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West Coast Hifi 270919

Julie-anne Sprague

Adrian Parente from West Coast HiFi joined Simon Beaumont for ‘Wired with West Coast HiFi to discuss affordable upgrade solutions for your home theatre.

Here are Adrian’s tips for affordable upgrades.

  • Change the amplifier
    • There are cheap solutions to upgrade your Amp to get best out of it. Create the ultimate entertainment system and stream from over 100 services. Control is easy with the Sonos app, AirPlay, the touch interface, or your voice via smart devices like Sonos One.
  • Adjust placement and positioning of your speakers
    • A: Placing them close to any wall will reinforce their low-frequency output. The idea of this may appeal but, on most models, doing this also spoils bass agility and precision.
  • Maximise your power supply
    • There are varying lengths to which you can go in order to better power your system. The simplest is merely to ensure the mains plugs you’re using are clean (best done by treating the pins with a cleaning solution – and ensuring they’re dry…) and all the components are connected as close together as possible: this means not plugging in your preamp on one side of the room and your power amp on the other. This improves system grounding, and so helps sound quality.
  • Update the light bulbs on your projector:
    • If you have used the projector a lot, the bulb could be failing. If it is approaching the end of its life replacing it may produce a brighter image.
  • Add a Bluetooth receiver
    • This one speaks for itself: adding Bluetooth connectivity to your hi-fi system opens up a whole world of possibilities. While Bluetooth has its limitations – and you wouldn’t want solely to drive £20k’s worth of speakers with albums streamed from YouTube – its convenience is unarguable.
  • Upgrade your cabling
    • When it comes to cables, there are those who believe using anything more conductive than string will do the job and that spending money on speaker cables and/or interconnects is a waste. All we can tell you is that the differences in performance between certain cables are clear to our ears.

Download this podcast here

Julie-anne Sprague
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