The answer is always, yes.

So every Friday from  4th May 2012, Audio affair will be hosting a weekly #HiFiTechChat hour between 1pm to 2pm (GMT). Anyone can participate this event with their HiFi related issues or just looking for a geek to geek discussion.

How to join the chat

There are two ways to do so:

1) Twitter: Follow the #HiFiTechChat hashtag at the appointed time to see all of the tweets. Alternatively, you can follow through Twitter Search or follow #HiFiTechChat on your favorite Twitter client.

2) To see all the conversation as it happens, we have a dedicated HiFi Tech Chat page on the Audio Affair website, you can even join in right there and then via your Facebook or Twitter account.

From time to time, we could be hosting a specialised HiFi topic, as well as special guest appearances. So make sure to put this in your diary and come have a peek every Friday.

Yamaha EPH100 Earphones

These sound fantastic! The best earphones i have owned or listened to, they blow my prior CX300s out of the water. Dynamic, clear, and they block out external noise very well. A good buy.

Focal Spirit One Headphones

Finally got this pair ordered and arrived yesterday. It’s really attractive on the eyes, comfortable on the head and nicely accessorised and very fairly priced.

TEAC AR650 Integrated Amplifier

Recently purchased this amp for £225. Very elegent and sophistacated looking amplifier. Modern vintage syle as I call it. Clear and well balanced high quality sound. though I was expecting a touch more power from the output. In this case its more quality over quantity. Never the less im extremely happy. Great look great sound. Money very well spent.

Myryad Z114 CD Player

Outstanding sound clarity,detail and imaging.Can match players costing three times as much.Only drawback is no balanced outputs.Highly recommended.

Tannoy Revolution DC4T Speakers

great speakers, slim compared to other floor standers so modern looking and not over powering, quality build and sound, would recommend to anyone

Do you want to write a review on a recent purchase? Simply go to a product page from our website and scroll down to the “Reviews” section, located just after the product information and before the “Comments” section. Writing a review gives you a chance to have your opinions heard by thousands of people and guides other researchers in their own product choices.

Being a judge, please consider its quality and usability, the pair with the highest price tag isn’t neccessary the best. Also don’t forget to check out a full list of headphones at Audio Affair. For more information on each pair of the headphones below, you may click the link next to the image.

Product of the year

We looked through every order for 2011 and the Beyerdynamic DTX 101 iE Earphones wins as our overall best seller. You lot must really value great sounding music on the move! In second place is the always popular Audioengine A2 Active speakers. We think everyone should have a pair of these on their desks by their PC, Mac or laptop – they sound so good for compact speakers.

Biggest influencers

Believe it or not, once again, it’s you, our customers! We’ve asked for feedback, we’ve listened, we’ve considered and we’ve implemented as many improvements as we can to improve your shopping experience – both online and in store. We hope the changes we’ve made will make shopping with us even more easy and enjoyable over 2012.

Most read posts in 2011

Here are the top 3 posts which were read once, twice, and again and again by lots and lots of people. Top of the list is 10 Tips On Speaker Placement, a useful article with helpful advice on getting the best sound from your speakers, so if you haven’t read it, take note! Once you’ve done that, our second favourite article was the Home Cinema AV Set Up Guide, for all of you that love the best movie experience in your living room. And finally, one night in October, What Hi-Fi magazine released their 2011 award winners and a rush of you visited out What HiFi 2011 Award Winners blog. Don’t forget these winners are available online too!

New look

No, we’re not talking about clothing! Audio Affair’s website has gone through many phases of developments over the last 12 months. These include a fresh skin, a completely new and unique checkout system and improvements in both speed and order efficiency, all of which we worked very hard on to make your shopping experience even better. The checkout changes reduce the time it takes to order and include the option to checkout as a guest and check international shipping rates easily in the basket.. phew! And there is more planned for 2012, so watch this space!

Once again, thank you to all of our customers from 2011. All of this wouldn’t be possible without you.

Best wishes to all of you for an enjoyable (and great sounding) 2012!

We’ve realised there’s been an increasing number of our customers now using mobile devices, DPD has invested in developing a mobile website to ensure receivers can quickly locate the information they need regarding their delivery and, if necessary, make changes.

We think their mobile website will be very convenient to access for anyone who is using smart phones, it automatically redirect the user to the mobile version, make their life easier.

Once you arrive on the mobile website, you will be able to:

• Collect from the local depot
• Change the delivery day to a more convenient date
• Change to a delivery address where you know someone will be in to receive the parcel
• Ask DPD to leave the parcel in a safe place

DPD mobile will ensure that anyone can track their parcels, wherever and whenever you require, and make all necessary changes to fit in with your schedule.

