There wasn’t really anywhere else to look, as far as subject matter went, for this month’s Back Issues column. We have just recently survived a very successful black-tie event in a posh London hotel with the great and the good (and a fair smattering of the rest) of the hi-fi and home cinema industry, and the What Hi-Fi? Awards 2024 edition is now in the shops and available for purchase.
So, into the archives I delved, looking for What Hi-Fi? Awards issues past. The question, as usual, was just how far back would I go looking for interesting comparisons and contrasts with the current day?
How things have revolved
Turns out the answer was all the way back to 1991 – a rather appropriate thirty three (and not quite a third) years ago; before even I started out in magazines (not by much, admittedly… but still; a win’s a win, eh?)
Why 1991? Well, looking through the issue, I noticed the names of a couple of old colleagues (even more aged and venerable than me, clearly), which made me rather nostalgic, of course; but more importantly, in the context of this column at any rate, was the interesting mix of products in the Awards that year, and the contrast in coverage between then and now, a third of a century later.
Photography? That old chestnut?
One thing that leapt out of the page at me, as an old-school mag man, was the photography on view. What Hi-Fi? was extremely fortunate to have “the best snapper of black boxes in the business”, the long-serving, long-suffering, live-music-loving Steve Waters, taking pretty much every picture in the magazine. Times have changed of course and now, with the website taking up most of the What Hi-Fi? team’s time, we tend to rely, along with press images, on ‘hands-on’ photos that reviewers take themselves.
One of the reasons this is possible is the remarkable ability of the smartphone in our pockets to take pin-sharp, fuss-free images nowadays; it's a facility that could barely have been imagined in the early ’90s. Back then, it was very much film, expensive camera bodies and lenses. And a bewildering amount of skill and experience.
But still: I struggled a bit, I confess, to work out quite what the horse-chestnut motif, that the art editor and photographer had come up with for the Auditions (now First Test) section, was getting at. Variety is the spice of life I guess – and it is rather ’90s; so there we go.
Time for some price-breaking news
As for the Awards themselves, there things are rather more familiar. Indeed, another reason to head back to 1991 was that this was the year that price breaks were introduced into proceedings by then-editor Mark Payton and the team. So, like today, you have the pick of the products in each price category (now called Best Buys) and then the review team chose one of those products to highlight – now our Product of the Year. 1991, then, was very much the beginning of an era in What Hi-Fi? Award reviewing.
The categories are, perhaps, more for the nostalgic among us. Some product categories have grown considerably in the ensuing 33 years; some have shrunk; and some, inevitably and perhaps sadly, have disappeared altogether.
From tiny acorns
Standout among the “yet to grow” categories is surely AV products. The image above is the sum total for 1991; so two AV amplifiers and a VHS recorder. Compare and contrast with the Awards 2024 magazine in the shops today (or, come to that, here), with its TVs, projectors, speaker packages, Blu-ray players, video streamers and more to go along with those home cinema powerhouses.
Another section that reveals the differing trends a third of a century brings is surely headphones. Where, in 1991, Awards were bestowed on just three products, in 2024 a massive sector is divided into two (wired and wireless), and we have 12 winners in total.
It’s remarkable how quickly we get used to new technology, take it all in our stride, and completely forget how things were a few short years ago; the only ‘wireless’ thing with any real traction in 1991 was radio.
Change the recording
As for the sections we are not likely to see again, cassette decks is probably the largest. And, with it, our awards for best blank tape – the TDK AR seems to have been our pick of an impressive trio of winners.
I was also a little surprised to see a spread devoted to in-car systems (I had forgotten we had ever covered that area of the market for our annual Awards). That, though, is an area What Hi-Fi? does still touch on on occasion, although we no longer go as far as judging for Awards.
Thirty-three years is, in many ways, not a long time – it certainly doesn’t feel it to me. But just look back and see how different things were back in 1991, and it surely brings pause for thought as to what now-unimaginable wonders await us in 2060 and beyond (fingers crossed…)
MORE:
Check out all the winners of the What Hi-Fi? Awards 2024
Read our review of the Michell GyroSE / Cusis S turntable
Bose and McIntosh Group: why I'm positive about the acquisition
