A 1970s Teenager's Bedroom (1998)
rocketroberts.com
rocketroberts.com
My bedroom started looking like that somewhat later in the mid 1980s, kicked off by the winning of some car speakers in a primary school raffle. This inevitably raised the question of what to plug them into. Collecting discarded junk from the 1960s-1970s at jumble sales and car boot sales solved that problem and I learned a lot.
I think that I was privileged to have had a childhood in the age of ubiquitous junk availability. It kept me off the streets and lead to a technical profession and some life long interests. It’s actually more difficult to get hold of stuff now thanks to electrical safety regulations, skips being locked, eBay pushing the prices of trash up and general lack of repairability of anything.
A footnote: 30 years later my bedroom is a radio shack and just as messy and I’m blessed that I found someone understanding enough to put up with it :)
Garage sales are still a thing and so are flea markets! There is still treasure around if one looks hard enough.
For the last 4 or 5 years, I have gotten heavily into the audio hobby. I've got to say, it's one of the most enjoyable hobbies I've ever taken up.
I know "audiophiles" get a bad rap with their needlessly expensive speaker cables, but I assure you 99.9% of hobbyists you'll find online are vehemently opposed to that kind of snake oil garbage.
I also assure you (from one engineer to another) that the matter of "what sounds good" is actually a fairly objectively understood thing. It's not like art or wine tasting where things are almost entirely subjective.
Audio does not need to be an expensive hobby. Even if you're buying new equipment, you can put together an absolutely fantastic system for a few hundred bucks.
The best part is that audio gear doesn't become obsolete.‡ We as a human race have been building loudspeakers and amplifiers for about a century now and it's a fairly mature art. A kickass stereo you build today will sound great in 10, 20, 30 years.
If you're willing to do a little DIY work, you can buy DIY speaker kits that outperform commercial offerings 2-3x the cost. This is a great cheap ($100) starter kit with lots of reviews online, and a video on the product page that shows you how to put it together. Compares well with $300-$500 commercial speakers.
https://www.parts-express.com/c-note-mt-bookshelf-speaker-ki...
If anybody has any questions about the hobby I'll try my best to answer them or at least point you in the right direction.
---------
‡ It doesn't become obsolete for the most part. Once you get into fancy digital codecs and home theater stuff, well, that's still an area of rapid flux. But good old RCA red-and-white L&R analog connectors (or the stereo mini jack, which is only a $3 adapter away) are still king in the world of stereo music.
But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Those engineers were very smart; 44/16 audio more than covers everything the human ear can hear.
Yes, but more channels are better. The spatial resolution of human hearing is pretty impressive, and stereo+headphones doesn't really do it justice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd5i7TlpzCk
Dolby Atmos is the latest multichannel audio format; rather than mixing down to a fixed 5.1 or 7.1 master, an Atmos master carries spatial metadata that can be decoded and rendered to any array of loudspeakers, from a binaural mix for headphones to a 24.1.10 home theater setup. Windows and Xbox One both support Dolby Atmos support; Windows also has a native spatial post-processor called Windows Sonic.
https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/content-creation/do...
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt8...
That only works for headphones though...
I don't really believe this, given the shape of the human ear and my own experience trying to reproduce 3d sound. Humans can judge direction and distance remarkably well up to a few dozen meters.
A binaural recording setup uses an artificial head with artificial ears, with the microphone capsules located where the eardrum would be. The microphones capture the phase and magnitude effects of the head and outer ear. Unless you have really weird ears or really bad headphones, the effect is extraordinarily lifelike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTkVnb3TXO8
It's also possible to process sounds digitally to create a binaural effect using convolution. Using a mathematical model of the ear and head (a head-related transfer function), you can position sounds in a 3D space around the listener. Many games offer HRTF audio and it provides remarkably accurate spatial information. HRTF audio is a key aspect of the immersiveness of VR experiences. It's possible to generate a unique HRTF based on your own anatomy, using either an audio capture from a microphone placed inside the ear or a 3D scan of the user's head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
It can also use a real head with real ears and e.g. the Roland CS-10EM binaural headphones (which I've had reasonable success with.)