To read more about our delivery options for the UK and international, please check out the delivery information page.

To celebrate our 5th birthday, we are giving away £300 worth of Ticketmaster vouchers. We sell equipment to enjoy concert sound at home, now remind yourself of the real thing, enjoy a live experience and get yourself a concert ticket to see your favourite artist.

How to win?

During the 5 days from 27th October – 1st November 2011. Tweet a message to include the hashtag #AudioAffair5 (you can Tweet it directly from the bottom of this page), the more tweets containing the hashtag, the quicker we will reveal a secret email address (we will reveal it letter by letter), this may even take place before 1st November.

The first person to e-mail to the secret e-mail address will win the grand prize of a £100 Ticketmaster gift card, and the four emails received thereafter will win a £50 Tickmaster gift card each.

Please remember to follow us on Twitter, so that you don’t miss any revelations of the secret e-mail address. Good luck!

Cable Winners

Chord Crimson 2 Plus RCA Interconnects VEE

AV Receiver Winners

Onkyo TX-NR609 AV Receiver

Speakers Winners

Q Acoustics 2020 Speakers
ProAc Response D18 Speakers
Tannoy DC6T Speakers
Tannoy Mercury V4 Speakers

Radio Winners

Revo Axis iPod DAB DAB+ Streaming WiFi Radio
Vita Audio R1 MkII DAB Radio
Vita Audio R4i DAB Radio CD iPod System
PURE One Flow DAB / FM / WiFi Radio

Home Cinema Winners

Yamaha YSP-2200 Digital Sound Projector
Dali Fazon 3 5.1 AV Speaker Package
Dali Zensor 5 5.1 Speaker Package
Q Acoustics 2000 5.1 Cinema Package
Q Acoustics Q7000 5.1 Speaker Package
Tannoy HTS 101 5.1 AV Package

Headphones Winners

AKG K450 Low Profile Folding Headphones
Beyerdynamic T50 P Headphones
Sennheiser PXC 310 BT Bluetooth Headphones

And here is a full list of the What HiFi Awards Winners 2011.

Featured products were :

Roksan Xerxes
Thorens TD 309
Clearaudio Anniversary
Pro-ject Xperience
Roksan Radius 5.2

Attendees were truly dumb founded by the build quality of all these amazing turntables, all true heavy weights with looks to match. First to take the stage was the Clearaudio Anniversary fitted with the trusty SME Model 10 arm. The towering 78mm tall platter revved into life thanks to the torquey motor and the sweet sounds from the Ortofon Cadenza Red were soon soaring into the eaves of the Birmingham demo room ! Amplification was handled by the Icon Audio Stereo 60 accompanied by the PS1 phono stage. A real room filler of an amplifier can only be partnered by some serious cones and this came in the form of Germany’s finest – the monolithic Quadral Vulkan floorstanders.

Next up was the Roksan Xerxes featuring the work of art that is the Artemiz tonearm. A true test to set up the 60 page manual gave even the most experienced audiophile a challenge to tweak to perfection ! Once coupled with the Ortofon Cadenza Black this turntable was capable of revealing such detail that classic 180gm recordings sounded as fresh as the day they were pressed.

Following on from the Xerxes came the Thorens TD 309. Just released, this high gloss finish range now has the finish to match the design. A fresh design from Thorens that looked amazing and well above its price point. Even with an out the box cartridge it gave the other decks a run for their money, and proved there are new designs some to be relished over 60 years after the first Thorens model was unveiled.

Last came the Pro-ject Xperience with its beautiful olive finish and stunning lines. Not dissimilar to the TD 309 this turntable was very revealing and capable of reproducing real depth and clarity for reasonable priced deck. Listeners were equally impressed with its amazing sense of timing and ability to envelop all who heard it. An impressive turntable and so easy to set up – just what the doctor ordered !

AV Set Up Diagram (Click to enlarge)

So, take a breath & we’ll do our best to explain it.

For the purposes of this example, we’ve used the rear of the new (for 2011) Onkyo TX-SR609 AV receiver, one of our most popular new sellers as it features the most upto date Dolby and DTS sound modes alongside ample amounts of power and impressive audio and video performance. An AV receiver is the heart of your home cinema set-up and is what you connect everything else to. It accepts image and audio from all of your other sources (CD player, mp3 player, etc), provides the power for your speakers and sends images to your screen with many other settings to get the best from your kit.

The first thing you’ll notice about the back of this AV receiver is the manufacturer has usefully grouped all sockets into groups with a title on each – the group on the left are labelled as “DIGITAL IN” (these are the digital audio inputs), then you have “COMPONENT VIDEO” to the right of these, a large group labelled “VIDEO/AUDIO” to the right of these (with “ANTENNA” above this and “UNIVERSAL PORT” to the right), a group above labelled “HDMI” and a large group of sockets to the right labelled “5.1 CH” (all of these are for your speakers).

We’ve connected a typical group of equipment to it using colour coded lines to show where everything would be connected, alongside a handy key on the right. To avoid any confusion, please note that all connections all have a different type of plug, apart from digital inputs, component video inputs and audio inputs which all use the RCA (or “phono plug”) which is an industry standard used for a variety of things including audio and video connections (more on these below).

So what are all these cables?

Ideally you’ll connect your Blu Ray Player, Sat Box and any other source using an HDMI cable (red cables), speakers are connected as shown (purple cables) although one pair of rear speakers are optional if you want 7.1 channel sound (most movie soundtracks are 5.1 channels but some newer releases are full 7.1 or even 9.1, each of which offers increasingly realistic effects sounds to the rear channels). A subwoofer is a must for realistic movie sound (yellow cable). There are inputs for sound, but we haven’t used these on this example as the sound along with the picture is carried by the HDMI cables. You can connect to your internet router (green ethernet cable) and to a radio antenna (pink cable) for a better FM signal.

It’s as simple as this really! For those of you that want explanations in a little more detail, read on…

Inputs for the picture

Now first things first, this AV receiver – like many, has video inputs to cater for a wide choice of equipment. In many cases, your DVD or Blu Ray player will have several different types of video outputs giving you a choice of which you use. In order of choice the following inputs will give you the best image quality (starting with the best):

HDMI is the preferred choice and will offer the best image, but this AV receiver offers the other choices just incase your DVD player or Sky box etc doesn’t have HDMI. For the purposes of this example though, we’ll assume that all equipment has HDMI outputs and so the “COMPONENT VIDEO” and “AUDIO/VIDEO” sockets are left blank – but at least you know now why they’re there!

1) “HDMI” (shown as red cables) offers the best image quality, upto 1080 horizontal lines in HD (high definition) – see the group of sockets labelled “HDMI”. In contrast to the “component” and “video composite” inputs, can carry both exceptional video images and audio along the same cable (with the other video inputs you need to run separate cables for audio). Please note though that you can only use HDMI for audio as well if you set the AV receiver and source to accept and send audio through the HDMI connection – otherwise you’ll need to use a separate cable to carry the audio (this is where the “DIGITAL IN” connections would come into play, where each of these digital inputs can be linked to an HDMI input if needed – using either an optical cable or coax digital cable. Why does HDMI look so good? Well, it can show upto 1080 individual horizontal lines on the image (referred to as 1080p) which is what you get with HD sources like Blu Ray and Sky HD.. All you need is an HDMI cable.

2) “Component video” is the next best thing to HDMI – see the group of sockets labelled “COMPONENT VIDEO”. These connections are split into three cables and carries image only – one for the green element of the picture, one for the blue and one for the red. Although not quite upto the standard of HDMI, these connections are designed to offer good picture quality as each element of the image is sent separately. To connect say a DVD player to these, you should have corresponding component video sockets on your DVD player and would use a component cable (with a separate audio cable to carry to audio which would be connected to a pair of audio sockets (left and right) under the label “AUDIO/VIDEO”. For the purposes of this example though, we’ll assume everything we’re going to connect does have HDMI sockets – but at least now you know why they’re there!

3) “Video composite” is the oldest type of video connection – a standard 1 socket RCA “VIDEO” input labelled yellow – see a row of 6 of these yellow sockets under the label “VIDEO/AUDIO”. In this case, video sent through one cable only (so you’ll also need to use a separate audio cable to carry to audio as with the “composite video” option above). For the video connection, you can use a single cable with RCA plugs on each end.

In our example, we have a Playstation or XBox,  computer, Sat Box and Blu Ray player connected all using HDMI (for video and audio so we don’t need separate audio cables) – easy!

Inputs for the sound

As explained above, if you’re connecting your AV sources using HDMI connections (and we’ve assumed that in this example for the Blu Ray player, DVD player etc), you won’t need a separate audio cable to connect the audio signal. In some cases though the source won’t offer audio along the HDMI cable and you’ll need to use a separate cable for the audio – you now have 2 choices:

1) Digital Audio (connected to a socket under the “DIGITAL IN” set of connections). A digital audio connection offers the best possible sound. These types of connections can either be optical using an optical cable or coaxial using a coax digital cable – the type of cable chosen simply depends on the digital audio output socket on your source.

