What’s the Next Big Thing in HiFi?

A couple of days ago, Janine, one of HiFi PiG’s freelance reviewers, posted a picture in our WhatsApp group that stopped me in my tracks a bit. At first glance, I thought she’d taken a photograph at a museum after closing time. What was it? Well, it was one of those very old “record players” with the great big brass horn sprouting out of the top like an ornamental trumpet, the kind you crank up by hand. The sort of thing you’d expect to find in the HMV logo, complete with the dog looking dutifully confused but loyal. Like the one in the image above! But no, this was her house. To be fair, Janine is an avid collector of this kind of thing and has a good few wind-up record players and a few reel-to-reel machines, too; a kind of mini-museum to recorded music.

But what really caught my eye was what was next to this machine: a small collection of wax cylinders. Not vinyl, not shellac, not even some obscure Soviet X-Ray record (look them up). But Wax cylinders? A format so old that even Edison probably thought it was a bit retro – yep, I’m well aware, thanks. And the machine itself looked a bit different to the norm too.

And that got me thinking.

We’ve had the Vinyl Revival. We’ve played with reel-to-reel. Cassette tapes have had a bit of a comeback, albeit one fuelled largely by nostalgia and possibly the fumes from the oxide flaking off the tape – I have no idea if oxide actually fumes, but it’ll do for the purposes of this article. So, I wondered, what’s the next big revival going to be? What (until now) dormant format is lurking in the back of a cupboard, ready for a second wave of enthusiasm from audiophiles with a bit of a thing for the anachronistic? 

Because make no mistake, we really do love a revival in this hobby. We can’t help ourselves. It’s like clockwork. Every time a format dies, we poke it with a stick, wait a couple of decades, and then collectively decide that actually, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Next thing you know, someone’s selling refurbished Walkmans on eBay for £400 and calling it “curated retro modernism” or something else equally pompous. At this point, I headed over to eBay to have a look at what folk are actually asking for Walkmans. Bloody Nora! I was gobsmacked to see (third down the list) a TPS-L2 with an asking price of 3221 Euros, Yep, that’s not a typo! Over three grand for a machine to chew your music up? The world’s gone totally daft. 

After I’d taken myself outside and had a good shout at some passing clouds, I thought I’d explore a few of the revivals we’ve seen and make some guesses as to what might be next…

So let’s take a look at what’s still lying around in the HiFi mortuary, waiting to be dragged back, warmed up gently, given a shot of adrenaline, and potentially brought back from the dead – extra points if you got the Flatliners reference. To be fair, most of these have already had, or are going through, their reanimation already. 

Let’s start with the obvious one: the CD.

People keep proclaiming it dead, but the thing refuses to go – a bit like that one bloke at the afterparties who says they’re leaving soon yet remains firmly attached to your sofa until Monday morning, blissfully unaware he’s got a rolled up tenner stuffed up his right nostril when he finally goes and hops on a bus home. Personally, CDs never went away for me. I’ve been buying them steadily for years, partly because they sound good, and partly because they don’t require you to sell a major organ every time you want to buy one.

CDs are also the format that everyone now regrets throwing away. “I had thousands,” people say, “but I sold them for £12 at a car boot in 2009.” And now they’re buying them back for £3.99 each on Discogs or secondhand shops, which proves that life really is just a big circular thing.

Will CDs have a major revival? Absolutely. They’re already on the way. But since they’re still alive, they don’t count as a proper resurrection candidate;  they’re more like a format on extended sick leave.

Reel-to-reel is having a bit of a moment, too, and I must admit I’ve had dalliances with it myself, before giving it up as a bad (and expensive) job. The problem wasn’t the gear; it was the music. Back then (I’m only going back a handful of years), the available catalogue of music felt like it was 98 per cent jazz, 2 per cent classical, and absolutely no per cent anything I actually wanted to listen to unless you went down the route of questionable “oh, someone doing the cleaning at Abbey Road did a quick copy of the master tape of Dark Side of The Moon and this is a one off that” tapes. Now, thanks to the likes of Horch House and a few brave new tape labels, that’s changing. There was a talk at the recent Warsaw show called (if I remember correctly), The Reel-to-Reel Revival, and I couldn’t help thinking then that the topic was at the very least a couple of years behind the curve.

And so, as much as I tell myself I don’t need another expensive obsession (not with HiFi, vinyl, and Leica cameras already competing to empty my pockets), here I am thinking: “Well… maybe just one tape player.” Actually, at this point in writing this, I realise I’ve got an 8-track quarter-inch machine upstairs still in its original box. I ought to get it out and working, I thought to myself. That won’t happen!

It’s a slippery slope, and I’ve always fancied myself in the skeleton bob; you know, the one where folk dressed in outfits that feel like “nothing at all” hurl themselves down a mountain of ice on a tea-tray… only without the tea and delicious cakes.

Cassettes are back, apparently. Bands sell them as merch. Indie kids love them. They’re small, cutesy, cheap to produce, and they go wonderfully with ironic moustaches and vintage cardigans. Do they sound good? No (awaits letters of complaint). Do we care? Also no. Do I have lots of them? Yes, of course I do; I’m a hopeless addict for this kind of stuff. I even ended up buying all the Bjork albums on tape a few years back – told you, there’s no hope! 