That's pretty darned spatial through headphones (recorded with Roland CS-10EM binaural microphones.)
I recorded my home, an afternoon with the family from the speakers that it would be played back from. After some fiddling with a pre amp to get the recording balanced well enough to play back, the effect was pretty effective.
I didn't expect it, but when that recording was played on that system and speakers, it was possible to sit in my room and basically hear the house! TV in the front room, dog walking around, doors closing.
Brought people in late at night to play it. Was spooky to hear midday sounds, and believe them. The illusion was that good.
Those needs specialized equipment to be recorded -- and can indeed reproduce the 3d spatiality of the sound (sic).
In fact there are 3d sound processors that can do very impressive things even without headphones (e.g. some from Roland).
1) The inter-aural time difference. Sound takes time to travel, so any sound coming from left of the head will arrive at the left ear sooner than the right ear.
2) The head-related transfer function. The shape and auditory characteristics of the head and ear canal change the sound slightly depending on the frequency and the direction of the incoming sound. Since this direction is different for the two ears, your auditory system can compare the 'shape' of the sound it gets from each ear and use that to position the sound in space.
The inter-aural time difference is, by far, the more effective of the two, but it only gives horizontal bearing. It also can't give 'in front' or 'behind'. The head-related transfer function can give both horizontal and vertical bearing, but it's not that accurate. Together, these explain why humans are far more accurate at localizing sounds horizontally than vertically.
Binaural recordings try to capture both of these mechanisms through stereo recording with a mock head. That's why listening to a binaural recording gives you the feeling of sounds coming from a point in space, because it's replicating the same experience you'd get from actually being in that space.
Any chance at a soundcloud link?
Two channels.
Here is a German shop that sells kits: https://acoustic-design-online.de/de/
They had once kits to build your own electrostatic speaker (warning, high voltage, danger!): http://silberstatic.de/
And RCA? What's wrong with balanced audio on an XLR?
I saw a lovely post on Facebook about how a freelancer had brought in something odd, that could only get the audio out of via analog.
He proudly came out with his crappy £50 RCA cables. We had to tell him that we only dealt with balanced audio. My friend went to the stores and found the most beat up converter she could find, and some ropey looking cables :)
There's nothing wrong with it, it's just totally unnecessary for line level signals over short cable runs in domestic environments. Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection.
If you're building a system from scratch, you may as well use balanced audio, the driver costs under a fiver.
Unfortunately for me, when you live downtown near a radio station that leaks into all your audio equipment, better EMI rejection definitely sounds better.
Is £50 a typo?
Obviously only the bit-rate matters for dynamic range, and a 16 bit signal has 96 dB of dynamic range. That is more than enough for even the most dynamic of audio signals.
A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody needs 16bit+ for anything other than improving their noise floor (which is still borderline inaudible at 16bit).
Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use. 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor.
And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor.
Yes, but the comment was specifically about dynamic range in audio production, not about higher bit rate's prime benefit of reducing artefacts in digital summing. The noise floor at 16 bit is -96db, if you're down there, you're doing it wrong.
> 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor.
It's more than enough if you're doing proper gain staging - the number of tracks is irrelevant.
Any mastering compression of more than 3db gain reduction is mostly excessive, but let's say 6db. So a final master will bring up a noise floor 18db at most (if gain staging was done properly and as you say you left plenty of headroom for the mastering engineer - although clearly you wouldn't be able to use all the headroom). That's still a noise floor of less than -78db, but more realistically around -85db.
Saturation usually only add harmonics not gain (obviously depends on the kit you're using).
> And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor.
Myth. Watch this [1] and you'll realise that there's plenty of range with 16 bit. People were producing with 16 bit for years perfectly fine. Before that high end studio tape machines (like the classic Studers or Telefunkens) were equivalent to about 14-16 bits (based on their noise floor) and we had decades of music produced and recorded on that format.
I am not saying that 24 bit isn't better than 16 bit. Of course it is, there are tangible benefits in summing and it gives you more headroom to work with. But, I'm saying it's a myth that there's not enough dynamic range or that you're somehow just bumping along above the noise floor. If you are then you're doing it wrong.