2) Analog Audio (connected to a pair of audio input sockets under the “AUDIO/VIDEO” set of connections). These are industry standard connections (almost always using RCA sockets) and are labelled white (left channel) and red (right channel), hence the audio interconnect you’d use for these come as a pair of cables (one for left, one for right). You can also use these inputs to connect any stereo hi-fi music source like your CD player, radio tuner, etc. and use your AV receiver to listen to music (we’ve not included these in this example to keep it simple!).

Home Network

Use an ethernet cable (shown as a dark green cable) to connect the AV receiver to your home internet network socket or router. This allows you to enjoy internet, internet radio and music/video stored on your NAS drive.

Radio Antenna

The definition of “receiver” in the hi-fi world is an amplifier that also includes a radio tuner. Hence, most AV receivers include either a standard FM radio and/or DAB radio tuner. These sockets allow you to connect a suitable radio antenna. Often times an AV receiver will include a small plastic square antenna with a bare wire cable that you’d connect into the bare wire terminals under “ANTENNA” (on the left). Ideally though, for the best sound, you need to use a radio antenna fitted to your roof (often connected to a wall socket behind your AV system) that you’d then connect using an aeriel cable (shown as a pink cable).

Connect your Speakers

Now we’ve discussed all of the sources coming into the AV receiver, now its time to discuss the sound coming out of it. The connections on the right are all for connecting your speakers using suitable speaker cables (shown as purple cables). You can buy the total length of cable you need, cut it, and then either use bare wire on each end to connect to the speakers and AV receiver – or, ideally, you can have the cables terminated with proper speaker cable plugs (referred to as “banana plugs”) – terminated cables should always sound better from the logic that “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link” and the plug offers a better and more consistent connection than bare wire clamped into a terminal.

A home cinema set-up has left/right speakers on the front (which play most of the main sound on a soundtrack including music), centre speaker (which plays most of the speech and some of the main sounds on a soundtrack), subwoofer (summarised separately below) and rear speakers (for effects). A home cinema set-up can either be 5.1 (which refers to 5 speakers and 0.1 for the subwoofer), or 7.1 (7 speakers and subwoofer, which is where you have an additional pair of rear speakers). Most movie soundtracks are 5.1 with only the most recent being 7.1. Whether you go for a 5.1 or full 7.1 set-up is upto you. For the purposes of this example, we’ve shown an optional pair of speakers for 7.1 sound connected.

I’ve heard of “Biwiring” – what is this?

Speaker cables come as a pair for each speaker (one is – and one is + which are connected to the corresponding – and + at each end). Most speakers only have 1 pair of – and + sockets which then connect to all drivers on the speaker inside the speaker through a “crossover”. However, some speakers will have 2 pairs of speaker terminals where one pair connects to the woofers (that play the midrange/bass) and one pair to connect to the tweeters (that play treble sound). In this case, you can either use a standard set of speaker cables for that speaker (and connect the two pairs of terminals on the speaker using speaker jumpers so the cable effectively connects to both), or, you can use a biwire cable, which is where you have 2 pairs of cables running from the same connections on the amp to each pair of terminals on the speaker. BiWiring is designed to sound better from the logic that you have a separate cable running from the amp to each set of terminals on each speaker – even though you have the 2 – and 2 + ends connected to a single – and + terminals on the amp.

Connect your Subwoofer

No home cinema would be complete without a subwoofer to provide impressive bass sound. You can connect upto 2 active subwoofers to this AV receiver, but in this example we’ve only included 1. A subwoofer is different to other speakers in this set-up because its “active” – this means the subwoofer features its own amplifier and volume control and is not amplified by the AV receiver like the other speakers – it is simply connected using a mono RCA audio cable referred to as a subwoofer cable (shown in yellow).

Other Inputs

You’ll notice some other inputs we haven’t used in this example – these are explained below (from left to right on the image):

-  “RI” (“remote interactive”) – this allows you to connect an external remote control receiver (not included) so you can control the unit when its hidden inside a cabinet.
- “PC IN” – this allows you to connect your PC or laptop using a standard monitor cable (useful if your PC/laptop doesn’t feature an HDMI output as in our example)
- “VIDEO/AUDIO” (explained above)
- “UNIVERSAL PORT” – use this to connect other Onkyo products such as the Onkyo UP-DT1 DAB module or Onkyo UPA1 iPod dock.
- “ZONE2″ (next to the “AUDIO/VIDEO” connections) – these allow you to send a stereo (left/right) audio signal to another room
- Power cable (this is shown at the top and is fitted to this model). Some models include a socket for the power cable with a cheap/standard power cable included. In these cases, you can upgrade the amp further by changing this for a higher quality mains cable.