Stereo Gear in the 1970s
audioholics.com
audioholics.com
Yes, pretty knobs matter. The right heft and feel is part of a quality user experience. I bought a bottom-of-the-range new Sony AVR in like 2010, and the experience sucked because too many options were buried behind a complex OSD and menu, while on the equivalent 40-year-old model was a single direct-access button.
You can crush a Harman/Kardon 730 to its component atoms, and there's an enthusiastic community that will help you restore it to operability. Virtually all the parts are available on Mouser or Digi-Key, and many can be replaced with better ones (tighter tolerances, smaller physical sizes) for peanuts. I doubt that new Sony AVR will ever be close to as fixable, let alone 40 years from now.
It's entirely possible that the right new kit will sound better, but I suspect as much as anything I'm room and layout limited more than gear limited. No point getting to -200dB signal to noise when there's a constant AC and CPU fan whine in the backdrop.
But the problem is none of this stuff is engineered to last in the same way. Many of the products are taking a base board design from an upstream vendor and only doing the minimal amount of work to give it a unique looking physical and OSD skin. They cheap out on the components they use as much as possible, even the mid tier brands considered to have high build quality. You're lucky if you get a decade out of one now, though admitted part of what's driving that is the assumption that features and interconnect standards are going to keep advancing fast enough that designing for a longer lifespan is pointless.
But it does feel a bit aggravating to throw something out every 10 years or so when you know it's probably just a couple caps or the like that have gone toast, but it's just not feasible to repair these DIY.
When I was a kid I got a hand me down Zenith stereo set from my grandmother. I'm sure the materials in the speaker drivers had degraded somewhat, but it still worked as perfectly as the day it was sold decades earlier. Not sure what my folks did with it, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if I found it in the attic, plugged it in, and it was still just fine.
And I don't think it's the luck; people get a bit nostalgic for the reality that never existed. Most of the iconic 1970/80s systems now touted as an example of build quality were top shelf equipment, no costs spared in their day. Yes they are repairable, but it was more a function of low integration technology of their time than any deliberate philosophy of their designers.
I'd dispute that - they came with schematics and proper, useful, troubleshooting. I used to have a bit of a collection of partially working Phillips SA-4xx series stereo amps, I wanted a 7.1 surround system using them for no good reason, (2000s I suppose, got as far as flakey 3.1 iirc) and they all had such diagrams, where ~nothing modern does. They were all before my time, fwiw.
It’s often a power supply that’s failed and those are quite easy to test and DIY replace if it’s the caps that have failed. I know a lot of people don’t even consider doing it, but for those few who are inclined to ask the question “could I fix this?” the answer is often “yes”.
A lot of what's on the market seems to have ambitious or vague specs. It makes me suspicious when I see those Lepai-style amplifiers that are the size of a CD-ROM drive and claim "30 watts per channel... at 10% distortion." Would it even be able to meet those numbers under the test conditions, used for rating amplifiers in the '70s? I suspect they get much tighter numbers at less ambitious wattages, and honestly, most real world listening isn't going to break 1 watt, but it feels like they're not really starting from a place of credibility.
From there, even a competent design seems to usually be sold as half a unit-- typically paired with a laptop-style PSU. I'm sure there's a huge range of quality and suitability of pairing, and it's another ugly cable management game to play. It's not going to fit neatly anywhere designed for traditional-sized components.
There are probably some decent all-inclusive units once you move past the $50 AliExpress market, but then you're looking at more complex products and more elaborate competition: the fact it's Class D architecture is one bullet point among things like the number of inputs and outputs, video handling capability, and user experience.
I know what you're referring to; I bought one of those years ago and it sounds terrible at any volume, no matter the power supply, the input or what pair of speakers I connect it to. I believe it's a defective unit since the high distortion is audible at any volume. However, I tried some of those small modules sold on Ebay and other (more costly) class D speakers or amps for instruments, and they're generally really good. The modules in particular cost peanuts for what they offer quality wise. But yeah, the chance to save on BOM costs is too appealing, so there are manufacturers going further then making class D amps with junk power supplies or no filtering at the output to save pennies.
And you can't have been talking about tuning controls because that's radio, and why would anyone listen to radio on high quality audio systems today?
So maybe just a big fat volume knob, milled from virgin aluminum, and used a heat sink for the non-existening heat production from the non-existent amplifier (it's all in the speakers). Yeah, I can go for that.
Edit: PS, I also deeply love Ardour and routinely learn a lot from you here and elsewhere. Thanks.
