The Back Issues series, pretty much by definition, highlights the differences and sometimes surprising similarities between What Hi-Fi? of yesteryear and the magazines we create today.
What I find particularly interesting is how there can be many issues from 30 or 40 years ago that are remarkably similar to what we have today – in terms of products, features and so on – while an issue from just 20 years ago might highlight just how quickly things can change in the world of home entertainment.
(Twenty years sounds a long time, perhaps; but call it 2005, and it doesn’t seem – to me at any rate – far away in the slightest.)
From shooting stars to dark side of the moon
The August 2005 issue of What Hi-Fi? is the perfect case in point. Twenty years ago, the iPod dock was all the rage – and the undoubted cover-star of What Hi-Fi?
In 2025 (indeed, from some time before now) not only is the “iPod dock” not really a thing any more, but even the product that was its sole raison d’être also no longer exists.
It’s a prime example of a shooting-star product; the iPod blazed across the home entertainment heavens for a relatively brief 21 and a half years. After its introduction in November 2001, it rapidly took the world’s music listeners on a miraculous journey of solid-state drives, easily shuffled music and the ability to take a thousand songs (in its first iteration) with you on your travels.
It was an astonishing achievement by Apple, and it changed the world of music listening completely.
As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, though, the pace of technological change only increases, relentless and utterly unforgiving. The iPod is now shackled to its dock in the Home Entertainment Hall Of Fame, having been superseded by, of all things, a telephone (a smart one, I know – but still…).
Its dock has inevitably yielded its place on the top table, or sideboard, or shelf – but never the beach or park – to its youthful and upwardly (any direction, actually) mobile cousin, the Bluetooth speaker. (Look out for our pick of some premium BT speaker offerings in next month’s magazine.)
The turntables on the cover of the July 2025 edition of What Hi-Fi?, in contrast to the shooting star that was the iPod and its dock, show that the record deck is, perhaps, more like the moon. Its fortunes may have waxed and waned over the years – and it has certainly been eclipsed a fair few times – but it is always there in the hi-fi firmament, a reassuring presence amid all the chaos of technological progress.
And long may it remain so.
For the record(ing)
Another product from back in 2005 that came and went – although in this case rather less gloriously than the iPod – was the DVD recorder.
The lead First Test in that August issue gives more than a small hint as to why: the excellent, five-star Sony RDR-HX510 could not only record broadcast TV programmes onto a DVD, it could also store incoming media onto a hard drive.
It proved not too enormous a step for the boffins at these remarkably innovative companies to progress things past DVD to Blu-ray, and then to persuade people to worry less about storing their media in a physical format or on a hard drive at all, and move on to streaming it all from the ether.
Fatboy slims
Amid all these once shiny new but now defunct products, of course, the ubiquitous television is still with us. A look at the Supertest of the 26-27-inch “sexy, slimline” LCDs here, however, clearly highlights what a couple of decades of concentrated boffinry can do.
Today, you could put two or three OLED TV screens back to back, and still the tubby telly of the noughties would stick out, poking forward from the sleek marvels of today.
And 27 inches?! Pah! We’re talking 65-inch behemoths – and more.
The prices also raised eyebrows: the sets on test here ranged from £599 to £1600 – a fortune for such a small TV!
You've gotta roll with it
There is, of course – as always – a calm oasis of ‘normality’ in the August 2005 issue of What Hi-Fi?, to contrast with all that highlighting of the remarkable pace of change. The traditional hi-fi system – of source, amplifier and stereo loudspeakers – is the core of what we do; it always has been and, for the foreseeable future at least, always will be.
The Group Test of one-make systems, including offerings from Cambridge Audio, Rotel, Arcam, Cyrus and other names reassuringly still with us, gives suggestions from the manufacturers of their own products that they felt would work well together. And, it would seem, the What Hi-Fi? review team agreed with them, to a greater or lesser extent.
The systems we come up with now are no longer suggested by the manufacturers; rather, we have broadened our options by marrying together the best of all brands to come up with groupings that work wonderfully together.
To road test so many potential products would take you months of research – trust us, we know. Which is where we come in. It’s always nice to have someone else do the hard work for you, after all.
MORE:
The 7 test tracks we have been listening to this month
Neat Iota II speakers review: a tiny package with punch
Read our first impressions of the Ruark Audio MR1 Mk3 desktop speakers
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