Well that was an emotional weekend! We’ve just moved our daughter Rhiannon into her second year student lodgings in Birmingham and it’s always so hard to say goodbye to her! I know she is loving her course and has many good friends, but the house certainly feels empty without her and I’ve lost my best movie and music buddy for a while!
I was a student in the very same city 35 years ago, so there’s a lot of mostalgic memories surface whenever I visit. It’s the circle of life I guess and it’s hard not to wish I was back there again with sculpted abs and less skeletal creaking!
The move meant getting a modest system set up for her as she has been using my cast-off hi-fi bits for years. She’s already made good use of my old Ariston RD110SL turntable, but it’s certainly not a deck that deals well with being transported around to lodgings and in truth the old gal is getting a bit sluggish to get her platter up to speed nowadays after nearly 40 years. So either an Audio Technica AT140LP or perhaps a Technics SL1200 Mk7 if we can stretch to it is on the cards in the future. She doesn’t DJ, but she likes the syle and in truth we both fell in love with the Technics SL1200GME I had here on review over the summer.
At the heart of her system though is the superb Roksan Attessa amplifier. It’s got enough power to reach decent levels in modest rooms, plenty of connectivity for taking a coaxial input from her TV or a bluetooth or USB feed from her phone running Tidal or Spotify - and it looks achingly cool to boot. The longer term plan is to add a dedicated streamer, maybe a Wiim Ultra to the system. When I reflect on my old student system (Systemdek IIX/Nait/Mordaunt Short MS30) and how much pleasure it delivered for the modest outlay, I can’t help thinking how lucky she is to be growing up in an era where virtually every album ever recorded is available on demand!
One of the many benefits of being a student is that you’ve got more time to listen to music than you’ll likely have in the world of work, and I think that’s one of the things that I appreciated most back then! Staying up playing a Floyd album at 2am with your mates simply isn’t an issue the way it is when you’re facing the grind of work the next day!
So on Sat evening I was very happy kneeling in her room assembling the impressively heavy stands that came with the Monitor Audio Silver 50 8G loudspeakers. As I struggled up the narrow stairs with them to her attic room I knew exactly how the ancient Britons must have felt as they hauled Sarcens of seemingly similar weight across Salisbury plain. My shoulder (which I dislocated in a bizarre mountain biking accident 20 years ago) is certainly letting me know all about it right now as I type this… The MA Silver 50’s are just the right size for her fairly small and irregularly shaped room with its sloping ceiling and the beautifully made Atlas cables made connections a delight. We really enjoyed sharing the exciting experience of powering up and hearing the system in that room for the very first time. Happily the Monitor Audio’s come with optional port bungs for their rear ports and the sound tightened up a lot with those in place.
For a £1500 ish system it sounded fantastic and it didn’t take long for her housemates to come in for a listen too!! This industry badly needs more young people to hear how good hi-fi can enrich your life, so hopefully a few of her mates might be tempted down this road. Amazingly hi-fi like this is more affordable, and arguably more capable relative to student wages than it was back in my day and I came away genuinely impressed with the performance that such a fairly modest investment buys. You could add a decent streamer or turntable and still be under £2000, which is about what my student system cost in real terms in 1988. That’s maybe 20 days of work pulling pints over the summer on minimum wages so not easy, but certainly achievable if you want it enough.
I’m curious how many of you have set up a system for your offspring and if it reminded you of your own first steps in to the world of proper hi-fi? I certainly miss her a lot, but it’s a comfort to know she has her music and films in good quality to keep her company. I’m going to buy her a simple rack to house the amp and any other bits we manage to put together as a surprise as clearly it’s going to get in the way on that desk.
Music has been such a comfort throughout my life, especially because of firms like Naim Audio who have brought it to life in my home for nearly 40 years. I can only hope it provides similar pleasure to the next generation.
JonathanG
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