Stu Smith
Hifi Pig (Stu) has a background deeply rooted in both playing and listening to music. In the dim and distant past he hosted the infamous “Midnight Train to Doomsville” show on the Sony award winning station “Wear FM” and has DJd at clubs, parties and festivals around the UK, where he’s been known to play sets of eight and nine hours.
As part of the dub reggae band “Roughneck Sounds” Stu toured the UK, cut an album and even got a tune played by the great John Peel. He has owned a vinyl only record store, a recording studio and finally ended up working in newspaper and magazine publishing.
Stu got the hifi bug in his mid-teens when he was bought a Hitachi separates system and was immediately hooked. In the first term of university, his grant was blown on an LP12, Crimson Elektrik amps and Wharfedale Diamonds and he survived on little more than swill and beer. These days quite a bit of kit goes through the sty and he has a bit of a fetish for unusual loudspeakers.
Stu lives in NW France with his long-suffering wife and two teenage sons. He is, for the moment, T total – though this status can change without warning (and indeed has) – and he is a bit obsessed with making Hifi Pig the very best it can be. His musical taste is eclectic and most things get an occasional spin, though classical music is a species rarely spotted in the pigpen he calls a listening room.
Stu is the only person to take any income at all from the Hifi Pig project which is derived from advertising you see on the site. He has been hired to design websites for a small number of hifi related companies (G-Point Audio, Epiphany Acoustics and also Paul’s Reference Fidelity Components) and a handful of non-hifi related enterprises. He is solely responsible for the design and creation of all advertising copy on the Hifi Pig website unless supplied by the advertiser/sponsor’s own design and graphics department.
Linette Smith (Mrs Hifi Pig)
What do you do when you live with an audiophile? You can either make them keep themselves and all their ‘kit’ in a little-used room (preferably with a lock on the outside of the door) or you can embrace the madness and let the HiFi take over the entire house……..guess which path I chose?!
You could say that music brought myself and Stuart together…he was a dance music DJ and I was a fully paid-up member of the glowstick-waving rave brigade, a match made in heaven!
We used to live with a neon pink PA system in our lounge so a full-on HiFi fest was never going to drive a wedge between us!
20 years on and I still like to wave a glowstick on occasion though I’m not quite the party animal I once was.
I like HiFi that looks good and sounds good, I like kit that dares to be different …..life is too short for boring HiFi.
I’m a bit of a hornlautsprecher Fan Girl, love going to HiFi shows, and find vinyl to be a pain in the butt.
Other than music of the repetitive beats variety, I like to listen to a lot of different genres, from disco to rock but have a bit of an aversion to ‘stately home music’ or classical, as some folk call it.
As well as HiFi and music, I enjoy art, reading, cooking…. especially baking (come on, you don’t think that Stuart got to be such a fine figure of a man on lettuce leaves alone?!) and am doing my bit to try and reduce the European wine lake, one glass at a time!
ALL HIFI PIG REVIEWERS ARE FREELANCE AND PAID A FLAT FEE FOR ALL REVIEWS
Janine Elliot
Janine is HIFi journalist best known for her reviews and column “Hi Fi Confidential” in Hi-Fi News magazine up until 2010. As well as HiFi, she has written on a number of subjects from cars to tropical fish, and worked in the HiFi industry for a number of companies in research, design and writing of product manuals. She spent 25 years at the BBC as a sound engineer and now teaches music in schools. As a musician, she has played keyboards and guitar with a number of famous musicians and produced her own albums and music for film. As a musician and HiFi fanatic since the age of 10 and being female she ticks all the boxes for being able to make sound reviews.
Jon Lumb
Hello, you lovely people. Stuart asked me to write a little bit about myself. I’m not normally a fan of doing this (it’s far too close to writing a covering letter for a job application, which is an activity I loathe), but it’s probably quite useful to have some idea of where I’m coming from when I write a review, so here we go!
I have a clear origin story of how I got into HiFi. I’d enjoyed listening to music on the radio from the age of about 10, but this was always just on basic equipment. My mum was a flautist who played most weeks in our local church. I’d actually forgotten this, but we did actually have a basic but proper hifi when I was small – an Akai receiver and some Tangent Monitor 3s (which are still going strong!) – but back in those days I had no idea what I was really listening to.
