Issue 95    January 2013
Welcome To 2013!
Editorial By Alan Sircom

  Welcome to 2013! It's strange how much has changed in just a year, even in the relatively sleepy backwaters of high-end audio. The move to file-based audio continues unabated, but the backlash has started with those still protesting CD sounds better. Vinyl's resurgence has grown in magnitude and importance and despite the ever-present threat of economic gloom and doom, people still want to spend good money on great audio. Far from being a footnote to the iPod, people are starting to rediscover what good audio is all about, this time from the headphones out.

Although widespread optimism is still not on the cards for some time, a new year is the perfect opportunity to be upbeat about the future, rather than be ground down by more years of austerity. Our New Year's Resolutions are simple; one issue per month from here on in. That's right, Hi-Fi Plus is now a monthly magazine. It will still feature the best products, just more of them, the best writers (but hopefully less of me), more features, music reviews, show reports, interviews and all the other things that go together to make Hi-Fi Plus what it is today, just twice over.

We have also revamped our website. Prior to 2013, we were one of the few companies to have retained a coal-fired website from the 1870s, but it was proving difficult to find smokeless web pages and we decided to follow our sister title The Absolute Sound into the 21st Century with a new-look web presence. With review reprints, the latest news, show reports, music reviews, features, blogs and custom content unique to the interweb all in the pipeline, go to www.hifiplus.com and see what all the fuss is about. It's also the ideal place to subscribe to the magazine, whether you choose to subscribe to the paper edition, PDF or just keep taking the tablets, you can find more online. It's not just changes to magazine and its website that are new for '13. This year, we plan to devote regular features to getting the best from any system. Starting with the equipment supports in this issue, over the months we'll be exploring every aspect of what could be considered the Philosophy of Hi-Fi, from personal ethos of system building and how to listen, right through to the importance of proper room treatment. Absolutely nothing will be off limits, from the ‘too sensible for audio use' to the ‘comes with its own medication'. But, as with any New Year's Resolution, we reserve the right to forget everything we said a day after we said it!

Alan Sircom, Editor Hi-Fi+