Sound

This story won’t interest those who have forgotten what a CD looks like, but I need to log it in my journal.

Over twenty years ago, not long after we moved into this house, we invested in a complete sound system - a unit with CD player, radio and amplifier, speakers in the living room, dining room and kitchen, and it was all wired in so we had sound in each room. It has been brilliant - well-used every day. We bought it from the wonderful Peter Tyson shop in Carlisle, where we have since bought TVs, small radios etc and had excellent service every time.

Sadly a few weeks ago the CD player began playing up - wouldn’t play certain CDs - and the radio was a bit unreliable. We knew Lynn didn’t make CD players any more so we couldn’t replace like with like. We could have taken it in to see whether it could be repaired, but we didn’t really want to do that for various reasons. Music is important to us so we were prepared to invest to get what we wanted.

So last week we went to Peter Tysons and spent a long time discussing and looking at the options open to us. We definitely wanted a CD player and an FM radio and whatever we got had to fit into our current system. Eventually we settled on a new unit with everything we needed plus streaming capability (!).

Today their technical guy came to fit it all up. He was great. It wired up perfectly with our system and he soon had the CD player working. There had been a bit of a concern that the sound quality might not be quite what we were used to because this was not a Lynn system, but as soon as a CD started playing and our guy himself genuinely said - I’d be very happy with that! - we knew all was fine.

And it’s great. It’s a sleek bit of kit and the sound quality, with both radio and CD, we think is better than it was. I’m happy. (And one day I may find out how to stream music . . . )

And we got a decent trade-in for our old and much loved machine. It will get repaired and someone will buy it, so it will live on.