But audio production often involves lots and lots of digital summing. I don't see how that's not related.
> Any mastering compression of more than 3db gain reduction is mostly excessive, but let's say 6db. So a final master will bring up a noise floor 18db at most (if gain staging was done properly and as you say you left plenty of headroom for the mastering engineer - although clearly you wouldn't be able to use all the headroom). That's still a noise floor of less than -78db, but more realistically around -85db.
That's only counting mastering compression.
What about NY style parallel buss compression on drums where you want to hit -20db GR as an effect, which will inevitably add some saturation too. 6-10db of compression on an individual drum track is common too if you're doing metal or electronic music. So you've got 10 drum tracks, each with several effects and a parallel track with distortion/compression.
> Saturation usually only add harmonics not gain (obviously depends on the kit you're using)
If it's not adding amplitude to your signal it's almost certainly bringing up the noise floor. Saturation generally works by applying gain until the device/plugin distorts. Just because amplitude isn't going up doesn't mean gain isn't increasing.
> Myth. Watch this [1] and you'll realise that there's plenty of range with 16 bit. People were producing with 16 bit for years perfectly fine. Before that high end studio tape machines (like the classic Studers or Telefunkens) were equivalent to about 14-16 bits (based on their noise floor) and we had decades of music produced and recorded on that format.
This is true for when you're operating on friendly signals like a sine wave signal generator with a fixed amplitude. Not so nice when you're tracking with 20db of headroom and the drummer some how manages a flam 24db f*cking louder than everything else which clips the overheads (this actually happened using 24bit, but now with crazy dynamic drummers I give myself TONS of headroom because there's no reason not to). At least when tape "clips" it doesn't ruin the take.
I do agree with you that 16bit can be good for recording (and for home audio I agree you'll never be able to tell a difference) but I don't believe there are literally zero differences between 24bit, and hard disk space is so cheap that there's no reason not to use the extra bits.
Any specific beginner-friendly resources that you would recommend?
I thought of starting with something small and defined, like upgrading my TV's sound but even that comes with a variety of bewildering options.
EDIT: You could also try IEMs, Etymotic makes some of the most clear, coherent, natural and neutral sounding. Their TOTL (Top-Of-The-Line) is the ER4 line which has a MSRP of $350, but you could get the same value with the ER3 line at $179.
Get yourself a reference/measurement microphone so you can measure the room, then use REM [1] to analyse the results (it's free). The Behringer ECM8000 is fine ($50), you don't need to spend a lot of money on that. You put the reference mic at your ideal listening position (you're not going to make an entire room acoustically perfect without needing a second mortgage, even high end studios aren't).
What you want to get to is a flat response across the frequency range. You won't get it, and you will need bass traps, mid traps, etc. to fix the problems. If you're doing it for your TV then you can get attractive looking traps that don't look ugly. But if you're doing it for music, and you want lots of bass, then you may end up with big bass traps in the corner of the room. Although the PSI Audio AVAAs [2] are another (more expensive) option for trapping bass without taking up any more space than a regular speaker. I trialled a couple of these and they were exceptional.
Depending on how bad the room is you can use room correction systems to fix it. I use a Trinnov ST2 Pro [3] (on top of a treated room) in my studio and the difference is astonishing.
This is my frequency response before and after the Trinnov [4]
Once you have got your room acoustics to a pretty good place, then the world's your oyster in terms of audio gear and speakers. I would advise against getting trapped in the super expensive audiophile world, you won't get much difference once you're above the $10k speakers range, and actually you can get results which will blow your mind with $1k speakers. Building your own is tough, because the dimensions are so critical, but if you're up for the challenge, it could be worth it!
I've spent a large amount of time in this world because I've built a high-end music studio in my house. And going much beyond this advice isn't worth it. You need to go and listen for yourself and work out what you like. But acoustics will always win over gear, always.
[1] https://www.roomeqwizard.com/
[2] http://www.emerginguk.com/?portfolio=psi-audio-avaa-c20
Not true at all..
Just because 44/16 well covers the frequency and amplitude domain of human hearing, it doesn't mean that the representation of the waveforms within that domain are precise. Other digital systems like 96/24 and variable encodings are much better at this because of the higher sampling rate and precision, and have much less error due to quantizing jitter.
