Beautiful Obsession

Ed Selley celebrates 10 years of being uplifted as he looks back over a selection of dream setups

- Ed Selley

Beautiful Systems has been a staple of HFC for well over a decade and in that time, it has covered a fantastically bewildering variety of equipment. For more than five years, I’ve been the lucky soul who has sat down in front of these wildly disparate setups and dusted off my most enthusiastic language to try and convey some of that experience. At times, I’ve touched on the nature of what it is that makes these endlessly variable systems just so enchanting and so, with the small hiatus brought about by Coronavirus and the difficulties of moving and shipping equipment around, I’ve got the perfect opportunity to take stock and expand on that notion.

At first glance, the constituent parts that make up the various systems look completely disparate without a shred of commonality between them. The only thing that can be accurately applied to each and every piece of equipment that has passed through over the years is that it makes music. The mechanics of how they do that has otherwise defied classification. Setups have relied on CD, vinyl and streaming for their source material. They have used valves and solid state (and on occasions, both) to generate power outputs between eight and 800W. They have used transducers that have varied between devices I could probably squeeze into if the drivers were removed, to ones I could fit in my pocket. Price is not and never has been a consideration for Beautiful Systems but that has also varied by an enormous amount.

Look of love