Will the revival grow? Probably. There will always be people who believe sound quality is secondary to aesthetic, and frankly, more power to them; they seem to be having a great time, and, for me, that’s the main thing in this game. 

But cassettes have already had their revival moment, so let’s move on to some formats that REALLY haven’t had their second bite of the cherry.

Given Janine’s picture the other day, let’s consider the unthinkable: Wax cylinders. Imagine it now: A Kickstarter video. A guy in a flat cap – he’d be from Yorkshire, and probably have a whipet (that’s not me pitching for the job, by the way). A listening room full of tat and mood lighting. A caption that reads: “Reinventing listening, one cylinder at a time”, or some equally crap tagline.

Someone would absolutely go for it full pelt, 78RPM; I have no idea what speed wax cylinders turn at, though I do assume they do indeed get spun in some way. There would be articles on Anachronistic PiG (our elderly sister title that’s not been born yet) titled “Why Wax Cylinders Are The Future of Analogue Warmth” or perhaps (unimaginatively) “The Wax Wevival.” And let’s face it, it would be totally ridiculous, which is exactly why it might happen. But would it catch on? No. They melt in warm rooms (I’m guessing), scratch if you look at them funny (I guess), and the players sound like a distressed owl in a biscuit tin – I do know this as I ended up having a look on YouTube….and they do, indeed, get spun. But never underestimate the power of novelty.

Ah yes, DAT. I’ve actually got one, and when I find a box big enough, it will be posted off to our mate Flemming Erik Rasmussen of Audio Group Denmark fame. DAT was Sony’s problem child and was used in studios. I know this as we used it in our studio in the 90s, and that’s why I still own one. However, it was pretty much completely ignored by everyone else. But… after decades of neglect…could DAT be the next vinyl-style comeback?

Probably not.

It’s temperamental (if I recall) and requires machines that were temperamental when they were new. But stranger things have happened in HiFi, and you can still pick them up on the Bay for not stupid money.

And what about MiniDisc? Surely it deserves a mention because it is, quietly, gaining traction again. People love it for the same reason they love vinyl: it’s kind of tactile, physical, collectable, and fun (audiophiles have a perverse sense of what constitutes fun, don’t you know?) And I think MiniDisc is my favourite of them all.

And, unlike cassettes, MiniDisc actually sounds half decent – my inbox is still expecting incoming as to whether cassettes sound crap or not!

I predict that MiniDisc is the one most likely to have a proper vinyl-style revival; small, fun, nostalgic, and with enough quality to avoid potential embarrassment when you start showing them off to your audiophile mates. And it’s pretty much the only format (so far) I’ve never really owned at some point or other.

Which brings me to the 8-track. 8-track is a strange beast. Some love it. Some hate it. And to this day, I have NO IDEA of how it worked – Janine did offer to enlighten me when I mentioned I was doing this article, as she knows all about this stuff. But I do recall it being quite the thing in the 70s, and that my folks had a copy of The Carpenters that was the soundtrack to many a Sunday drive-out and Summer holiday.

Could it come back? Well, it seems it kind of already has, and there’s already a bit of a thing for it in the retro car scene. But mainstream? No, surely not. It is too silly, too big, too fragile, and too prone to eating itself like an Ouroboros (that snake thing that is eating its own tail) made of tape. That said, if someone made a luxury 8-track player in machined aluminium, with a hand-finished walnut veneer, I’m sure there’d be some audiophiles who would buy it. Of course they would. I include myself in that as I’m a bit of a sucker for nostalgia. 

But here’s my honest prediction: Nothing and everything is going to be the next big thing. Revival culture isn’t really about the formats. It’s about us as human beings: We love nostalgia. We love rituals. We love the feeling of discovering something “lost”, even if it was never lost in the first place. But most of all, we love getting excited about music in new (and old) ways. Audiophiles aren’t just about the kit and the music; they are also about the format.

The Vinyl Revival wasn’t about vinyl being better (and no, I’m not getting into that discussion here!). It was more about vinyl being fun. It was about re-engagement, ownership, physicality, and the sheer joy of hunting for something rare – or more commonly, hunting for something you sold when you thought CDs were the future. It was a bit of an antidote to streaming. And I reckon that any future revivals will follow that same emotional pattern.

MiniDisc? DAT? Shellac? Wax cylinders?

All of them could, like our after-party hangabout, see a bit of a bump, not because they’re better, but because formats give us a story to join in with.

But will any of this lot become mainstream? No. Not really. All these revivals are niches within niches. Fun, interesting, quaint, sometimes daft, but ultimately small pockets of enthusiasm within an already small hobby. And that’s perfectly cool with me. HiFi is about enjoying music in whichever way makes you happiest.

If that means vinyl, great, even if you call them vinyls.
If that means CDs, brilliant.
If that means hunting down a working Edison cylinder player on eBay…great! They are there!

So what’s the next big thing in HiFi? It’s whatever we decide, I reckon. Whatever catches our collective imagination. Whatever sparks joy, nostalgia, curiosity, or a bit of an obsession. Formats come and go. They peg it. They return. Sometimes they come back thrice, just to see if we were paying attention the second time round.

So, get ready for the next “big thing” and the next “lightbulb moment” that will empty your pockets quicker than you can say “ I nicked that idea off my mate Joseph Swan.” 

Stuart Smith

Read More Sunday Thoughts.

What do you think? Join the conversation over on Facebook.