Bought for a song

摘要

Choosing the audio highlight of my year is not an easy task because more than one candidate stands out. I was pleasantly surprised to see an old set of Armstrong 730/732 amplifiers sell for over a thousand pounds on eBay, though I did wonder if the seller's description of them as 'museum pieces' referred to me rather than the amplifiers! The Proms, as ever, was a musical highlight. And this year the HDTV versions from the BBC's iPlayer upped the picture quality to 1280×720 pixel resolution at 50 frames per second. The audio for the TV versions also improved, but sadly, only to 125kb/s AAC. So still not a match for the 320kb/s AAC from Radio 3. The old joke that 'the pictures sound better on radio' still applied! When it came to the hi-fi equipment I use, the highlight stems from something I did just over a year ago when I had my old Armstrong 626 amplifier revived and restored. Since that has two sets of speaker outputs I decided to splash out and bought a pair of 'near LS3/5As' from Stirling Broadcast. [Pace, to those who would insist there are no substitutes!) This has let me use my old Spendors in one room while using the LS3/5A v2s in another.