Life Before Computer Audio: What Were Your Personal Golden Days As A Music Listener?

[Rexp]

A decent ghetto blaster playing cassettes will blow away any CD player, Used one as a source in front on Conrad Johnson amps amd PMC speakers for a bit while my turntable was being fixed.

[esimms86]

16 hours ago, Indydan said:

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, owning a ghetto blaster was the greatest thing! I could listen to tapes and the radio at home, as well as when walking around. Showing it off, while walking around with it on my shoulder at school was awesome! 

 

This is a picture of a similar one I had as my first. I later bought another one that was bigger. The bigger the better! 

 

 

 

Do the right thing Mookie!

[semente]

I must have been 7 or 8 when I got my first radio, cassette and record player, which I had to share my sister...it was one of these portable low-fi beauties:

 

 

It was very easy to operate and I remember taking the hamsters and the turtles for a spin.

[AnotherSpin]

My first piece of tube audio looked like this.

[rodrigaj]

When I was 13 years old, my uncle gave me a Webcore phonograph player. Tube based.

 

This guy restored one that looked just like the one I had - a funky aqua blue green:

 

 

[WAM]

A present from my parents ( a long time ago):

 

 

[gmgraves]

On 5/8/2018 at 10:25 PM, Rexp said:

An orchestra leader friend of mine did the same, ditched the records for an awful cd playing system, goes to show just because you can play doesnt mean you care about good playback.

Maestro Georg Cleve, who I knew very well, could have had 10.5-inch, 1/2-track, 15ips reel-to-reel masters of his concerts and rehearsals. The orchestra management would have gladly bought him a pro tape deck and a playback system to go along with it, and in fact offered to do so. But he turned them down. All he wanted was a cassette tape of his performances that he could take home and listen to on his cheap boom box. It's all he had, it was all he wanted or needed to hear what he wanted to hear. I had to run a cassette deck (with Dolby B turned OFF!) in parallel to my two pro machines. At the end of each performance, I would quickly hand him the C-120 cassette(s) as he walked off the stage at the end of each performance! One of the two R-to-R recordings went to the symphony management for their "archives" and the other went home with me.  Cleve simply wasn't interested in SQ of the recorded performance.

 

Many times Cleve would come to my house to listen to a performance recording on my system (at the time a pair of HK Citation 12s bi-amping a pair of Magnepan Tympani IIIC speakers, No preamp when the Maestro came to listen, just the Otari MX-5050 feeding the passive crossover and then the power amps directly!) because the cassette did not resolve some nuance he wanted to hear. I would take the opportunity to pitch a decent system to him, but he always said he didn't need nor want it. I always suspected that he pretended to not "get" technology because it was well known that Toscanini (his conducting hero) "couldn't" even operate a phonograph (also, I suspect, an affectation. I firmly believe that Toscanini's "couldn't" was really a "wouldn't"!).

[Rexp]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

Maestro Georg Cleve, who I knew very well, could have had 10.5-inch, 1/2-track, 15ips reel-to-reel masters of his concerts and rehearsals. The orchestra management would have gladly bought him a pro tape deck and a playback system to go along with it, and in fact offered to do so. But he turned them down. All he wanted was a cassette tape of his performances that he could take home and listen to on his cheap boom box. It's all he had, it was all he wanted or needed to hear what he wanted to hear. I had to run a cassette deck (with Dolby B turned OFF!) in parallel to my two pro machines. At the end of each performance, I would quickly hand him the C-120 cassette(s) as he walked off the stage at the end of each performance! One of the two R-to-R recordings went to the symphony management for their "archives" and the other went home with me.  Cleve simply wasn't interested in SQ of the recorded performance.

 

Many times Cleve would come to my house to listen to a performance recording on my system (at the time a pair of HK Citation 12s bi-amping a pair of Magnepan Tympani IIIC speakers, No preamp when the Maestro came to listen, just the Otari MX-5050 feeding the passive crossover and then the power amps directly!) because the cassette did not resolve some nuance he wanted to hear. I would take the opportunity to pitch a decent system to him, but he always said he didn't need nor want it. I always suspected that he pretended to not "get" technology because it was well known that Toscanini (his conducting hero) "couldn't" even operate a phonograph (also, I suspect, an affectation. I firmly believe that Toscanini's "couldn't" was really a "wouldn't"!).

Great story! I wonder whether the maestro would have settled for a CDR of his work.

[gmgraves]

21 hours ago, Rexp said:

Great story! I wonder whether the maestro would have settled for a CDR of his work.

Good question. I was recording the San Jose (CA) Symphony in the late 70's through the mid 80's. My last season was just before the widespread release of CD players and the recordable CD was still, several years away. I'm sure he would have. After all, CD players are even simpler to operate than cassette decks!  Glad you liked the story. 

[gmgraves]

On 5/10/2018 at 3:22 AM, Rexp said:

A decent ghetto blaster playing cassettes will blow away any CD player, Used one as a source in front on Conrad Johnson amps amd PMC speakers for a bit while my turntable was being fixed.

I dunno, Compact Cassettes, while convenient and while making it possible for anyone to record their favorite musical performances, were pretty limited in Fi. The best one that I ever had was an Aiwa ADF990. It was quite impressive: It had three motors, (the dual capstan motor was servo'd and the transport was logic-controlled) three separate heads (erase, record, playback), it sported Dolby B and Dolby C NR and Dolby HX-Pro that combined an active, variable bias mixed with the high frequency content of the recorded signal itself in a (largely successful) effort to eliminate self erasure of high frequencies at levels higher than -20 dB. It also featured a microprocessor based system that would automatically optimize the bias and EQ for any cassette you put into it to record. It made pretty spectacular recordings on FeCr or CrO2 tape (I'd say equivalent to a good R-to-R machine at 7.5 ips, 1/4 -track). When it finally broke, I gave it away rather than repaired it as I had gone to digital recording by that time. That was 20 years, or more, ago. I bought the machine in 1985 as I recall.  

[Ralf11]

I've heard about the Aiwa ADF990 - did you ever test it vs. a good Nak deck?

 

BTW, the cassettes that Advent put out themselves always sounded better than any copy I could make of a recording.  Advent must have made the specially somehow to compensate for their decks.

[gmgraves]

On 5/8/2018 at 5:43 PM, AudioDoctor said:

My Dad had a nice system right up until he bought his first CD player in ~1990.  He got rid of his turntable and records.  That Sony CD Changer sounded awful.

 

I did like listening with friends to new albums.  Or a high school sweetheart.  The fireplace and the record player with her favorite band playing were a good go to...

Interesting that you should mention that Sony CD changer. All the early Sony CD decks sounded awful, if you ask me. I had a friend who had a Sony CD101, the first CD Deck to go on sale here in the USA. I couldn't believe how incredibly dreadful that thing sounded! I thought a decent cassette deck playing a commercially recorded cassette sounded head and shoulders better. When I bought my first CD player I avoided the Sony like the plague and bought instead the original little Magnavox FD-1010 / Philips CD-101, 14-bit machine. It was a little jewel of a player. Gorgeously made, bare bones, no remote, but unlike the Sony, it actually sounded quite good. I think it's still quite handsome. Alas it's gone the way of the Dodo!

[gmgraves]

9 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

I've heard about the Aiwa ADF990 - did you ever test it vs. a good Nak deck?

 

BTW, the cassettes that Advent put out themselves always sounded better than any copy I could make of a recording.  Advent must have made the specially somehow to compensate for their decks.

I tested it as far as I could. When properly biased and with HX-pro engaged, it would do 14 KHz fairly flat (-2dB) on Sony FeCr tape. With HX-pro off, it was -5 dB at 8K (both readings at 0 Vu - which in professional terms is actually -10 dB). So it really made a cassette recording sit up and do tricks. Wow and flutter were inaudible (closed loop drive), overall distortion was low (as it would be in a deck that can optimize every blank tape inserted into it). Beyond those measurements and observations, my impression was that the Aiwa was at least as good (performance wise) as a Nakamichi. But I don't think it was as well made...

[Allan F]

On 5/10/2018 at 3:59 PM, gmgraves said:

Maestro Georg Cleve, who I knew very well, could have had 10.5-inch, 1/2-track, 15ips reel-to-reel masters of his concerts and rehearsals. The orchestra management would have gladly bought him a pro tape deck and a playback system to go along with it, and in fact offered to do so. But he turned them down. All he wanted was a cassette tape of his performances that he could take home and listen to on his cheap boom box. It's all he had, it was all he wanted or needed to hear what he wanted to hear.

 

The above is not unusual, George. Professional musicians often are not audiophiles. The explanation frequently offered is that many musicians are interested in and concentrate on details of the performance, rather than sound quality, when listening to a recording. Maestro Cleve likely fits within this group.

[Ralf11]

musicians often seem to have an ability to "hear past the gear"

[esimms86]

It gives one pause for thought when people start talking about hearing a recording played back “the way the artist intended.”

[mansr]

1 minute ago, esimms86 said:

It gives one pause for thought when people start talking about hearing a recording played back “the way the artist intended.”

Makes everything sound like a boom box?

[mansr]

22 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Interesting that you should mention that Sony CD changer. All the early Sony CD decks sounded awful, if you ask me. I had a friend who had a Sony CD101, the first CD Deck to go on sale here in the USA. I couldn't believe how incredibly dreadful that thing sounded!

I have one of those. There's definitely something dreadful happening with high frequencies. Unfortunately, it won't read CD-Rs properly, so I've been unable to measure just what it's doing. My attempts at modifications to improve the analogue front-end have so far been insufficient if not entirely useless.

 

22 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I thought a decent cassette deck playing a commercially recorded cassette sounded head and shoulders better. When I bought my first CD player I avoided the Sony like the plague and bought instead the original little Magnavox FD-1010 / Philips CD-101, 14-bit machine. It was a little jewel of a player. Gorgeously made, bare bones, no remote, but unlike the Sony, it actually sounded quite good. I think it's still quite handsome. Alas it's gone the way of the Dodo!

I also have a CD105 which is electrically similar to yours, just cheaper thanks to some new ICs for the optical tracking servos. The oversampling and DAC chips are the same. Not sure about the analogue output stage. Compared to the Sony, which is just bizarre in some ways, it seems a much better design. Reads CD-Rs without a glitch too.

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

The above is not unusual, George. Professional musicians often are not audiophiles. The explanation frequently offered is that many musicians are interested in and concentrate on details of the performance, rather than sound quality, when listening to a recording. Maestro Cleve likely fits within this group.

Certainly. We've discussed this before on other threads. But you are very correct. I've known musicians who say that they can hear what they want to hear of an AM table radio!

[gmgraves]

44 minutes ago, mansr said:

I have one of those. There's definitely something dreadful happening with high frequencies. Unfortunately, it won't read CD-Rs properly, so I've been unable to measure just what it's doing. My attempts at modifications to improve the analogue front-end have so far been insufficient if not entirely useless.

 

I don't doubt it. I also cannot figure out what could make the top-end of an audio component sound that strange or that dreadful. I've seen speculation that it was the brick-wall filter, but I dunno....

 

46 minutes ago, mansr said:

I also have a CD105 which is electrically similar to yours, just cheaper thanks to some new ICs for the optical tracking servos. The oversampling and DAC chips are the same. Not sure about the analogue output stage. Compared to the Sony, which is just bizarre in some ways, it seems a much better design. Reads CD-Rs without a glitch too.

I never tried my Magnavox/Phillips unit with CD-Rs, by the time they were available I had moved on to a Pioneer Elite CD deck (the one with the CD "turntable" where you put the CD in the drawer upside down) It sported XLR balanced outputs but still didn't sound very good (just better than any Sony up to that date). I plugged the data output into an early Theta DAC (only did 44/48 KHz) and the combo was excellent. I used that until SACD came out and Sony sent me an SCD-XA777ES to use to help them launch the format by reviewing the discs (multiple disc packages of which I received in the mail about every other day, it seems. This explains my huge SACD library!) which I did for about three years. During that time it became clear to me that this particular Sony was not only an SACD player but it was also the best sounding Red Book CD player that I had heard to date as well. At that point I sold the Pioneer (wish now, I'd kept it) and the Theta (it was bettered by an Assemblage DAC 3.0 from Sonic Frontiers in Canada. This DAC which is R2R, still sounds very decent!). I still think that the Sony SCD-XA777ES is one of the best sounding stand-alone CD players I've heard. Of course, it ought to be. I believe it retailed for better than $4000 when it debuted around 2001! 

[mansr]

9 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

I don't doubt it. I also cannot figure out what could make the top-end of an audio component sound that strange or that dreadful. I've seen speculation that it was the brick-wall filter, but I dunno....

It's distortion, and lots of it, that much I can tell. Eventually I'll get to the bottom of it, if I have to inject EFM data bypassing the optical front-end. The fun thing about the CDP-101 is that it uses discrete components and trivial ICs extensively, so tinkering is easy.

 

14 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

I never tried my Magnavox/Phillips unit with CD-Rs, by the time they were available I had moved on to a Pioneer Elite CD deck (the one with the CD "turntable" where you put the CD in the drawer upside down)

Was that by any chance an Aiwa mechanism? I have a B&O CD50 with that "feature." Working on getting it operational. As all things B&O, it has a sleek exterior and dreadful interior.

 

(I've been buying old, broken CD players cheaply on Ebay to amuse myself, if anyone's wondering.)

[Superdad]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

(I've been buying old, broken CD players cheaply on Ebay to amuse myself, if anyone's wondering.)

 

Wow, you are easily amused.  Are you a cheap date too?  

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

It's distortion, and lots of it, that much I can tell. Eventually I'll get to the bottom of it, if I have to inject EFM data bypassing the optical front-end. The fun thing about the CDP-101 is that it uses discrete components and trivial ICs extensively, so tinkering is easy.

Yeah, I know it's distortion. What I could never figure out was: 1) what was causing it, and 2) how could Sony (or indeed any company making audio equipment) have released something that sounded that bad? 

2 hours ago, mansr said:

 

Was that by any chance an Aiwa mechanism? I have a B&O CD50 with that "feature." Working on getting it operational. As all things B&O, it has a sleek exterior and dreadful interior.

 

(I've been buying old, broken CD players cheaply on Ebay to amuse myself, if anyone's wondering.)

No, the Pioneer mechanism was not an Aiwa. I took the thing apart at one point and various pieces of the transport said "Pioneer" on them. So, I suspect that it was made in house. The "platter" was machined just like a direct-drive phono deck's 'table. 

[gmgraves]

16 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

Wow, you are easily amused.  Are you a cheap date too?  

Don't know about Mansr, but I'm a cheap date! Don't bother asking though, I won't "come across"! I'm not that kind of a boy.

[look&listen]

3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Pioneer Elite CD deck (the one with the CD "turntable" where you put the CD in the drawer upside down) It sported XLR balanced outputs but still didn't sound very good (just better than any Sony up to that date). I plugged the data output into an early Theta DAC (only did 44/48 KHz) and the combo was excellent.

Had Theta 'Miles' CD player same Pioneer turntable inside. Very good player for CD, but never heard great CD player, if any.