Aged about 14, I got roped into helping run the sound at the church. A lot of church sound is a car crash – it’s mostly very well-meaning people with minimal skills and even more minimal budgets. I was extremely fortunate that 2 of the guys involved really knew what they were doing – one had a degree in the subject, and one had run a professional outfit for a while doing live sound. So I got really well trained, not just on the technical side, but also how to listen properly to what was coming through the system. They had also ensured that there was s decent budget for equipment, and that it got wisely spent! One of the side effects of this was that I got a really ingrained feeling about when things didn’t sound right, it was my job to fix it. And that meant when listening on whatever mini system I had at home soon became something of a source of frustration, because frankly it sounded awful, but I was no longer able to just switch off and enjoy the music.
I spent my post-GCSE summer getting immensely hot and sweaty working for my Dad’s tree-surgery business. At the end of which, I had enough money to go to my local hifi shop (a little shout out to Acton Gate Audio of Wrexham here, who were fantastic and quite willing to give the proper time of day to a 16-year-old). It was in some ways a bit of a classic “What HiFi Award Winners” setup – Technics SLPG-390, Nad C320BEE, and the eponymous Quad 11Ls. What’s interesting (to me at least) is that despite a relatively “professional” starting point in hifi and sound, I don’t go for the sorts of setup that someone working in a studio tends to want, which is, of course, that completely flat frequency response, and warts and all presentation. I want my HiFi to make the music sound as good as possible, even if that means it’s not the last word in accuracy (don’t worry, I separate that preference when writing reviews!) I suspect it’s the live sound element that is part of it. When you’re engineering a live concert, you want it to sound as good as possible for the folks there, even if that’s not necessarily the last word in accuracy.
At some point, I fell down the rabbit hole of hifi forums. It started with the now-defunct Audiogain forum (no idea how I came across that one), before gravitating over to the Wam forums, where I spent a goodly few years as a moderator. The Wam also ran its own HiFishow, which was my first intro to these things.
John Scott
I’ve been obsessed –I don’t think that is too strong a word – with music and the things that make music, for as long as I can remember. My first experience of a “HiFi” system was my parent’s 1950’s radiogram – my Mum still has it – followed later by a Sony music centre, which I thought was a sonic revelation and I suppose compared to the radiogram it was.
Around 1979, a school friend had become aware of the concept of “separates” as the way to go for a true hifi experience and we both spent many Saturday afternoons in Russ Andrew’s hifi shop in Edinburgh – Russ had sold his share in the business by this point but the shop retained his name. The staff there were very generous with their time, recognising that we had next to no money but letting us hear what we could aspire to, from a Sansui turntable, NAD amp and KEF speakers, through Rega Planer 2 and 3 turntables and all the way to the Holy Grail of a Linn Sondek and active Isobariks, powered by Naim 250s.
We were hooked. As soon as I left school and started work I began saving and within 18 months I was the proud owner of a second-hand Linn Sondek, an A&R Cambridge A60 amp and a pair of Linn Kan speakers. Over time, the turntable was upgraded to another, better, Sondek (Valhalla power supply and Ittok arm) which I still have, Naim Amplification and Linn Keilidh speakers. I resisted the lure of CD until the point came where I could no longer find the new releases I wanted to buy on vinyl and had no option but to buy a CD player. These days, the CD player has been banished to the attic, all my CDs having been ripped to a hard drive and streamed into the hifi system, currently via a Squeezebox Touch. I think that streaming/computer audio/hi-res is providing a really exciting opportunity for the future of the hifi industry and I look forward to seeing how this develops.
Music-wise, I raised myself on Top Of The Pops and Radio 1 until I discovered hard rock and Prog in the pre-punk mid-seventies. When punk came along I didn’t see any reason to turn my back on the music I already loved and so it just joined the mix – the more music the better as far as I was concerned. A developing obsession with Dylan along with Elvis Costello did put a dent in my love of Prog for many years and I totally avoided the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, but these days all genres of music sit side by side in my collection – life is too short to be a genre snob. I still struggle a little bit with opera though.
