WIN Af woo ROTEL B&W SYSTEM To celebrate our 1000th issue, Andrew Everard looks at how audio prices have changed since the magazine was launched, suggests a superb £1000 system to make the most of your CD collection, and gives you the chance to win it!

FOR THIS 1000th issue, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of an audio system one could put together for E1000 — a sum unthinkable when The Gramophone was founded. At that time a survey in Staffordshire showed that the average mine-worker earned £2 17s 7d (E2.77) a week, and pottery workers E2 Os 9d, or about £2.04 in modern currency, while a gramophone would then have cost somewhere between £10 and £30. With today's average wage for junior admin staff at around E18,000, that £10 gramophone, a bit over four weeks' wages in the 1920s, would today be the equivalent of almost El 400.

Look around the shelves of the big electrical sheds on the outskirts of every major town these days, and you discover that you can buy an audio system for little more than £50 — the equivalent of a 1920s gramophone being sold back then for just 7s (or 35p). At the entrylevel, audio equipment continues to be more affordable than ever, and it's perfectly possible to put together a system of separates for under £500. Even the coming of multichannel sound from DVDs hasn't done much to alter that situation: with all-in-one 'home cinema in a box' systems on sale in discount outlets and supermarkets for prices starting at under £100 — yes, for DVD player, amplification and speakers — and a 28in widescreen TV set available for well under £200, it's possible to be up and running with a complete surround sound cinema system for under £300. Or less than that junior admin person's weekly wage.

From the start, The Gramophone was bought by music enthusiasts, and the pages of early editions were full of hints and extra equipment to get the best performance from players. And while the mass-market is today dominated by those 'plug in and play' micro systems and 'home cinema in a box' sets, for the enthusiast the idea of combining components to get the best sound remains — it's just that these days we're usually talking about choosing a CD player, an amplifier and speakers, not buying each part of the system in bits. Only in one area do enthusiasts buy hi-fl in what's more or less kit form, and appropriately it's in the highend record-playing sector: it's not unusual to buy a motor unit to spin the records from one brand, a tonearm from another and the cartridge to convert mechanical movement into electrical signals to an amplifier from a third.

When it comes to hi-fl separates, £1000 will buy you a very good system of CD player, amplifier and loudspeakers. It's easy to think that all the effort in the affordable audio market has gone into AV products, so that you can now buy a very good DVD player for E100, and a multichannel receiver for E300, but in fact there's something of a revival in the fortunes of affordable stereo components.

Manufacturers who put all their eggs in the multichannel basket are now coming back to stereo, while those who kept a token presence in the market are now looking to reinforce their ranges. But there are those who kept the faith with high-quality stereo music reproduction, keeping it prominent in their line-ups even as they developed home cinema products; Rotel is a prime example of this balance, as is its European distributor B&W Loudspeakers.

Over many years Rotel has made two-channel products fly in the face of 'bells and whistles' trends. Its ranges of the 1980s and 1990s eschewed the frills then popular, sticking instead to relatively plain black casework housing solid audio engineering.

For a long time Rotel circuit design has been based around high-quality power supplies, components selected as the result of extensive listening tests, and simple, direct signal paths with as little as possible between input and output. Its amplifiers had adequate power output rather than claiming superficially impressive figures, tone controls where fitted had bypass switching to take them out of circuit for a cleaner signal path, and reliability came as part of the deal.

On the CD front Rotel set some trends, being one of the early adopters of Philips' BitStream technology in the early 1990s. And players such as the RCD-965BX became classic budget audiophile buys, simply because they delivered a smooth sound — a long way from the brash presentation of much early CD hardware — at a highly attractive price.

But whatever the technology under the lid, Rotel thinking remained the same: the company only changed its technology when its designers truly believed there was a solid gain in performance, and the basic design of its players stuck to that combination of highquality components and simple signal paths. The arrival of the latest Rotel range a few years back saw the company going back to these basic principles: the entry-level RA-01 integrated amplifier can trace its roots all the way back to the company's classic RA-820, while the RCD-02 CD player builds on the experience the company has gained during a long history in this area of the market.

And so it's a system based on Rotel electronics we're offering as a prize in our 1000th issue competition. Courtesy of distributor B&VV, we have the company's RCD-02 CD player and RA-02 amplifier, matched with a pair of B&W's DM601S3 loudspeakers, together making up a stereo package worth .E1000.

The RCD-02 CD player draws on the technology of much more expensive Rotel CD players for its circuit layouts, and has at its heart a single chip from Burr-Brown combining the functions of digital filtering, HDCD decoding and 18-bit conversion.

This is fed by an over-scanning disc-reading mechanism designed to deliver clean digital data, and the analogue section is a typical Rotel design, combining a minimalist layout with high-quality audiophile components. Power from the player comes from a transformer made in-house by Rotel — the only way the company says it can achieve the quality it requires — and fast-response storage capacitors for a dynamic, involving sound.

The RA-02 amplifier is, as you might expect, one step up from the entry-level RA-01, and while it has the same 40W per channel output, it adds remote control operation for greater convenience — the handset supplied can also 'drive' the CD player.

A simple, direct circuit layout combines with a Rotel-made toroidal transformer and selected components including British-made capacitors to give a sound with plenty of punch and refinement, while niceties include a highquality phono input, five line-ins, separate record and listen selectors, speaker A/B switching, a headphone socket and even 12v trigger switching allowing the amp to turn other components on and off.

Completing the system is a pair of B&W's excellent DM601S3 speakers, part of the third-generation line-up of this acclaimed design, which has won many awards. A twoway model designed for use on stands or shelves, the DM601S3 uses a 16.5cm woven Kevlar mid/bass driver — a technology B&W has been refining for many years — together with a 25mm alloy dome tweeter mounted on a loading tube derived from the company's Nautilus speakers, found in many top recording studios. This tube, filled with a damping material, absorbs rearward radiation from the drive unit, thus avoiding distortions and allowing only the intended signal to be heard.

Underpinning this sweet, clear treble is a fluid, open midband and powerful bass tuned with B&Ws Flowport technology, in which the surface of the port opening is dimpled like that of a golf-ball for smoother air-flow. This avoids common port noises, especially when the speaker is working hard. The speakers come in a choice of two finishes — black ash vinyl or light oak 'Sorrento' vinyl, and the lucky winner will be able to choose which finish they'd like to suit their decor.

So that's our £1000 1000th anniversary prize: a perfectly matched CD-playing system to make the most of your disc collection. And all you have to do to have a chance of winning it is answer one very simple question...