I do, it was useful when I had flakey internet and the habit stuck. Analogue FM sounds a lot better than the “compressed to buggery and probably in mono” tone of DAB as well in my opinion. There’s also the aesthetic factor, I’m a huge fan of glowing dials and physical analogue controls.
Funny enough, the art of setting up a good stereo system (using said knobs) seems to have been lost.
Probably because few can afford more than a closet these days (and good headphones are cheap).
I know that sounds like overstatement and wishful memories of the good 'ol days, but it's not--that thing really was beautiful.
However, the golden age of audio is right now and tomorrow will be platinum. Everything else is nostalgia.
People today just get to re-create things digitally using the things from the previous times as a basis. The folks making the originals had no basis, and just made shit up as they went.
"throw it at the signal and see what it sounds like" but he did get some unique and cool effects.
I miss that beautiful sound.
As are the loss of tactile buttons and illuminated displays, analogue and digital monitors.
It feels like the same trend in software, where more of the inner workings are concealed and the user is at yet more loss for what happens underneath.
Rock on FM was local, and very experimental in those days. Then, in the 1980s, consolidation started happening, and the 1996 removal of all ownership limits turned radio in general (both AM and FM) into the cesspool it is today. There are precious few rock stations from those days that have managed to stay around, not get borged into the cesspool, and keep their format without going stale. In my neck of the woods, WXRT 93.1 in Chicago is the best example.
I'm a fan of the quad stuff from that era, ESL57s and Quad IIs as well as Tannoy speakers. I imagine you're more US centric in your appreciation, but it was a wonderful period of innovation in music reproduction when individuals with a vision could shape how music was appreciated.
I surprised myself how much I liked quad valve gear. I still have a quad22 but it's in pieces suffering the effects of the tropics on wax potting of discrete components. A later generation quad 405 driving electrostatics was just amazing.
The difference today is the source is streaming audio from my computer.
Am noob, just want to reuse my gear, avoid the Siri & Alexa & Google "smart" stuff.
I replaced it with a Grace Digital IRTP800. Used that for many years, until GD bricked it a few months ago by shutting down their web site.
So I replace that with a Galaxy Audio RM-IRD. Unfortunately, and I'm pretty mad about it, it has some small number of songs it can "shuffle play". I have more songs than that, so it will only play them starting from the beginning, meaning I only ever hear the first 100 songs or so. GA support does not respond to my queries.
So now I'm just using Windows Media Player with my computer's 5 cent DAC until I can find another streaming box. I have a Roku box which does streaming, but apparently none of the engineers at Roku use that feature because while it technically works, it is useless because all the files must be in one folder. Who organizes their music like that?
I'm actually baffled why today, 2021, I cannot find a decent streaming audio player.
He is a carpenter and build the living room furniture (which my parents still have) around this contraption. When I was a child, it was the holy center of the living room, and we were not allowed to touch it. It is still working. In the 90ies, the family CD player was hooked to it, later various DVD players.
It was all garbage after a few years. Funny enough, the 70's Marantz stuff my mom has all still works. Nothing like hearing the speakers 'pop' when it turns on, the bluish glow of the receiver, turning those knobs, and watching the meters jump around to the music.
As a kid, I had dozens and dozens of cassettes and later CDs that I carelessly threw around my room, they were cheap and it was nothing special. My father, on the other hand, valued the vinyl collection he built up as a teenager in the early 70ies higher than anything else of material value in our house. His generation had a completely different relationship to music than the following ones.
Still more of a fan of the hi-fi era that preceded the 70's when tube amps were king, reel-to-reel was spinning....
Solid-state begat a "watt wars" where amplifiers/receivers could boast numbers far in excess of what a typical tube amp could (the voltages would have to be crazy high, the transformers too heavy).
Then speaker efficiency fell (who needs efficient speakers with 80 Watt solid-state amps?). Woofer, mid-range, tweeter and the accompanying crossovers made for, arguably, crappy sound where all the "sound stage" was blown with out-of-phase audio signals washing over the listener.
Music that still sounds fine on CD and on Apple Music, and which used to sound fine on the radio, seems to sound muddy and distorted on current FM stations.
Most music today is digitally compressed when it really doesn't need to be, as most storage media can hold hours and hours (weeks even!) of high-quality music.
Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-loss storage instead? SMH.
* A friend and I spent an evening listening to direct-cut disks and then put on a normal pressed LP. We thought there was something the matter with the stylus, the pressed disk sounded so muddy.
It kicks ass!
