HiFi the way forward

I am amazed by the number of outrageously priced HiFi systems on the market. There must be a lot of non technical and deluded people out there!

People that would spend £10,000+ on an amplifier, £5000+ on a DAC or Preampifier, and then £10,000 on speakers.

I agree about spending the most you can afford on the speakers, there are no good low cost solutions. But when it comes to the electronics these prices are absurd.

Just think about the cost of the components. First they are largely standard ICs and thus the design and performance is already fixed by the manufacturer, second there are a very limited number of good ICs, especially for preamps and DACs. The cost of the components in a good DAC design is not more than £100, so why a price tag of £1000+??? Even worse for preamps, the cost of a good, low noise opamp is not more than 50p, and the total cost to make a preamp with RIAA compensation, line inputs and volume control is no more than £100!!!

So what would be a good choice?

1. Computer source (make it a Mac!), not CD, there is no future in CDs, just copy them to iTunes and you have the same quality source. Don't buy music from the iTunes store, all the tracks are compressed with AAC lossy compression which ruins the timbre, the attack and the stereo positioning. What you can do increasingly today is to get high quality digital files, up to 24bit/96kHz from internet download vendors. Finally we can get some source material closer to the recording in the studio, most are classical or jazz, as the recording labels have not woken up to this higher priced opportunity.

2. Next a DAC. A top end DAC can be made with 4-6 ICs, the excellent WM8804 and WM8742 from Wolfson Electronics, a couple of good opamps from National Semi, and some power supply regulators. This will give you a DAC with SPDIF optical or RCA inputs, and balanced or unbalanced line outputs.

3. A preamp is not strictly neccessary, unless you want to play vinyl disks, which in any case have a recorded quaility much worse than CD or file downloads, so why would you bother? If you have a collection of vinyls, then get a preamp, but then record them as lossless audio file (eg Apple Lossless format, or non compressed AIFt) onto your computer, Quicktime can record and top and tail your tracks.

4. An excellent amplifier can be made using the Class D modules from Hypex together with a decent toroidal mains transformer and some big capacitors. Buy as a kit, or from some boxing house.

All in all the electronics could be built for less than £400 cost. Then you need the computer, but this is a shared cost. But when it comes to the loudspeakers, spend, spend, spend.

My system ideal:

Mac Mini or iMac computer, Wifi AirPlay streaming to an Apple TV, optical digital input to a DAC+AMP combination and some high end speakers.

All controlled remotely by an iPad using iTunes.

Even better might be the AirPlay built into the DAC+AMP combo.