How do I know music is more important than clothes? I just moved home and the first thing I set up was my turntable and vinyl stash | Tech Radar

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How do I know music is more important than clothes? I just moved home and the first thing I set up was my turntable and vinyl stash

Spinning up some excuses for why I still haven't unpacked

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Moving home is such a pain, and that's doubly true when half of your possessions are tech gadgets. I just spent weeks moving my belongings between two flats on opposite sides of London, and it would've taken half the time if I didn't have to shift countless large boxes that were 10% gadget and 90% packaging to keep said gadget from breaking.

Eventually I finished moving to The Ladder, as the area is called (not funny, since most tenants still aren't on it), and as soon as I had my foot on the rung, as it were, my turntable and hi-fi kit was the first thing I set up. The deposit had barely gone through before my Sony PS-LX310BT was on the cabinet and some Edifier M90s were either side.

That's right, the very first thing. Before I unpacked my clothes. I still haven't unpacked my books or computer. Getting some tunes going was the most important task.

This wasn't just because I wanted to enjoy some music while I unpacked, though, or because I wanted to claim the good speaker spots in the living room before my flatmate moved his own turntable in (OK actually, that was part of it). No: it's because getting your hi-fi set up in a new flat can save you loads of faff later on down the line.

Speakers aren't something you can just dump anywhere in your living room and get a good experience. A lot of thought needs to go into where they're placed.

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Stereo speakers like mine need to be placed so they're spread evenly across a room, to put the listener in the sweet spot betwixt the two, not hidden together in a corner. You want to make sure they're placed on a surface that won't offer unwanted resonance, aren't too close to a wall and are, ideally, at ear level.

If you set up a living room and then bring your hi-fi kit into it, the ideal placement for all of this may already be taken up by other things. Books or DVDs or fancy liqueurs can hog the shelf space on which a speaker would ideally do best.

In my old apartment, the only convenient space for a turntable was on a shelf in the corner of the room. Reaching it to swap a record was a chore, and so I didn't bother using the player as much as I otherwise would.

That's why I thought it important to give my hi-fi set-up priority space in the room. Now, everything else can be place around it.

I'll admit, it wasn't perfect. As you can see in the pictures, I put my speakers on the same cabinet as the turntable. Great for taking pictures, not so great for music, because vibration interference might affect record playback. Unfortunately, it's the only place in the room where I could equally space the speakers, so it's something I'll have to make do with.

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"There's nothing as fun and sexy as cable management" is what I would say if I wanted to say something totally wrong. I hate the whole process of cleaning up wires and cables, and so often ignore it, leaving trails and black snakes and wire rat kings running like veins around my house.

(I know some people find great satisfaction in cable management and maintenance, with some cables ties and so on, and that's fair enough. It's just not my cup of tea. You can try and help me with mine, if you want though).

Unfortunately, this can quickly become a problem with a hi-fi set-up, when players and speakers need cables for power, cables for music, cables for the sake of it sometimes. I've created some pretty hideous messes in the past.

Sometimes, that makes moving house quite a pain, because you're left tangling or untangling countless wires. It's why I thought it important to set up everything quickly when I moved: I could refresh my cable situation, making sure I had all my audio cables in position before any annoying extras needed to be added.

I'm glad I did, because in the week I've moved here, the behind-the-cabinet area has turned into a nest of vipers. If I had to add my turntable now, it'd give me a migraine trying to work out what goes where.

That's especially true of power plugs, which are few and far between in any rental flat. Where I've plugged in the turntable and speakers, I also have to find space for a refrigerator, internet router, separate internet box (yeah, my ISP really likes taking up power points apparently), and various other things.

Since I've yet to buy a splitter, I'm constantly playing musical chairs with the plugs, removing and replacing them to find space for my laptop charger or projector. Thankfully, since the turntable and speakers were there first, they're too embedded to remove.

When I first set up my turntable and speaker, I thought those pieces of kit getting central spots would be the end of my space issue. I was wrong. And I'm not just talking about the fact that my flatmate and I have far more UK pint glasses than our kitchen storage can cope with.

Records. I'm talking about records. They're pretty big, aren't they? A lot bigger than my Spotify collection, that's for sure, because that takes up zero space.

Partly, I'm talking about how tall and wide records are. They just don't stack on all shelves, so you need to be smart about where you place them.

But the biggest problem for my flatmate and I soon became just how many records we have between us. We must have far north of 50 collectively, which makes them hard to fit on any kind of shelf.

Unfortunately, I didn't think of this ahead of time, and we only realized the issue when we'd already settled in the living room. Where were our records going to go? We'd already filled the crevices in the cabinet with bowls and plates, and reaching the shelves required a stretch, so that was no cigar.

It took some reorganization to carve out a space for them in one of the cabinet's areas, and that's only a half measure, because I had to sacrifice about three-fifths of my collection to the black void that is my unpacked room. But our favorite records are within reach, at least.

If I'd have thought this far in advance, I'd have saved some more cabinet space for records. But it just goes to prove the point: a hi-fi system takes thought, and if you don't bring it into your home before anything else (yes, including bowls and cutlery and little ramekins of the sort I have far too many of), you end up having to totally reorganize when it's too late.

➡️ Read our full guide to the best turntables

1. Best overall: Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Evo
2. Best cheap beginner deck: House of Marley Revolution
3. Best budget Bluetooth deck: Audio-Technica AT-LP70XBT
4. Best premium Bluetooth deck: Cambridge Audio Alva TT V2

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Tom Bedford is a freelance contributor covering tech, entertainment and gaming. Beyond Tech Radar, he has bylines on sites including Games Radar, Digital Trends, Android Police, Tech Advisor, Whatto Watch and BGR. From 2019 to 2022 he was on the Tech Radar team as the staff writer and then deputy editor for the mobile team.

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