If you compare 128 kbps MP3 files to a CD the difference is night and day. 320 kbps MP3 is transparent, 192 kbps is not bad for most recordings. As I am writing this I am working on a python script that recompresses FLAC files from my music server to put on a USB stick for the car or for my Garmin watch. Right now the target is 192 kbps AAC for the car and the high end of the spectral band replication range (maybe 64-96 kbps) for the watch.
The old speakers I've heard are not remotely flat. But they do sound big, and fun, and maybe you can just EQ out the speakers with a modern receiver's room correction.
The sound beautiful, at least to my old and abused ears, for both music and movies. (I use them as stern + a su=ingle sub for music, and as part of a 5.1 system with a centre speaker and rears for movies).
They aren't quite 70's old. But they were a long way from new when I got em off eBay a decade or more back.
I also still have the first speakers and amps I ever bought, back in 1988. Boston Acoustics A60MkIIs and a NAD 1100/2200 opre/power amp pair. This speakers have has 3 or 4 new drivers (all due to party abuse) and the caps in the crossovers replaced every decade or so, and the amps have had all the electrolytics replaced a couple for times. They still provide great sound in my dining room.
(And I've become a bit af a NAD/Boston Acoustics brand-tragic. I end up drunk eBaying both brands every now and then, I have a pair of A40 speakers on my desk here, The lounge room home theatre amp is a NAD 70W per channel amp. And I've got most of a setup of a pair of A40s, a NAD 3020, and an Apple Airport Express together as a birthday present for a friend in a few weeks...)
I met a guy who had a pair about 10 years later. I offered him double what he had paid for them new. He wouldn't let them go, either.
Combined with this software: https://www.roomeqwizard.com
This one really boggles the mind indeed and I have a theory. But first basically: to me it's the same as saying, if you could have the real DaVinci's Gioconda painting at your home, "Look, I've got this 300 dpi color print of the Gioconda and I don't care, because from 10 meters away you cannot tell the difference". This, in itself, when you can save tens of thousands of songs in FLAC (CD quality) on a 1 TB is just seriously WTF.
But I think the reason people are still using mp3s when they could be using FLAC files is because there's an entire industry, operating at a loss, streaming non-CD quality. And they have to brainwash everybody into thinking lossy audio still makes sense in 2021.
Storage, however, is only going to get cheaper and cheaper. The mental gymnastics going to be needed in the upcoming years to keep arguing for mp3s over FLAC is going to be plain mindboggling.
I don't care if I can't consciously hear the difference. I still want the correct file/sound. I can put 60 000 songs at CD quality on a 1 TB stick / SSD. Soon we'll be able to put 600 000 songs at CD quality on memory sticks / SSDs. And you can bet you'll still have people nostalgic of Winamp and Napster explaining how mp3 makes perfect sense.
FLAC are also a bitperfect archival format btw, mp3 ain't.
I rip all my CDs (and I still collect CDs) to FLAC file.
The only time I convert to mp3 is because my car's media system reads mp3 but not FLAC: and when I need to convert I'm happy that I don't have a lossy format to start with.
These days I buy a lot of cds and vinyl from bands at merch desks or off bandcamp, but I can't remember the last time I ripped any of those, most of what I listen to is Apple Music streaming (a lot of which is lossless these days) or Spotify Premium. I have a few TB worth of media server space with a huge music collection on it, but I didn't even notice it was offline for a week or more recently, because it's way easier for me to stream off my phone, laptop, or AppleTV - and if I'm in the mood to listen to stuff that's not on streaming, I'm almost certainly in the mood to pull the vinyl out and give it a spin...
I was travelling and didn't have the album on me, but I wanted to show it to a friend. I downloaded a 256 or 384kbps version, and much to my surprise, I didn't like the way it sounded at a higher bit rate at all! The added clarity made some instruments stand out a bit more than others, and I found it distracting and too lively.
The delta in quality between 384kbps and FLAC (to my concern-worn ears) is narrow enough that I can't really tell a major difference.
When MP3s were "hot", storage wasn't available in the sizes now, nor was bandwidth available to make uncompressed practical. FLAC style compression wasn't really a thing then either.
MP3 was able to hit critical mass, and people have been unwilling to let it go. We see that in so many other areas as well like FB, shopping at Amazon, etc. People are aware there are less bad things, but it's just too engrained.
I appreciate good audio quality but if music itself is good I would listen to it even at low quality MP3. The quality of some really old stuff is low anyways.
Today, most users are listening to AAC or Ogg Vorbis, not MP3. At typical compression rates, the distinction between lossy compression and lossless is completely anaudible. There have been many many blind studies of this, including some you can take yourself online right now.
