As Hi as Fi Will Go

Artrockers,

I don't do New Year's Resolutions, but I have decided that this year I will reinstall a proper hi-fi in my living room / lounge. It all started on a visit to my local Heart Foundation shop. I was in there on the perennial search for a decent sofa at a decent price. I've been down the Land Of Leather route, bought a 3 piece suite and watched it fall apart inside 12 months, so I'm not falling for that again. I want a Heal's quality sofa at DFS prices and that means used, and that means Heart Foundation. Actually I have found my sofa, stylish, built like a tank and only £200. I digress. A whole wall of the shop is dedicated to electronic stuff, 90% of which is VHS players for a tenner a touch. One day I happened to spy a pair of speakers with the Leak logo, I pounced and got them for £15, Leak Sandwiches, very nice! I had absolutely no use for them, I simply couldn't resist. So here they sit, two bloody great lumps of wood, waiting for me to breathe new life into them. Older readers will know that I now need an amplifier and a turntable, youngsters will have no idea what the hell I'm on about.

I just got back from my weekly Heart Foundation trawl, where I was frustrated to find a Kenwood power amp bundled up with an FM tuner and a twin cassette deck for £60. Now, I might be up for a hi-fi but I can foresee absolutely no circumstances in which I'll need a tuner or a cassette deck ever again. I offered them £20 for the amp but they weren't having it, all or nothing, so it was nothing.

But I will have a new hi-fi, it may take a while, the 5000 or so vinyl albums and 10,000 singles that fill my upstairs cupboards stand in mute rebuke and demand to be played, my wife stands in less mute rebuke, demanding that I get rid of 'all this rubbish'. So if I don't complete my hi-fi and start playing my treasures again I have a funny feeling that I'll be bumping into my record collection again, in The Heart Foundation shop.

Tom Artrocker