Some magazines like Practical Hi Fi and Hi Fi News & Record Review were quite neutral. They just reviewed equipment in an matter-of-fact way. There were others like Popular Hi Fi and Hi Fi Answers that, as far as I remember, preached with great enthusiasm and conviction a fairly narrow route to nirvana. One of them had a “ladder” which got brought up in response to every query. They were so enthusiastic and convincing that it had to be the right approach. In the area I could afford it involved an A&R A60 on one rung and the Nytech CTA 252 on the next one up. On the turntable ladder it went Rega Planar Two, Planar Three on the next rung and LP12 on the top. It was a short ladder, though, and pretty much every system ended up being recommended with an LP12. There were similar ladders for speakers.
I’ve got a few of the late-70s & 80s magazines blurred in my mind now and can’t remember exactly which was which, who wrote for what. I haven’t got anything of that era left and I always flitted about buying the one that looked interesting that month rather than subscribing.
IIRC HiFi Answers was the one with all the tweaks & tips stuff, I think that is what I was buying when I was filling my Lenco plinth with plasticine, using twin & earth mains wire for mains cables and speaker cable. It might have been the one that went all Peter Belt and gave me little black stickers to stick on everything. If a tweak was free/cheap I’d likely try it! Was Answers the one where Ken Kessler started raving about Audio Research, Krell and LS3/5As with an AR turntable as source? Then there was Jimmy Hughes who fired his Impulse horns at the back wall for some unfathomable reason. I remember HiFi News being far more middle-ground and detached from fashion, but good, and I bought that fairly regularly too. Practical Hi-Fi was earlier I think, but very good as I recall. I think of that one as a ‘70s mag.
The real fundamentalist wing was Flat Response and later HiFi Review. They were obnoxious and quite funny with it. That was all the ‘Linn Basik better than a Koetsu’, a reader’s letter page advising someone with an Audiolab amp seeking speaker recommendations not to bother as it sounded far better without etc. Utterly obsessed with 80s smooth jazz fusion too, e.g. David Sanborn, Joe Sample, Earl Klugh, Ben Sidran etc. I think that was Chris Frankland. I hated the stuff at the time (I was into new-wave, shoegaze, indie, Krautrock, synth-pop etc), though I do have a copy of Sidran’s Bop City bought out of curiosity (which isn’t bad in its own way, and is a great dynamic recording).
Again I don’t see the ‘80s as the conspiracy some do. Speaking to some dealers decades later it becomes clear that some of the loudest and most paranoid voices from ‘also-ran’ companies actually produced badly made and unreliable kit or didn’t meet supply targets etc. A couple of brands come effortlessly to mind!
I expect even some long standing makes like Quad and Sugden probably had some fallow years whilst they were untrendy but at least they had a good export performance to keep them going.
Judging by the sheer numbers of 34, 44, 306, 405/2, 606 and ESL63s still floating around the UK used market today I suspect Quad did fine pretty much everywhere. SME, Spendor etc too.
