Every year at the Marriott City Centre Hotel, in Bristol, Audio T organises the Sound & Vision - The Bristol Show in association with What Hi-Fi?

Now in it's 31st year, the Bristol Show is the largest and longest running consumer Hi-Fi and home audio show in the UK and continues to go from strength to strength showcasing the latest and greatest Hi-Fi from the UK and from around the world. This year there were well over 200 brands exhibiting!

This year Boswell our intrepid teddy bear (from Brentwood not Peru!) took a short tour and stopped for a few selfies along the way.

It's a very busy show so he had to sneak photo opportunities wherever he could without getting in the way of the eager and enthusiastic listeners in every room, but he was most impressed with the breadth of equipment available and the great energy from both exhibitors and attendees alike.

The sound from the Exposure room was enticing, plus Boswell couldn't resist the lighting!

A lot of the rooms were dark spaces full of sound, not the best for photographs, but Naim and Dynaudio were making some great sounds. Still more exhibitors choose to have timed and structured demonstrations like KEF and B&W both showing off their technological advances in the world of loudspeakers.

Boswell did have a chance to perch on the new Monitor Audio Studio speakers which were rather wonderful.

Revel are now being handled in the UK by Arcam alongside Mark Levinson as part of Harman Luxury Audio.

Quadraspire were so take with Boswell they even let him hold one of their new Q Plus isolation devices which are used when a rack is impossible or to further enhance performance on a rack

Rega turntables have always been popular with the little bear and this years Record Store Day limited edition promises to be a corker!

Needless to say there was so much to see and hear that it is impossible to do it justice in a short blog. Let's just say the Sound & Vision - The Bristol Show should be on every enthusiasts list of must-attend events. There are some gems in every bedroom and you will often be left impressed and amazed by what you see and hear.

Not only was Boswell very impressed by the Quad equipment on display especially the new Solus but he also had a chance to catch up with his old friend Paddington who travels with the lovely people from IAG. Now where did I put those marmalade sandwi… — Not only was Boswell very impressed by the Quad equipment on display especially the new Solus but he also had a chance to catch up with his old friend Paddington who travels with the lovely people from IAG. Now where did I put those marmalade sandwiches.

The 2019 Sound & Vision - The Bristol Show is held from the 22nd to the 24th of February. You really should come along for a look, a listen, and possibly even purchase b(e)argain! Trust the bear from Brentwood he thoroughly recommends it. Hope to see you next year!

The day the new iPhone6 went on sale, a photo depicting the scene outside Apple’s Covent Garden store made the rounds on social media. Its caption: “There is literally not a single woman in this iPhone6 queue”. I remember thinking at the time, that’s nothing compared to the wall-to-wall ‘Y-fronts’ you get at a Bristol Show. I’d say it’s an eye-opener for any female who’s never had a close encounter of the nerd kind before.

But as the next show approaches, I do wonder why it is so male-dominated. You do see women there if you stare hard enough in a Where’s Wally? kind of way, although it’s often a wife or girlfriend wearing a far-away expression which comes from hours spent traipsing around hi-fi shops with their blokes.

It’s not that we girls don’t love music. A quick Google search suggests we buy CDs, attend concerts and listen to music in roughly equal measures. And considering women are supposed to have a better hearing range than men, you’d think we’d be the ones scrabbling, Dawn of the Dead style, through the doors of the Bristol Marriott on Sound and Vision weekend.

Hi-fi has featured strongly throughout my life, from the years I flat-shared with a fellow student who blew almost his entire grant on a top range system, to the two decades I’ve been married to an audiophile. Yet when my husband goes all geek on me about his latest Audio T purchase, my general response (after wondering whether we need to take out a second mortgage to pay for it), is still: “Er. It doesn’t sound all that different from your old one.”

‘Holy grail’
While it would be easy to put it down to the differences in the sexes, I don’t count myself as a typical girly-girl. I have a degree in chemistry, I know my way around a bass guitar rig pretty well and shoes and handbags leave me cold.

But I feel sure there are true ‘audiofillies’ out there, women whose knees go weak at the roundness of a sub-woofer and who can reel off its specs as efficiently as any male enthusiast. And in my quest to find one, I meet Serena Lesley. Serena has spent serious money building the sound she wants.

“Open, but forgiving,” she says. “Relaxed and not too much detail, or else it’s too spiky and brittle.” It’s like hearing a fine wine being described.Serena doesn’t have a technical or musical background. Her understanding has been racked up by trial and error, reading and learning from reviews, acquiring a knowledge which has taught her how to make tweaks for the best sound using blobs of blu tack or halved squash balls under the hardware.

“You understand from experience the importance of everything that your music needs to go through before it hits your ears,” she says, “and your 'holy grail' is a completely transparent-sounding interconnect, though you know that they're like unicorns, so you end up with one which colours the sound in a way which compliments your room, your stands and your separates and which allows you to feel more, rather than less, connected to the music.” Her explanations sound fascinating, well-informed and rather poetic and I’m beginning to understand why she devotes so much energy to her hi-fi.

“It’s a quality of life thing,” Serena tells me. “It inspires emotion, evokes memory, changes your mood. You can’t get this kind of emotional response from the clock radio in your bedroom.” And there’s another peculiarity. We women are meant, by nature, to be emotional creatures, so why aren’t we spending more time, money and effort building systems of our own?

‘Marketed differently’

"Serena has spent serious money building the sound she wants."Serena admits she’s never met another female audiophile quite like herself, but she believes there are many more women who appreciate good hi-fi than is evident.

“Perhaps if the perception of hi-fi as a hobby becomes less gender-specific, less driven by the technicalities and is marketed slightly differently, then society will stop assuming that it is generally not a 'female' interest,” she says. “And the women who love listening to high-quality music reproduction in their homes will become more visible, driving further female interest in this area.

“After all, the driving force of hi-fi as a passion is to get closer to the art which is music. Badly-reproduced art cannot inspire emotion, cannot draw you in, cannot fill you with wonder, cannot fully communicate what the artist means to convey. Good hi-fi brings you that experience as fully as is possible. And there's absolutely nothing gender-specific about that.”

Experts have been telling us for years that we’re wired up differently. There’s plenty of documentation and debate about the fundamental differences between the genders, some of it informative, some quite laughable (Anyone remember John Gray’s Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus?)

I can’t deny that my husband disappears into his listening cave from time to time just to sit and enjoy his music, while I’m more likely to treat my tranny as audial wallpaper while multi-tasking at several other things.

Perhaps ‘WAGS’ like me are a lost cause, but I think there are many other women out there who merely need to be ‘shown a starting point from which to grow an interest’, as Serena puts it.

And let’s face it, from the retailer’s point of view, we are a huge untapped market, so maybe marketeers need to take a deeper look into our psyche, find out how to hook us, press our buttons without getting too tech-ey about the buttons themselves. Maybe then, we’ll see many more women enthusing about the finer points of a high-end amp or speaker and eventually, a greater gender balance at future Bristol Shows.