Anyone with a decent set of ears and a bit of patience/training can learn to tell the difference in quality, and once recognized, the difference is quite clear.
I will agree that although clear, the difference is still subtle, and 44/16 is generally pretty good.
Not true at all.. the bit rate will only affect the noise floor, you'd be hard pressed to notice any difference between 16 and 24 bits (you won't). And when it comes to the Hz - (width of the time-slice, 44 / 96) that will only make any difference on super high frequency sounds, but again, even with that the vast majority of people will perceive no difference. Band limited sound waves can only solve to one solution, and making the slices smaller in the time domain will have relatively little effect because you can perfectly represent all signals in the range of human hearing at 44khz sample rate.
Higher bit rates are useful for people using DAWs like Cubase, ProTools, etc. where your 'signal' is going through myriad processing and summing stages because of the use of multiple tracks, plugins, etc. (sometimes hundreds) That's when you don't want the artifacting from summing multiple approximations. I use 32bit / 96khz in Cubase for this reason.
The human brain is very good at convincing itself [3] that it can tell the difference, but in a double blind test you'd have no chance.
Useful info and reference:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
[3] http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_audio.htm
"you'd be hard pressed" and "the vast majority will percieve no difference"
which is it?
bit rate: yes, as sounds are at the lower end of amplitude within the bit depth, the more 'stepping'/'zippering' occurs to the input waveform since less bits are available to represent the shape of the wave at that amplitude, and so things become more distorted, and the signal noise goes up. similarly, for higher amplitude sounds, the less need for compressing/limiting to remove clipping artifacts, so again, less distortion (though the latter isn't inherent to the signal encoding per-se).
sampling frequency: irrespective of the nyquist theorem, the shape of the wave is different. even if you can't explicitly hear at a base frequency of the overtones above a certain frequency, the waveform is not the same and your ear is not being moved in the same way, period, and relative distortion of overtones with respect to the base frequencies within the nyquist spectrum increases with frequency, so the tonal effect of the sampling frequency on the sound (and net distortion) is diminished as the sampling frequency increases. aka overtones become increasingly distorted to a lesser extent as the sampling frequency increases; banded spectrum (e.g. FFT display) is much cleaner, as a visual example.
both of these can be masked somewhat with dithering, but again, this is introducing noise into the signal, which you can also hear; all other things equal (which they arent), the dither free signal will inherently have less noise and so be cleaner sounding.
I agree that bit rate is harder to perceive, and for most things, this is more important w/r/t multiple generations of distortion introduced by software.. but just because something is 'hard' to percieve doesn't mean it is imperceptible and therefore a net zero, which is what the original post is claiming. whether a net 0.0001 is relavent is a different matter (as I said previously, 16/44 is generally fine, so I'm not in the 'I can totally hear the difference from my monster cable digital edition' camp), but it is not a net 0, and when listening for tambre rather than frequency, quite clear once you know what to listen for.
also yes:
I did a blind listening test for this while in an audio engineering program. Was able to clearly tell 44 vs 96 and vs 192, as well as 16 vs 20 and 24 (though 24 vs 20 was pretty difficult). That was a while ago so not sure if my ears are still as sharp.
Also, because cymbal sounds are pretty close to being noise, it's arguable whether it would matter or not. Although if you listen to a 128 kbps MP3 then you can often hear the top end frequency sounds (like cymbals) becoming 'mushy'. To the vast majority of people once you get to 192 kbps it's inaudible, and then above that most people with 'perfect ears' would struggle. And that's with a lossy format, never mind the lossless formats of CDs, WAV or FLAC which is the discussion at hand.
So while cymbals do have lots of high frequency content, in a 44.1khz recording any frequencies at or above 22.05khz should be removed first. (In reality it's not a brickwall filter at that frequency, but tends to steeply roll off once it gets nearer).
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're asking.
"Kids these days" wouldn't understand but the ordinary family didn't have the money to buy anything they wanted, unlike today where middle class people can largely by most of the ordinary day to day consumer electronic stuff without much thought about the money. I'm not saying everyone can, but certainly in my middle class life in the 1970's there was no money for buying teenagers a bedroom full of electronics.
I had to beg and wait many years till we got a home computer.
And to be honest it isn't high-end gear for the most part. I mean, a lot of it is from Radio Shack. And the higher-end stuff isn't new and/or had to be repaired.
"Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years"
http://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-squ...
Certainly in Britain.
America was always different though, middle class kids always have more. I remember watching tv shows with kids having a phone in their room that blew my mind as a kid sharing a room with two brothers and very locked down phone in the house.
Free local calls amazed me too when I found out about that.
And refills of soda.
Land of plenty indeed.
I live in a pretty average US home (built in 1971, raised ranch similar to this:https://photos.zillowstatic.com/p_e/ISi3u8fp8ljszu1000000000...) and there's plenty of room in the 2 non-master bedrooms to dedicate half the room to a crammed-in arrangement like this, with a bed crammed in the other half.
My mother worked for a company that made cash dispenser (ATM) machines. Every now and then, they'd scrap some old machines, and she'd tip me off. I'd raid the bins behind the company, and carry off whatever I could carry - professional grade power supplies, AC motors, all sorts of electronics that I'd de-solder components from and re-use.
We'd also raid the local council dump when the workers weren't watching. A surprising amount of stuff got thrown away that could be fixed and re-sold to friends for a little extra pocket money.
Sometime around 1982, aged 15, I saved up and bought a Jupiter Ace computer. It had 3K of RAM, and was programmed in Forth. That summer, I wrote a whole load of games for it, and sold them on cassette through a computer magazine. That paid for the computer several times over. It was never a popular machine, and I think I was one of only about three people selling games for it that summer.
Then my school threw out an old teletype. I got permission to take it. There was no printer available for the Jupiter Ace, so I resolved to connect the teletype. Trouble was there wasn't an RS232 interface available for the Ace either. I'd built a TTL-logic parallel board for the Ace from scratch. To get +/- 12V for RS232 I used one of the cash machine 24V smoothed power supplies, used second hand cash machine transistors to switch the power via a parallel port pin, and wrote an RS232 implementation in software in Z80 machine code (hand assembled, as I didn't have an assembler). Eventually it all worked. I must have been the only owner of a Jupiter Ace that had a 1960s printer attached.
The Jupiter Ace had one of those crummy rubber keyboards. I'd scavenged enough cash machine keypads, so I desoldered all the keys from them, etched my own circuit board, and made a proper keyboard. That made programming much nicer.
Anyway, my parents weren't wealthy, and I certainly wasn't. But you should never underestimate a resourceful teenager.
I think it was an ASR 33, or at least I recall it looking like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 Unfortunately I don't have it any more - my parents threw it out a few years after I left home.
Wikipedia certainly implies the ASR 33 used current loop. If I recall correctly, mine had a DB25 connector, which likely indicates RS232, and is probably how I figured out it was RS232 in the first place, as information was hard to come by back then. I do know I used a 24V power supply from a cash machine, using a potential divider to create a +/- 12V signal, which is consistent with the model I had having an RS232 interface. Getting the timing right in software was a lot of trial and error.
Edit: this page indicates that RS232 was available as an option on the ASR-33 teletype: http://bytecollector.com/asr_33.htm
If I recall, the teletype was sourced from the Green Bank Observatory, which had some really impressive old equipment - racks of hardware with nixie tube displays, all that kind of stuff.
Even the ZX Spectrum, for those unfamiliar: it is a 30 year old British micro computer designed around being _cheap_, was £125 of "old" money. Now compare that to a Raspberry Pi. Heck you can even get a wide choice of budget laptops for the same price as what the Spectrum was (if you take inflation into account).
So I wouldn't say people are financially better of now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. I just think the financial barrier for entry into electronics has been lowered.
The UK had a huge DIY computing, hifi, and music hardware scene in the 70s and 80s. Even with DIY, the products weren't as cheap as they are today. But the DIY element made them more accessible than professional equipment, and far more educational.
For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene. You can find copies of kit-promoting magazines like Electronics Today International online, and the Canadian and Australian issues were a lot less music-oriented than the UK editions.
Even Adafruit etc are lightweight compared to some of the 70s/80s DIY, which needed analog design skills and a willingness to build your own unsafe DIY power supplies.
[1] My guess is the UK had some very early synth startups like EMS and a solid hifi scene. When EMS folded some of their designers needed new work and there was enough interest in kit synths to keep them busy for a few years. Likewise with hifi.
The ham radio people and strictly non-ham radio people like to pretend the other doesn't exist although they do nearly the same hobby, and amateur radio is much larger, more active, and richer (in the sense of more stuff and more expensive capable stuff) ... Funkamateur from Germany and some title in kanji that I can't enter on this keyboard from the Japan Amateur Radio League have been published for most of a century and are pretty active.
There is an uncanny valley effect. German schematic diagrams are full of "R" as a decimal place, rare in the 80s metric prefixes (cut it out with the nanofarads plz) and swapping periods and commas in long numbers. And there was something unusual about European scientific notation that I don't remember.
Also there is more total electronic hobby and electronic kit activity and sales now than at any time in history, despite endless accurate yet misleading claims that since the death of the Heathkit company no individual company has come close to monopolizing 90% of kit sales. No slice of the pie today is nearly as large as heathkits slice of the pie, but the pie overall is vastly larger.
That said, I have also noticed the brands have largely won the consumer war and people seem far more willing to drop cash into Apple / Sony / Samsung / etc because their hardware has a desirable aesthetics. However that might also be a symptom of the electronics industry going mainstream.
Germany has had (and still has) it as well.
15 years ago would be the heyday of the Palm and there, lots of software was free or even open source. I certainly didn't need to buy any software back then to fill that little productivity machine.
BTW, I was much more productive on the Palm than on modern smartphone devices. For example note-taking was much better with a stylus than with a touch interface.
Maybe I was looking in the wrong places but there didn't seem to be much free stuff for Win CE back in 2002.
I completely forgot that they were around at that time.
I might had a dig around and see if I've still got it. Might be a fun device to repurpose.
While I'll agree with all the other responses that electronics have gotten a lot cheaper, I think there's another compounding factor. Back in the day, I think far more adults were dismissive of this sort of technology (or were personally unfamiliar to the point that they didn't see the value). So for kids, not having much money of their own, it was always an uphill struggle to justify the expense of any of it.
Today's adults were the kids from back then, and so are not as dismissive. So they do see the value, and are likely far more willing to spend the money.
To be more accurate, you're not making a useful point. You're just complaining about the way you grew up.
Oh grandpa, is this dementia? Everybody knows that electronics cannot be repaired but must be replaced every two years! ;)
Recognizing the reel-to-reel was refurbished from the junk yard, in the context of a picture of an entire corner of a teenager's bedroom dedicated to (at the time, relatively) expensive equipment for playing music and communicating with people, this may be a bit tone deaf. Maybe the "junk" sold today would indeed last 1/3 the life span of some of this stuff, but it would cost an inflation-adjusted fraction of the price and fit into a low-to-middle income teenager's pocket. Other than the speakers, of course.
I'm a little bit in awe at the prospect of having so much stuff as a teenager :)
Is it super accepting parents and he just scrounged what he could somehow, parents/family in the biz/already hobbyists, super rich parents/family...
Was it all actually exceptionally cheap?
Help me understand how this happened...
The big expense was a soldering iron which I paid £5 for, a lot of money, by trading excess book vouchers I got for it (people kept buying me book vouchers endlessly). That landed me a 1965ish weller iron. That allowed me to fix anything.
Not a great one by any means, I certainly wouldn't be doing SMD soldering with it, but adequate for through hole and point to point wiring. It probably won't last as long either.
My old man has a couple of soldering irons for the 70's that still work great. You'd be paying over $100 for the same iron these days.
He also still has the same roll of solder that he had in the 80's. A kilogram of solder lasts a long time. In fact, most of his electrical tools from the 80's are in good condition and get regular use.
Generally speaking tools are much, much cheaper in relative terms than they used to be.
I remember looking longingly at a mini-wood lathe in a model magazine in the 1980s. It was super cheap, ad something like $300.
