Cowps:
I have been visiting this forum for some time now, with a view to getting my first hi fi set up. I have to say I've been baffled by all the options. I have recently noticed that there are quite a few people on here who advocate vintage gear over new budget gear. This only made things more confusing for a novice like myself. This made me think, and I wondered if anyone else might agree that this could make a good feature for the magazine. Similar to some of the Top Gear challenges, I would be interested to see if a group of your reviewers were given a budget, say £500, who could come back with the best system. What do others think? With all the experience at your disposal, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a bargain, should it? A comparison with your best buy budget systems would also be useful for anyone weighing up their options.
Just a thought!
I only can afford to buy secondhand and I think that What Hi Fi misses a trick by not publishing some kind of history book of WHF reviews, I think that there are many good ideas for combining and sustaining secondhand gear (from modding through to your idea which I think is brilliant). I think that they ignore the rising 'cottage' industry where people on Ebay create products will emulate higher priced products (there are various categories from interconnects/mains cables through to modded DAC modules etc)... and I feel as though my attempts to ask on this forum have been ignored (I say this not bitterly and I do not think that it is done in a deliberate way but no-one from the magazine has taken time to answer).
However... in their defence. What Hi Fi is a magazine that only has certain resources available to it, they only have a certain budget, certain number of editorial staff and it only has a certain number of pages... the remit was widened from Hi Fi to Sound & Vision and they have to allocate those resources into a coherent strategy. I would imagine that a large portion of their income would come from the advertising that is bought in the magazine by the manufacturers who (and I am not particularly weeping for them) have to compete in a crowded market place and develop new products and move forward... I am not sure that they would be so keen to do that (pay money to WHF, not stop development) if WHF actively started to ignore the 'new' in favour of promoting the secondhand market, such a strategy would not only be harmful to WHF but to the industry as a whole - think of how influential WHF are.
I would also like to take your Top Gear example and use it a bit more. Top Gear no longer have a secondhand car 'expert'. Indeed when a secondhand car is purchased in Top Gear it is usually as a comic foil in order to show up the presenters or the cars themselves... Last year sometime I began to mildly sicken of Top Gear and I found myself actually being nostalgic for the 'old' format. I mooned after it for nearly an entire episode thinking things like - 'What use is this? When am I ever going to need a comprehensive review of a bloody Aston Martin? When am I ever going to sit in an Aston Martin. Remember when you used to get that Goffey fella telling you about how easy it was to put the seats down....'
And then I did actively remember that Goffey fella telling me about how easy it was to put the seats down and I kicked myself... who wants to get mired into that stuff? What we want is to see the lastest, the fastest, the sexiest and, in our case, the loudest. I am never going to sound test any Plinius stuff... or Naim (well maybe The Uniti - one day)... or Copland... or Sugden etc. But I like looking at it. I like someone telling me how good it is. Hi fi porn! phwaor. So, if you think about, do you really want your favourite hi fi mag to give up reviewing the brand new and sexy and deote any space to the secondhand market - which is so cheap and so covered on the net that you really do not need them to do it at all.... there are plenty of places to get the info goods on secondhand goods.
So maybe your article idea is good as a one off, I do not think that they will do it, but it would be nice to have a more consumer orietated 'credit crunch beating' issue - as a one off.