Fire up your nice headphone amp, plug in your electrostatic headphones and take a blind test yourself. You'll find that there's no audible benefit to lossless compression. It's just a waste of network bandwidth and disk space.
Rip a shitty 80s mastered CD, rip to wav, flac, etc.
Get a remastered version of the same album (watch out for loudness war, avoid 2000s), and rip 192+ mp3 or 128+ opus, high quality settings.
Compare. I’ve found the new master lossy sounds better than my old flacs, due to the better source.
Still, space is so cheap I’m mostly getting 16-44 or 48k flacs for new stuff these days, the cost of space is under ten dollars and can reencode forever.
I think the coincidence (in time, not necessarily causal direction) of master quality issues and growth in lossy codecs is probably one reason people get confused by this. People are hearing crappy recordings, listening to it on mp3s, and drawing conclusions.
I think measuring this stuff is tricky because there's so many variables involved, from the master, to the compression (or lack thereof), to the amps, speakers, quantifying perception, etc. I agree with you completely but suspect there's a bit more to it.
However I see geeks debating file formats ad nauseum, and I did too for many years as well when storage was expensive. But when aiming for best quality, master quality becomes the primary factor.
* When the compression is done well. Shit compression makes itself known fast. If that shit compression possibly sounds okayish on 2000s style computer speakers, connecting the output to real speakers makes it even more obvious.
Not all compression is equal even if they do use the same codec.
The original point: lossless compression is not worth it, lossy is OK.
The counter-claim: only when the lossy compression is done well.
This is not about audio compression.
There is:
* dynamic range compression, referred to above as "audio compression" (confusingly)
* psycho-acoustic aka "lossy" data compression
* lossless data compression
Because when you're in a recording/editing session it is referred to as compression. As is in, "we need to use some some audio compression for that last bit". Anyone within earshot would not think someone is suggesting throwing that last bit throw an MP3 encoder.
My ears are almost fifty years old and were never that great to begin with.
I can't hear the difference. While I love music, I've never had good hearing. Further worsened by live music and clubbing (without protection). Aging too, of course.
Just from a practical matter, I prefer lossless encoding. Some of the MP3 files I encoded have glitches. It simplifies deduping my library (just pick the best quality instance).
https://www.ebay.com/itm/174964794345
When I got to high school we got a separate component system and a certain player. Oddly the tuner my brothers and I bought (Sony) powered a tv which was just a monitor.
By contrast, any fool with a couple hundred bucks (in 2021 dollars, even) can wander into Best Buy and have pretty darn great sound in his/her living room.
The article talks about the "receiver becomes king". How about streaming services or the mp3 player/iPod.
I'd say the biggest golden age was when anyone could play any song, from almost any artist anytime, anywhere. In the 90's when I grew up if I wanted to listed to a particular song, I'd have to walk down to my local store and buy the single or the album, walk back home and play it on our CD receiver.
Nowadays the day the song is released I can listen to that song immediately and better yet, I can share with my friends and have them listen to it immediately.
See: Betteridge's law of headlines.
Anyone who thinks the 1970s is the golden age of audio isn't paying attention.
[ EDIT: also, huge shout out to Bandcamp, where I can sit at home in the comfort of whatever listening system I want (typically for me a set of Genelec studio monitors), peruse vast quantities of music for free (typically listening to whole albums several times before I buy), and then finally choosing anything from MP3 to FLAC as the download format. I mean, my 70s self would not have believed this if I had described it to them. ]
(And it's all portable.)
Enough that I am tempted to build my own with a raspberry pi running the Exaile media player.
I think that digital recording and distribution has been a game changer for the kind of music that I listen to, often obscure, indy musicians. YouTube is a blast.
About a decade ago, I sold my ReVox B77 open reel tape recorder and bought a pocket sized digital recorder.
The gear for live music has improved. I'm a jazz bassist, and a quality amplifier plus speaker now weighs 12 pounds.
We take it for granted but when I think about it I'm amazed that I can on a whim decide I want to listen to Beethoven and 10s later I'm listening to world-class musicians playing any piece I want.
24 bit FLAC sent bit-for-bit perfect to my Burr-Brown converters and then to my Genelecs? This is better quality than anyone in the 1970s could have imagined [ EDIT: including the engineers in the studios where the music was recorded. ]
Convenience for shopping? Well, perhaps. But it's about more than convenience. I discover more music, by more artists, than Tower or HMV could ever have introduced me too.