Having resisted for almost two decades, I finally took the plunge recently and tried living with a turntable as part of our special Vinyl Week.
I expected to enjoy the experiment. What I didn't expect was to fall completely in love with it.
Within days, I found myself eagerly browsing record shops, keeping an eye out for bargains on eBay and looking for excuses to put an album on.
More surprisingly, my family got into it, too. The simple ritual of choosing a record, putting it on the platter and dropping the needle proved far more engaging than scrolling endlessly through Spotify.
There was just one problem: because my main living room system is the Sony HT-A9, I needed a Bluetooth turntable that could sit at the back of the room without cables trailing across the floor.
The Pro-Ject T1 EVO BT fit the bill perfectly, but while the setup worked, I quickly discovered that the HT-A9 only supports compressed Bluetooth audio.
The result was a noticeable compromise in sound quality. I loved the vinyl experience, but I knew I wasn't hearing what the turntable was capable of.
Rather than abandon the whole project, I decided to build a minimalist hi-fi system that could coexist with my existing home cinema setup.
The turntable's location was already approved by my wife, so moving it wasn't an option: whatever I chose had to work wirelessly, fit neatly into our living room and, ideally, sound fantastic.
After much research and consultation with my esteemed colleagues Kashfia Kabir and Ketan Bharadia, I settled on the KEF Coda W active speakers – and they've been brilliant.
They're not quite as eye-catching as the models in KEF's LS range, but they're very handsome in their own right and, crucially for me, compact enough to slot into the existing bookcase in our living room. More importantly, they sound superb.
For relatively compact speakers, they produce a surprisingly big, confident and weighty sound. That's partly down to the hefty 100W of amplification power per channel. They're also detailed without sounding analytical, tonally balanced without sounding dull, and wonderfully fluid with music.
Crucially, they also support the aptX HD-quality Bluetooth streams sent by the Pro-Ject turntable, and the improvement was immediately obvious.
The speakers impressed me so much, in fact, that they inspired the next stage of the project.
Wanting to get more use from them, I borrowed a WiiM Pro Plus streamer from our hi-fi team and connected it to the Coda W via optical. The result is what I now consider to be a near-perfect modern hi-fi system: a Bluetooth turntable for vinyl, a streamer for everything else and a pair of active speakers that require no separate amplifier.
It's compact, easy to use, living-room friendly and, most importantly, it sounds terrific.
Unfortunately, the KEF Coda W speakers aren't discounted for Amazon Prime Day, nor have I spotted any worthwhile deals elsewhere. That's not especially surprising given how new they are.
Even so, I'd argue they're excellent value at their £799 asking price. There's a reason we awarded them five stars in our KEF Coda W review.
Prime Day is often about chasing the biggest discount, but sometimes the best products to buy are the ones that aren't on sale. The KEF Coda W is just one very personal example.
If you do fancy recreating my minimalist hi-fi setup, though, the good news is that both the Pro-Ject T1 EVO BT turntable and WiiM Pro Plus streamer are currently available at reduced prices:
