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Separate Tuner, Cassette Deck, Amplifier, CD player, Equalizer, and Turntable?
I am old enough and if that system were in good shape I would set it up in my living room right now. Would probably leave the cassette deck and CD player in storage though.
Definitely going for this setup next month when I move ..just going Vinyl and speakers was too little. (I know it's sacrilegious to say this but Bluetooth speakers for the record player also let me connect my phone and gives me the other sources... Is it high Fidelity it's fine... I'm an audio engineer I can say that.)
Yes, I am that old. Yes, I miss physical buttons to play and rewind, along with a decent wheel to adjust volume without fixed steps.
I also miss when placing the speakers separate of each other was the normal and expected behavior. The idea of Stereo.
But above all, I miss dynamic range. And that's not because of the gear, but of the recordings.
Which speakers?
The scary part is people are conditioned to like 0 dynamic range now. Dynamics scare them.
Thank goodness we have old recordings where the sound actually mattered and engineers took it seriously!
Honestly, aging capacitors and cracked motor drive belts aside, a complete hi-fi is a thing of beauty. And it's supposed to be, hence the showy front and glass case to keep the dust off.
I'm no audiophile, but with refurbished power supplies, updated noise reduction* & EQ, and modern speaker technology, that setup would be an old media blasting beast.
* - for the uninitiated, or if you're old enough to smell OP's photo, the way tape-hiss intrudes on music is just hot garbage by today's standards. So, having a way to mitigate it would be strongly advised.
Yes, but how does Huey Lewis sound on it?
LOL.
On CD? Almost as good as a new drug.
I've got news for you
So, having a way to mitigate it would be strongly advised.
oldReliable.jpg : Aux cord connected to digital music
Honestly, has there been any progress of high end speakers? On the low end sure, high end not so sure.
Progress has been steady as far as I can tell. We have a much better understanding of the physics now and much better material engineering.
The problem is that anything "high end" in the audio space is either for professional use, or for audiophiles, aka, expensive as all heck.
You'll probably need another mortgage to get a setup like this working in modern days with all the up to date bells and whistles.
Don't get me wrong, if you spend the cash, it will sound amazing. There's some question as to what actually helps with sound quality and what is audiophile snake oil, but even with the snake oil, it sounds great; it just costs more than it would without the snake oil, and separating the snake oil from the stuff that actually improves the sound is a nightmare.
My parents had a JVC setup. Dual cassette deck with the click buttons like a VCR, a separate tuner, turntable and a CD player. The JVC amp had a digital EQ with buttons for each bands and the meters were florescent with waterfall displays for each band. The speakers were 12 inch with 12 Inc passive radiators and we're as tall as me when I was a kid. It was black brushed aluminum.
That one appears to have a CD player, which most certainly wasn't included in the one I grew up with.
I grew up with vacuum tube TV, (we got one channel, maybe a second if the weather was right), and reel to reel tape players.
I still remember the TV not working and my Father pulling it away from the wall and removing the back to look for the burnt out tube. Then since this generally happened on a Friday evening, (no Saturday cartoons), we had to wait until Monday to drive into town and go to the drug store to test and search for a replacement tube.
When I got to be a teen, I remember listening to the local am rock radio station and waiting for hours for the latest hit to come on so we could record it on a portable cassette recorder. Both my sisters spent many evenings doing that. We were sailing the high seas of piracy before it even existed.
Ahhh, those were the days. I'm so glad we don't need to do that shit anymore.
I have some bad news for you, your Dad didn't want you watching those cartoons...
Fun fact, recording stuff from the radio is not piracy. There's actually an exemption for broadcast recordings specifically.
Also, I have similar memories.
I too am old.
I grew up on crt as well, but that's because my parent's kept working until like 2015 when they swapped it for a 4k lcd with dimming zones
I am that old, we just were never that rich.
My dad did splurge on a CD player that came in a self-contained one-off unit that also had a dual deck tape player pretty early on in 1989. He bought it off a encyclopaedia seller and it came with a huge collection of classical music CDs and a bunch of books. Pretty decent purchase, in the end, given the financing. None of my friends had an easy way to copy CDs to tape for years after that, so even that was ahead of the curve.
I dumped the CDs from that collection that haven't died to disc rot last year, too.
My dad had a set-up like this because my mom and him used to be DJs. I was forbidden to touch it but, in the 90s, when we had cassette players and CD players as part of a separate cabinet, those were hard to mess up.
So, as a compromise, my dad showed me how to power up all of the amps and receivers to get the cassette or CD player working. At the time we had a massive subwoofer next to our CRT TV and, when the subwoofer magnet messed with the TV coloring, my dad blamed it on our Sega Genesis instead of the sub.
Good times.
You call that old? It's got one of those fancy, new-fangled CD players! Not old at all.
Holy shit, that exact Sony EQ is right beside me! It's an SEH-310, made in Japan, 1981. I'm old enough to remember racks like that, was far too poor for stack of Sony gear. My shit has always been a random mess of cobbled together gear.
This was common. I didn't know anyone who actually went out and bought everything all the same brand right out of the gate.
There was always that one family in the neighborhood.
That was my dad, sorry. He was 100% the crabass who had the system and never let anybody touch it, and, worst of all, barely ever used it himself. It was just as fun being his daughter as it sounds. Plbbbt!
I'm slightly younger so all of that would have been black plastic instead of brushed steel.
Still use my stereo system, obviously upgraded from that cheap plastic rca junk but still. I've never not had a stereo system. Funny how it was the norm, now its rare for any human to have ever heard music not on shitty earbuds. Makes me sad. And explains why popular music sounds horrible. No one's ever listened to it on an actual home system.
*im talking about the population spoon fed corpo pop that most people (usually young) listen to. There is amazing music being made today but it actually takes effort to find now.
My best friend had this (1980s) and he also had something I've never seen before or since: an 8-track recorder. We would make mix tapes on the thing and take them to parties - where we were extremely, extremely unpopular because our 8-track mix tapes had shit like Laurie Anderson and Ultravox and Jon and Vangelis songs on them. Also the tapes played back at 125% speed so everybody sounded a bit like the Chipmunks.
Personally, I find the current vinyl craze kind of amusing. I spent the first ten years of my listening life with LPs and the moment I got my first CD player that was the end of that shit forever. The clicks and pops and the physical PITA of taking records out of their sleeves and setting the stylus down somewhere to hear a particular song and then cleaning the record and putting it back was just so incredibly annoying. The only good thing about LPs was (is) the cover art; as a huge Yes fan growing up I should perhaps appreciate that more, but it wasn't enough to offset the negatives.
I'm with you on the vinyl. I was glad to get rid of it, and the pops and clicks, the need to clean every record before playing, etc
Years later, I came to realize that the whole ritual of removing the LP from its various sleeves, carefully handling it by the edges, checking for warps, blowing off the loose dust, carefully setting it on the platter, carefully cleaning it with a Discwasher or some other system, them finally carefully setting the needle down, only to do it all again in 20 minutes when you flip the record, and then reversing the entire process to put it away, became a ritual that gave the playing of a record a feeling of importance, as if it were an important cultural experience. By doing that often, it became exactly that, and a person's record collection became an important indicator of their personality. Music felt important, an integral part of a person's being, all because we treated it almost like a religious ritual.
Today, music seems so disposable.
Thats exactly it.
Plus a lot of music now is INSANELY crushed to the point the only listenable version IS the record because they physically can't squash the life out of it.
Check out no more tears cd vs the record. Mind blowingly improved on the record. Same with rush vapor trails (sadly the worst victim of the loudness wars).
Not to mention that the advent of touchscreens on literally everything makes accessibility a lot harder for a lot of people.
Look at Mr. fancy-pants having an EQ in his rack.
It was a black Technics tower in my family home. I loved to play around with the huge graphic EQ without having a clue. I've also experienced the jack slap a few times (much later though with my own gear) but thankfully never right into an eye but always close to the eyes.
99% of people that owned a graphic eq didn’t have a fucking clue what to do with it
Yeah, we both might be a similar age.
Why do you need to hit me like this... Right now i'm fixing my dad's old telefunken hifi. I'm a lot younger than that generation. But my first taste of music was on that motherfucker with old cassettes and radio...
Fuck how am i nostalgic of a time i only saw the aftermath of?
Don't worry. I feel about 40 years older than I am because I didn't follow trends, preferred old tech, and am a cheap ass. I can talk to a 70 year old like I was their buddy in high school hahah
We never really had one; didn’t have that kind of money I’d guess nor do I think my parents really would have had the interest even if it was in the budget
Amplifier at the bottom, when it's the only thing that generates significant heat? Plainly not an audiophile set-up. Should be on top, and the turntable should be off to one side on one of those vibration isolation decks. Kids these days, eh?
