Have you ever suddenly been inspired to embark on a brand new hobby?

Maybe you’ve never owned a boat before, but having seen one chug by on the river you have thought “I’d love to do that!”. A quick browse in the classified ads shows lots of boats that look fine, and they don’t cost all that much. Basically any boat would be great, and you could gradually do it up, even if it is a bit shabby now. In your mind’s eye, your family will love you when you are able to take them on spur-of-the-moment, cheap weekends messing about on the water, starting in a few weeks’ time.

From this high point where the world is your oyster, you begin to take the advice of the magazines and other experienced hobbyists. Before you have even owned a boat, you become aware of the hierarchy of boat owners, and the boats that would render you a laughing stock if you owned them. You become aware of the general consensus on different types of bilge pump – not something you ever wanted to know. You begin to form an idea of the boat you should really go for – and it is not one of the bargain basement jobs you first saw. You might just about be able to stretch to a boat that would put you in the lower echelons of boat ownership but, importantly, not on the very lowest rung. You could always, perhaps, move up from there over time.

It now turns into an all-consuming hobby with the goal of having a boat on the river at the end of the year. In the end it costs thousands, and your children have grown up and left home before your boat finally takes to the water. You hit a bridge and rip the top off your boat the first time you take it out. You feel sick and abandon the whole hobby (a true story).

That’s the nature of male hobbies. They start out as wonderful, spontaneous ideas, but can turn into nightmares – mainly due to the existence of other hobbyists! Audio is one of those hobbies, I think. Ridiculously, the prices paid for bits of audio knickknackery rival the costs of boats.

A person could be seized one day by the idea of hi-fi as a way to improve their life, buy an amp and some secondhand speakers off Gumtree for £100, and plug their tablet or laptop headphone socket into the amp using a £2 cable. Hey presto, a hi-fi system that will sound much better than what they had before, and which has tinker-ability via the buying and selling of speakers and the audio streaming/library software options; there is no urgency in changing the amp and tablet hardware as they are pretty much perfect in what they do. The speakers are almost like pieces of furniture, so the person can indulge their tastes in how they look as well as how they sound, and they can be restored using standard DIY skills – a nice mini-hobby.

But what if the person does the natural male thing, and starts to read the magazines and forums? Immediately they will realise that their tablet’s headphone output is a joke in the audio world. They need to spend at least a few hundred pounds on a half-decent ‘DAC’, plus a couple of hundred on a budget cable. And of course, this is only for convenience: real audio quality can only be had if they own a decent turntable and a special vibration-free shelf to put it on. Where do they go from there? They need to make a decision on which turntable and which cartridge to go for. They need to take a view on cables, power conditioners, valve or solid state amps, accessories like cable lifters and record cleaning machines. Each decision, they are assured by their fellow hobbyists, will result in “night and day” differences in the sound.

After some months agonising over it, they assemble a beginner’s system for about £3,000 – they will upgrade as budget allows. It sounds OK, but they know that even though the brand is a highly recommended one, the particular model of valve amplifier they could afford has “hints of a slightly reticent mid range” – one of the magazines said so – and if they listen carefully, perhaps they can hear that… But the more powerful 18 Watt model cost £800 more and they decided against it. Perhaps they made the wrong decision. The nightmare unfolds…