There's no way it worked as well as something like this random < $50 one now: https://www.banggood.com/DC-24V-Mini-Lathe-Beads-Machine-Pol...
I’ve got a newer Weller TCP station now that gets used for everything from 0603 SMD devices through massive capacitors. Cost around $300 (more than a Hakko) but was worth it as it’s absolutely bomb proof and a pleasure to use for extended periods.
Most of my equipment now is from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s cheap, reliable and easy to repair if it does break.
Combined to growing up in a non poor family, some scrounging around second hand stores, getting broken stuff from friends/family members that you repair yourself, etc... is how it’d happen.
Well, I did. It launched me on a career of 'rescuing' left-over hardware which still keeps me from buying new stuff unless absolutely necessary. While I might not be a good consumer (my father's oft-heard reaction when I spoke of my latest conquest: 'if everyone were like you the economy would crumble, just toss the rubbish and buy something new') but I don't feel this to be a prime responsibility: we're not here to support the economy, the economy exists by virtue of all our interactions. If the economy can only survive by virtue of people being wasteful the solution is not to produce more waste but to fix the economy. This will lead to some articles becoming more expensive - like they used to be - but it will also lead to less waste being produced, fixing another problem.
The rapid pace of technical developments between the 50's - the era from which some of the stuff our teenage bedrooms were filled with - and now has been part of the reason for the development of modern throw-away equipment. Now that this pace has slowed down and in some cases halted or reversed (want a good compact cassette player? Buy a second-hand older model and restore it) there is often no direct incitement for replacement of 'obsolete' hardware: an amplifier from the 90's sounds just as good as one from two decades later. It would make sense to repair that older model instead of buying something new, were it not for the fact that somewhere along the line manufacturers 'forgot' to think about repairability when designing hardware, 'forgot' about providing schematic diagrams or only provided them to 'authorised' repair centres, started using hard to source components, etc. Fortunately those latter 'omissions' have been reversed for a good deal by the existence of active repair communities on the 'net ([1], [2], etc) so the curious and enterprising can still continue on their mission of learning and discovery.
The era of the linked article was an era of transistorization. His vacuum tube amp reminded me of the research lab grade Tektronix 545-series o-scope I owned with 500 watts of vacuum tubes and those weird ceramic and gold plate standoffs instead of PCBs, my Heathkit SB-102 vacuum tube ham SSB radio, and my motorola land mobile receiver and transmitter strips converted for the then new 2 meter ham radio repeater fad (which has since mostly disappeared). That o-scope in the mid 50s cost someone about one new house, by the mid 80s I got it for $100 with all the plugins, while living in a $100K house, figure it dropped in value by a thousand over a quarter century. My dad paid about a mortgage payment for the SB-102 when it was new, maybe 15 years later I got it for free when he upgraded, just too many microprocessor controlled features with no change in performance specs..
Note that with computers you can't do anything in 2018 with 1998 equipment, it won't work or the software and protocols are not designed to be compatible on purpose. However literal research lab grade work in the mid 50s is roughly equivalent to average dude work in the 80s so in the late 80s paying $100 for a file cabinet sized o-scope was reasonable because it was totally useful and practical and I learned a lot using it, if not terribly portable or reliable (burning out tubes, need to realign after replacement, etc)
There was also an interesting aspect to 70s stagflation, everything before 1980 cost ten times as much, so that also excited the depreciation. In the 50s $10K would buy a nice house, but once people got used to paying $100K (and now $1M) a dollar isn't worth what it used to be.
Also the nostalgia of time smooths things over, but a 1950 car was kinda rusted out and worn out by 1959 so people get weird feels about a kid driving a 1950-whatever automobile when that thing was pretty worthless at the time the kid had it in 1959, and this extends to electronics. I'm sure someone saved a lot of money for a long time to buy the very late 60s Sony black and white 7 inch TV I had in the early 80s as a home computer monitor, and to have that as a kid as my computer monitor during the moon landings would imply I was quite rich; but in 1982 or so that TV being used as a monitor would imply a bit of poverty, maybe, and in a nostalgic sense it gets blurred into "70s" and I must have been a rich kid, LOL.
