Sonos

Most of the competitor systems were not available two years ago when I went for Sonos, so I can't make categorical statements about them. But Sonos manages to be both delightfully easy to set up and use, and to sound - for the £300 it costs to equip a typical room - really very good.

One impressive aspect of Sonos is the way they keep the system fresh through software updates. When it first appeared in 2005 it was all about playing files stored in computers in the same house. Since then it's developed to accommodate NAS devices, Internet radio and - especially - paid, lossless streaming services, all without rendering any of the original hardware obsolete. My Play:1s can now tune themselves to the specific acoustics of the room and their position in it, all done in software with a smartphone controller. Now we're getting integration with voice control devices like Echo, again with only a change of controller, not in the players themselves.

Similarly, today's system has used the increasing power and capacity of wireless networks to do away with the old requirement for a wired connection. You can still use one if it suits your home - it does mine - but all-wireless works in most cases if your router has the horsepower.

One gripe with Sonos is that there is no native integration of the BBC iPlayer Radio, but recently the access through TuneIn to BBC on-demand content has got noticeably better, so I can call up this week's News Quiz, for example, without having to resort to my old lash up of a Bluetooth adaptor feeding the line-in port of my Connect.

Some bemoan the lack of Bluetooth input, but Bluetooth is rubbish for music as it relies on the phone as the streaming device. I have Bluetooth speakers, of course, and they're fine in a hotel room or other small space where you're confined to one room. But Sonos puts all the streaming guts in the players themselves, so the phone is only a selector and controller, which works far better.

The only Sonos devices I have direct experience of are the Play:1, the Connect, and the Play:1 stereo pair, which I've listed separately because it lifts a compact speaker on to another plane of performance. I have a single 1 in the kitchen, where it copes fine, even with Wagner and the competing noises of cooker and extractor. But the pair in the bedroom is more than twice as good; I use the kitchen 1 as entertainment while I'm working, but I actually sit down to listen to the bedroom pair. The Connect, Meridian DAC, big-arse amplifier and speakers downstairs sound bigger and better, but they cost a total of £4,000 or more, so they ought to. For £300, plus the price of a Deezer Elite subscription, a Play:1 pair is a bargain.

Ah. I've had the opposite experience in hifi shops. In 1991 I took my modest budget to a shop to buy a turntable. Target was a Linn Axis, which sold new for about £400. Nice enough, I thought in the dem room. But before I could buy one, the hifi enabler said, "We've also got this one, that one of our staff has had at home for a couple of years. A new one costs the GDP of Wales but you can have it for £800."

'This one' turned out to be an LP12, of great fame and some revisionism, mainly from people who can't afford them. Even through fairly simple ancillaries, it blew the Axis and everything else I'd heard so far into the weeds there was no point even looking for them. I duly bought it, still have it, and spent the next 15 years gradually acquiring other components that were worthy of it.

This has usually involved listening to in-budget candidate items, finding them unsatisfactory, then hearing something much more expensive and deciding, like Wayne, that one day it will be mine. This has not been as financially ruinous as you might imagine, since I've upgraded each item from make-do to yeah-baby in one big step, not multiple small ones. The Dynaudio speakers were too much, but the stands improved my old pair so I bought them and added the Dynaudios a year later when the Committee gave its approval. I waited two years after falling for the Musical Fidelity A5 amp before a tax refund coincided with finding a two-year-old one at half the new price. And I bought the brilliant Something Solid XR equipment rack with a bequest from a deceased uncle.

Expensive, yes, but kept and enjoyed over many years, and probably only £6,000 in total over all that time. My Vauxhall Astra cost me much more than that and gave me very little in return.

You mention a Cambridge amp. Which triggered a thought. I used to go to Richer Sounds in Cambridge. And Oxford for that matter. IIRC Richer Sounds still has a demo room. Whether or not they sell the kit you want I couldn't say - but my level of audio equipment is somewhat behind you and WDB.

I hate it when you're right.

Mostly.

If you want retro (and doesn't everybody these days?) I've just put a fresh pair of lithium AAs in the Casio fx-39 I discovered in the elsewherementioned sweep of the parental home. This was the calculator I bought in December 1979 to use at school, and it got me right through to A-levels. It was superior to the cheaper fx-31 - although I never worked out how - but gave away two digits to the out-of-budget fx-120 that some of my contemporaries could afford. Other people had newer models with LCD displays that didn't get through batteries so fast, and were quicker from 0 to 69! too. But my 39 glowed greenly on for six years - until I got to university and decided I could afford ten digits after all.

And the 39 still works! My student fx-115m lives in my desk at work, but is solar powered and gets a little flaky if the light isn't bright enough. So I think I'll take the 39 to join it, if only for the green display and the delightful spring of the keys. A person can have too many touch screens!

When doing my A-Levels I had a programmable Casio (FX-4000P) which meant checking some answers could be done with a programme. I'm thinking of crude estimations for integration. No use for exams because not allowed. But a well constructed calculator.

It did conditional jumps etc. Later programmable calculators ditched that sort of thing.