My Lepai amp is dying a slow death and so I decided to replace it. I've tried to bootstrap my hi-fi system here with cheap but high sound quality components - starting with the Lepai amp (which I bought to drive my cheap outdoor speakers in the garden). If you haven't come across this, it's possibly the cheapest 2 channel amplifier you can buy - I paid ~ £20 for it, they go for about $20 on Amazon.com.

It was reasonable and the reviews tend to rave about it. I worried that, just as audiophiles tend to assume more expensive products sound better than cheaper products, people thought the Lepai amp was better than it was because it was so cheap. After moving to Berkeley, I eventually picked up a set of the critically acclaimed Andrew Jones SP-BS22-LR speakers for $75 (they normally retail for $130 ish but Amazon has some amusing pricing fluctuations).

This combination sounded great but would distort significantly if you tried to drive the speakers at any sort of volume. I put this down to the amp.

A few weeks ago the left channel would fail. A quick jiggle (for lack of a more technical term) of the speaker cable would help but eventually it would cut more frequently and this wouldn't help. It still works sporadically but for the most part - it wouldn't. This means the amp failed after just 2 months of use. At £20, that makes it relatively expensive. I normally expect to at least a year out of my electronics (my Acoustic Energy Aego-M speakers at home are still going strong, 5 years later).

After some googling, it was a split between the Dayton DTA-100a and the Fiio A1, which were both cost effective good quality amplifiers.

In the end I chose the A1. It was slightly cheaper and put out less power but several reviews questioned the reliability of the Dayton amp (having had amps fail after a few months). So far, the A1 has proven to be significantly more reliable than my Lepai amp - but only time will tell if this persists.

The power concern seems to not be such an issue either, it will easily go loud enough for my music to be heard on the street outside our flat (again, a very scientific metric). As for quality, I've found it is significantly clearer at higher volumes than the Lepai amplifier. Tonality seems to be better - in particular, the bass seems more pronounced.

You could buy 4 Lepai amps for the same as Fiio but you really do get what you pay for. Other people don't seem to have had the same reliability issues (or seem to have overlooked them, based on the low cost of the Lepai) but if you're after a quality product, you can't go wrong with the Fiio. (Plus, I'm hopeful that the warranty/support situation is better, since Fiio appears to be a more reputable business.)

My musical renaissance began in earnest at the age of 15 when my parents bought me a Sony mini hi-fi system for my birthday. It had a CD player, reasonably high definition speakers and an FM radio. The radio was my favourite feature of the system, I began a life long habit of listening to music while I worked (or studied, at the time). A few weeks in, I quickly grew bored of listening to Capital FM - the most 'pop' of the popular radio stations - and switched to XFM, a rock radio station. It was then my musical taste started to diversify, and I became well acquainted with popular artists such as Muse, Keane, Athlete and so on.

In sixth form, at age 16, I started a Young Enterprise business with my peers, Paul and Herman. Herman, the visionary of our group (a great talker who sadly doesn't talk much to me nowadays) decided that we'd build a student run record label, 'Renegade Records' and we got to it. Paul handled the finance and legal aspects of our business (he's now a lawyer, so I guess that worked out well for him) and I took care of everything else. I spent hours printing CDs, emailing and calling people, and just generally managing. It was great fun. With a team of 17, we recruited bands, produced CDs and organised two concerts. We did well, raising nearly a thousand pounds for charity and learning some important life lessons about people management, failure and how to sell an idea.

We didn't get far in the end of year competition that Young Enterprise organises, getting knocked out by a team that made a calendar and sold £3000 worth of advertisements on it. (Evidently this was the right decision by the judges - based on the relative strength of adtech companies versus music tech...) We did however get the chance to represent our school in the annual Ogden Trust business competition, eventually coming second in the country. We were amusingly bested by a team we had left in runners up position in the two previous rounds. This culminated in a tour of the HSBC building - the first time I set foot in Canary Wharf and not the last.

One of the websites that my more musically involved Young Enterprise colleagues recommended was a music streaming website called Last.fm. Little did I know at the age of 17 that I'd one day be on the other side of the servers that ran the website, so to speak. Last.fm was my favourite website for a long time. As a growing music lover, my music collection expanded massively from a few gigabytes to tens of gigabytes. I'd spend hours in Fopp, an indie music shop in Cambridge, searching for cheap obscure music - some of which I liked, some of which I returned. Still, this was inefficient. And the recommendations my friends suggested often didn't match my mood. As my taste became more and more refined, I found myself relying more and more on the superb recommendations engine that powers Last.fm.