This is already the case with computers. Nobody does anything new or exciting or more productive in nearly a decade. There are tail-fin like style changes. Someday a teen in 2030 will get a 2020 laptop that cost a huge pile of money in 2020, totally handles the workload in 2030, and some dude in 2070 will accuse the teen of having been rich because that laptop cost a boatload of money in 2020. Of course in 2030 with a scratched up screen and dead battery and deeply un-stylish exterior the kid only had to pay $50 inflation adjusted equivalent, so the kid was not necessarily rich.
Still, I think its a definite ethical difference - back then, kids developed the skills to survive in capitalistic society pretty early - paper routes, odd jobs, etc. These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it with non-work-required utopia...
I suspect a lot of kids are busy doing things that look better on a college application.
Anecdote time: I grew up in an area with a good mix of blue collar and white collar families. Reunion season is coming up so I reconnected with some old friends. There's actually strong INVERSE correlation between "had a typical summer job" and "success in the marketplace". Most of the doctors/lawyers/engineers/software people didn't work typical teenager summer jobs and are now doing very well, both financially and in life (families, houses, health, hobbies). A depressing percentage of the people who did work summer jobs are still working those same jobs.
The people who are doing the best had a summer activity, but not a typical teenage job (or even a job). E.g., freelance programming, prestigious math/science camps/competition prep, volunteering and hospitals and in research labs, etc. Years later, you see the dividends paying on an early investment in increasing the value of one's labor.
IMO the blend of protestant work ethic and capitalism on display in the parent comment can be a dangerous one to teach kids. That fantasy is not how the world works. No one gives a damn how hard you work; what they care about is what you get done for them. Otherwise we'd all be digging trenches with spoons.
These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with
capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed
commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it
with non-work-required utopia
As a capitalist myself here's a book I really recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Beginners-Rius/dp/0375714618
I suspect you will walk away from it thinking the same thing most people do: Marx's criticisms of capitalism are absolutely vital and relevant to this day... and his solutions are even worse, and that capitalism is still probably the least terrible solution we've got. :)
But more to the point: there is no definition of socialism or communism that even remotely advocates this a "non-work-required utopia." It's all about work and workers!
(Now, in practice, socialist/communist societies wound up stratifying anyway, and elites often didn't exactly have to spend their days in a coal mine or shoveling pig shit like the commonfolk. But that's been pretty much true of every economic system under the sun since the beginning of mankind. So, even a cursory glance at history tells us that this is not a problem unique to socialism or communism.)
What I do want to point out though, is that teens don't work like they used to. Some think thats a good thing; others do not. Alas, only the prosperity of future generations can really provide a valid indicator ..
Those adults are almost always wrong - although not necessarily in the obvious ways. A small minority of teens run successful YT/Instagram/WA/Etsy channels, and some of them make surprisingly good money from them.
Tape players were always a challenge. I never had enough money for good ones (reel to reel or cassette), so I just repurposed my base model Walkman. The Yamaha receiver/Walkman combo was the source of many mix tapes of stuff I liked on FM radio, usually classic rock and Dr. Demento.
One issue with 80s-era LPs was a lot of major labels started using the cheapest possible materials in the pressings and those horrible plastic bag sleeves instead of heavy paper. Indies were better when it came to quality, but when CDs started picking up steam I was happy to switch.
Lots of weird stuff could be found in people's trash. Once I got an old 50s or 60s era waveform monitor, another time I picked up a vintage typewriter from the 20s that after a little restoration kind of worked (but it was torture pounding those keys, frankly).
What are those round things that are slightly slanted downward at the top shelf? In the first picture there are three of them, in the third pic (late 1976) still three with the middle one having a blue frame and brown circular lines on the white circle, in the fourth pic (January 1977) only one remaining
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ham-radios-technical-culture
:(
He has some amazing content on there - go down his rabbit hole.
I bet he beamed with joy when Tom Sawyer played!
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/N3MAAOSwLApZ3LWg/s-l300.jpg
They still sell for about 500 euros for a used one. But it is not the same. Can anyone identify the amplifier?