HOW TO ADD A STREAMER TO YOUR HI-FI SYSTEM

It feels as though we’ve now accepted streaming and welcomed it into the hi-fi community. Fears were real, and often founded, that streaming would replace physical media to detrimental effect, offering up inferior performance in return for perceived convenience.

In many ways, though, it has helped us fall in love again with those cumbersome old discs; being able to throw music from your palm to your speakers can be wonderful, but our desire to fall for an album’s cover and actually hold our music has far from been quelled.

That speaks for vinyl more than CD, of course, with the latter’s sales dropping dramatically over recent years. But that doesn’t have to make for wholly miserable reading: more likely it is the rise and ubiquity of CD-quality streaming, not to mention the ever increasing range of hi-res options, that mean you don’t actually need the silver disc any more for comparable sound. But how and why cassette tapes have