Fast forward a few years and I'd become a bona fide audiophile with a non-trivial FLAC collection and some decent headphones. The music I'd collected became one of the main motivational forces that took me through my travels and added an extra dimension to the places I'd visited. Hiking through the Himalayas became all the more stunning when coupled with Howard Shore's soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings (at least until it became so cold my Sony Walkman's hard disk platters refused to spin anymore). R.E.M. took me through the rainy race days in Northern Kenya. A constant quest during my time in India was to identify a song I heard at the gym in my first week and could not figure out. Eventually I heard it again when the mobile phone of the taxi driver who was dropping me to the airport rang - on my way out of India. He shared it with me and I'll share it with you:



When I returned to London to start work at Barclays Capital, I found myself with less time to listen to music. Locked down corporate systems and a day filled with meetings meant my headphones were rarely used. My 15 minute commute was occupied with trying to find a pocket of air in the Tube carriage to squeeze into and I never managed to have enough space to put headphones in my ears. Still, music played a big part in my life. my first date with my ex-girlfriend was at a candle lit jazz concert. My friends and I had started exploring the live music scene in central London and I discovered some fantastic artists.

The time came, quicker than expected, for me to find a new employer. At the end of spring my friend Sam linked me to the jobs page on Last.fm. I didn't think they'd hire someone like me but I came back to the site a few months later as I was finding new music to take on holiday with me and saw the same opening. I applied, they had a great interview process which I did well enough in to get an offer. In September 2011, I walked into their office with a stunning sense of surrealism that I was now actually working on a product that I actually used and loved.

As a music enthusiast, the constant tenet of my passion for music was discovery. My musical taste at age 17 was a subset of my musical taste at age 23. It's why we listen to the radio - to get access to new music. There's a lot of utility in someone more qualified curating your playlist, which is why DJs can acquire such celebrity status. Picking tracks is an artform. But just as Amazon enabled the long tail of books, the long tail of music was growing as more and more content was ripped, seeded and downloaded. Suddenly the same 100 top tracks weren't enough for the above average listener. The marginal cost of acquiring music was close to zero and they wanted it all.

In the breadth of all of this choice though, people needed guidance. Last.fm provided that - it was the radio stream with a catalogue longer than the stock of all of the CD stores in England. This catalogue, coupled with insightful recommendations based on a user's own past listening history made its recommendations almost always hit the spot. Sadly, the product came to languish. New product development has suffered over the last half a decade as its new owners struggled to understand the value their product provided. Without a true understanding of its value, they mispriced it. They tried to cover its pages with adverts and, as advertising prices hurtled downwards, underinvested in their product. What's worse is that Last.fm is still built around the old way . The majority of their content comes from the major labels and there's a lack of interesting indie content on the service. This becomes restrictive - for many many reasons (mostly legal) that I don't have time to cover here.

The idea of an infinite radio stream is an important concept though and something that Soundcloud, my favourite product, has executed on brilliantly. Originally just a site for music creators to post and share their sounds, they flipped the balance of power around and essentially put music consumers and creators on the same level. There is no distinction between a creator and a user. They operate a brilliant social model, similar to Twitter, where users can either post their own content, reshare other users' content and favourite content. This enables a whole hierarchy with consumers at the bottom, curators in the middle and creators at the top. It's a beautiful and disruptive solution to getting music out of the stranglehold of the major labels.

When artists upload music to Soundcloud, they do so willingly. Users can stop and start and skip tracks as they like - something that the labels explicitly forbid on standard radio services. Soundcloud allows users to keep up with their favourite artists' new uploads with absolutely no friction by offering a stream that just continues to plays. In fact, the music never stops on Soundcloud. When it runs out of content, it finds some more. And it somehow always knows what to play next. Most of the content is from upstart artists and so you're almost guaranteed to find something new.

It's this endless stream of good music that makes Soundcloud so valuable to every music lover, creator and curator. My 100+ gigabyte music library is languishing on my hard disk as, each day, I keep Soundcloud open more than Facebook.

Soundcloud is also an exceptional promotional tool for the artist. My friend Siva (who incidentally designed all the artwork for our Young Enterprise bands) and I use it extensively to share music through our reggae blog Millennial Roots. It allows artists to bump their tracks up to the top of search results, to offer freedownloads of samples or demo tracks and to embed their track in as many blogs as they like. Soundcloud's business model hinges on this value that it provides to creators of music. By offering free music to users, a presence on Soundcloud is, more often than not, an easy route to growing a good audience for any new artist. Spending €5 a month for this level of user engagement is a minimal expenditure for the shrewd band manager.

The future is in intelligent discovery - as Netflix, Amazon and Last.fm have shown us. But discovery can't exist without content. By cutting the entrenched incumbents out of the process, Soundcloud have democratised promotion of music while providing an super smooth discovery experience.