A Handy Hint

Anna was complaining that we never listen to any music: our records (remember them?) are all in boxes in the attic, and our Cds all over the place. Most of our music is now on MP3 players.

So she wanted to jettison our old stereo and buy an MP3 dock. I had a look at them, and decided the cheap ones wouldn't give the sort of sound quality our old stereo did - and the expensive ones were expensive. And then I had a brainwave. I bought a cable with a stereo jack on one end and two phono plugs on the other. The phono plugs connect into the back of our amp (where the turntable used to connect, as it happens) and the stereo plug goes into the headphone socket of a laptop or MP3 player - and our digital music emerges from our old, but good quality, stereo system.

So don't throw out your amp and speakers and replace them with a dock - simply buy a cable (it cost me £5.00 sterling - say $7 or $8) as opposed to hundreds for a dock of comparable quality.