December 2025

The Sound Of A Milestone As hi-fi+ Achieves 250 Issues
The ever-evolving landscape of high-end home audio gear as we enter 2026.
Editorial By Alan Sircom

  We made it! 250 issues of hi-fi+. And the stars aligned to make this celebratory issue our annual Awards... just in time for Christmas, too. It doesn't get much better. OK, so perhaps the free Rolls-Royce with a glove-box filled with Patek Philippe watches for every reader we were hoping to give away this issue might have been a little better, but only a little!

Keen calculating types might point out that 250 monthly issues would put the first issue of hi-fi+ back in February 2005, and yet the magazine was launched back in 1999. So what happened?

For the first ten years of the magazine, hi-fi+ was a true periodical. The magazine was a quarterly at first, then moved to a bi-monthly, and only became a monthly magazine in January 2013.

From the outset, the magazine set a high standard. We maintain that audio is a luxury product and, if you are reading about it, then it's best to do so in something that looks and feels luxurious. Alongside the high design values, by-product of high-quality paper gave us the reputation of being 'the best smelling magazine in the audio business.' Sadly, some of the olfactory boons of the past have stayed in the past, as print stocks change over time, but we have tried as much as possible to keep the luxury touches.

However, things do change. Some of the things that we did in those early issues never quite took off. For example, while it stands to reason that people who buy high-performance audio share common interests, that doesn't mean they want to read about those other interests in their audio magazines. So, things like wine reviews were tried... and failed. In team meetings, we periodically think it's a good idea to try this again, but it tends to become 'a good idea' a few hours after the team meeting has moved from 'office' to 'bar'.

We stay close to good audio's core, but that core is undergoing some tectonic shifts (mixing geographic metaphors is probably why I failed geography... that and writing something rude about drumlins!). Combining the retrospective and crystal-ball gazing elements of an anniversary and Awards issue throws such shifts into sharp focus. We cannot be sure what will fill the pages of hi-fi+ a few years from now, but it probably won't be the same mix we see today. As today's magazine's content is subtly different from that of a few years ago.

That's a good thing. Audio is perhaps the most mature part of consumer electronics, and with maturity comes the risk of stagnation. And there can be no stagnation when the type and nature of products are in a state of flux. It's surprising how far we've come in 250 issues, but there's still a lot of room for change. "May you live in interesting times" need not be a curse, after all!

Alan Sircom, Editor hi-fi+

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