The wonders of hi-fi

Home hi-fi equipment has come a long way since the days of cassette tapes and vinyl records and it's now possible to kit out your front room with a top-notch music system for about £500.

But why would you want to spend more money on new equipment when you've already got a perfectly good hi-fi that's been the source of your sound for many years?

Well, with large-screen TVs and Media Center PCs creeping into the fray, it's going to be just as important to have good sound quality as well as a good picture.

What is hi-fi?
In audio terms, hi-fi (or high fidelity) is used to describe sound that has been faithfully reproduced to the original, achieving imperceptible amounts of distortion. This trend was jump-started by the arrival of compact discs in 1985 and 20 years later, the term hi-fi can be applied to most home music systems.

Most all-in-one mini systems will include a radio tuner, a multi-disc CD player, inputs for external audio devices (such as iPods or games consoles), at least one cassette deck and a couple of small stereo speakers.

Bigger integrated systems may come with a surround-sound decoder, surround-sound speakers, a DVD player and lots of ports for attaching other components. But these can stretch to hundreds of pounds and there's no way of upgrading certain elements of the system.

So, if you really want to get into home hi-fi and build a system that will make your music collection and movies sound like they should, you need to know about hi-fi components.

Separate yourself
Hi-fi enthusiasts enjoy better-quality sound by using separate components for each job, rather than all-in-one hi-fi systems. It means you can pick and choose what components to use based on your preference - CD player, amplifier, MiniDisc player, digital tuner - to build the ultimate system that's tailored to your own needs, and which can be added to or upgraded as time goes by.

In essence, a hi-fi or home-cinema system built on separate components is going to give you more flexibility - and often better quality - than the all-in-one systems.

What do you need?
To power the system, you first need an amplifier. Like a computer processor, this is the brain of the system into which everything plugs in.

If you want to add a DVD player and surround sound to your hi-fi set-up, you'll need an AV receiver. These look like hi-fi amplifiers, but with one big difference: they'll take the audio signals from your DVD player, set-top box and other devices, decode them into surround sound, then power a number of loudspeakers placed around your room.

The price of AV receivers ranges hugely, from models costing less than £200, to monsters weighing in at more than £2,000. Spending more on an AV receiver will get you better-quality sound, support for more surround-sound formats (with the possibility of upgrades in the future), greater device connectivity for now and the future, and most obviously, more powerful amplification.

Some models also feature THX, which is a certification of quality from Star Wars director George Lucas's audio company. If you're attaching a DVD player, we would recommend an AV receiver that has support for both Dolby Digital and DTS, along with identical power amplification for each channel for consistent sound.

If you want a 7.1 surround sound, make sure that the AV receiver you purchase is also capable of decoding Surround EX and DTS-EX soundtracks, and has seven channels of amplification.

However, if you just want something to power your music collection, a £50 amplifier with inputs for a CD player, record player and auxiliary devices will do just fine.