5 SIMPLE DEMO STEPS TO HELP YOU REACH HI-FI SYSTEM NIRVANA

Choosing the right hi-fi kit can be tricky. We reveal how to audition and compare components with confidence

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If you have visited whathifi.com over the past week or so, you may well have seen that the What Hi-Fi? Award winners for 2023 were recently revealed. Our annual awards season is a mammoth undertaking where we consider every product we have awarded a five-star review to in the preceding year, as well as a raft of brand-new kit, much of which is submitted by manufacturers themselves and some of which are so new that they only go on sale days before our winners are announced.

During this time we compare hundreds of products against one another to arrive at our final list of winners. On one of the many days spent locked up in our test rooms, the reviews team were deciding between a trio of music streamers and it occurred to me that there are some basic rules that should be followed to such a job properly.

This isn’t an extensive list by any means. It isn’t even in any particular order. But follow these simple guidelines when you are demoing kit with the view to buy, and you'll have a much better chance of making the right choice.

1 To ensure accurate results, set-up is everything

This is the big one, as the way a product is set up can make or break its performance. Let’s start with speakers. If they are standmounters, is the support a good one? 

If a manufacturer makes a dedicated stand then that is usually a decent place to start, or just go for one of our speaker stand award winners and you can't go far wrong. It’s a small point, but whether we’re talking about a speaker stand or floorstanders themselves, make sure that the spikes at the bottom are properly adjusted so that the speaker is level and doesn’t rock. Why does the speaker being perfectly level matter? It just looks better.