Does Anyone Miss When Audio Was More Conservative?

[oatp1b1]

17 hours ago, Digi&Analog Fan said:

  Speakers for instance. Back in the late 1970's you could buy a really nice sounding set of bookshelf speakers for around $100 a pair/../Nowadays a larger speaker with near full range bass is a hell of a lot more than an extra $100.

Yes, but if you take inflation into account you can definitely get "larger" speakers for an additional 100 1970 dollars today. The $100 price increase is equivalent to a $700 increase in 2020 currency, and a lot of serious brands that offer a $700 bookshelf speaker most likely has a $1400 tower speaker.

[Digi&Analog Fan]

Your figures are a little wrong. $1 in 1979 is worth exactly $3.53 today not 7 times. Inflation was only bad during the Carter administration since then. For $600 today you get midrange and treble, and if you want bass flat to 30 hertz you need to see your accountant.

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 minutes ago, Digi&Analog Fan said:

if you want bass flat to 30 hertz you need to see your accountant.

I wasn’t alive way back in the day, but could you really get bass flat to 30 Hz for a hundred bucks?

[The Computer Audiophile]

5 minutes ago, Digi&Analog Fan said:

Your figures are a little wrong. $1 in 1979 is worth exactly $3.53 today not 7 times. Inflation was only bad during the Carter administration since then. For $600 today you get midrange and treble, and if you want bass flat to 30 hertz you need to see your accountant.

You could get a reasonably priced pair of Elac speakers and a sub today. 

[Digi&Analog Fan]

The lesser priced Elacs sound boxy and it would have to be one cheap sub.

[Digi&Analog Fan]

You could for $200, get 30 hz bass. I had a pair of TSI speakers that could that. So could AR 5 for $250 list.

[NOMBEDES]

I blame the Russians.   Any audio company can pay for a years worth of rent if they just sell one or two uber speaker, amp, what have you to some tone deaf Russian Kleptocrat who only wants to brag about his audio equipment, which he only uses once or twice a year.

 

So there.

[fas42]

11 hours ago, Digi&Analog Fan said:

A patron at an audio show reportedly remarked, "Isn't $80,000 a bit expensive for a turntable? The salesman said, "maybe so,  but $80,000 is cheap for a time machine." Recreating a musical event from long ago or trying to can get expensive.

 

There are two forms of expensive ... you mention one, but the time machine also occurs when the expense is time and effort by the participant in evolving a nominally ordinary recording playback machine to a sufficiently refined level, 🙂.

[fas42]

10 hours ago, John Dyson said:

That impersonation or  replication of reality is a laudible goal, but VERY FEW systems that I have heard could really replicate the real, intimate sound of Blues in a bar, or like Bluegrass like my family played.  I think the best that we typically can get is 'plausible.'.

 

I took an excellent double CD of that very thing, a local R&B band powering, live, in a club - top notch recording, technically - to the last hifi show in Sydney - not a single rig I tried it on got close to extracting what was on that recording ... bare hints only.

 

Which says audio is in effect still very conservative - playing well under the mark of what's possible.

[sphinxsix]

 

On 5/22/2020 at 9:06 PM, Digi&Analog Fan said:

in 1981 an audio hobbyist could afford the best preamp on the planet; said to be the David Burning TF10 for a mere $900. Or the cleanest solid state preamp on the market, according to TAS at the time, the PS  Audio IVa at $625 retail.

 

I started my adventure in audio in the early 90's so I don't remember these prices, I remember JMLab and Wilson speakers costing $60k, but I'd love to be able to buy Magico Q7 for even a little more than $1k! 

 

On 5/22/2020 at 9:06 PM, Digi&Analog Fan said:

  How do you feel about this? If you are old enough to remember, do you miss the days when audio was much more conservative and more of a hobbyists venture than a game where only the wealthier among us can afford to fully get into without compromise?   

 

There is one thing you don't touch upon - the fact that the SQ of today's gear and of the one from the 80's or 90's can't really be compared. A year ago I bought active Adam Audio T5V for 350 euro. I use them as desktop speakers. The moment I connected them to my laptop and gave them the first listen at home I started thinking how much a customer would have had to pay for the sound like that in the late 90's or early 00's in the audio shop I ran back then. Much more, believe me..  Same with hi end gear. We witness the constant progress in audio (I'm thinking here of a good gear, cause obviously there has been and will always be lots of worthless s..t on the market too).

 

In short - I wouldn't like to be able to afford the best amp on the market if it sounded worse than the one I use now 

BTW IMO there has always been and I'm sure there will always be gear with absolutely fantastic value for money ratio in every price range and this is the only gear worth spending our money on, it's only the question of finding it, the remaining stuff, for me may not exist 

[vortecjr]

On 5/22/2020 at 3:06 PM, Digi&Analog Fan said:

But the plethora of amps, speakers, turntables, even cables...   

Do people still talk about those:) The so called influencers here only want to pitch massive improvements from mother boards, routers, and switches. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, vortecjr said:

Do people still talk about those:) The so called influencers here only want to pitch massive improvements from mother boards, routers, and switches. 

Nobody has pitched anything. 

[Rexp]

13 hours ago, NOMBEDES said:

I blame the Russians.   Any audio company can pay for a years worth of rent if they just sell one or two uber speaker, amp, what have you to some tone deaf Russian Kleptocrat who only wants to brag about his audio equipment, which he only uses once or twice a year.

 

So there.

Or drug cartels/money launderers, I mean the empty hi-end store near you has to be doing something.. 

[Digi&Analog Fan]

Another thing besides loads and loads of people really wondering about high end audio with all those you need to skip vacations and take a loan prices. Over the years I have been in dozens and dozens of audio parlors all over the place. Very few times at all was I anywhere near sufficiently impressed or anywhere near tempted to make a big purchase. Anything from bad component matching to the speakers being only 4 and a half feet apart. One time a guy in the other room started a loud vacuum cleaner while I was auditioning (I think he was the owner). Maybe he didn't take me seriously as a potential buyer. No other customer was in the store. For all he knew I could have had thousands of dollars in my wallet. If you ever have thousands in your wallet and get treated like that, show him the money before exiting his door for good. Who knows how much clowns like this have cost the high end in sales by putting a bad taste in peoples mouths. Over the decades greed and stupidity like this must have added up. I'm just glad that I don't need places like that. Another thing that didn't help is that a lot of people realize that DVD players and other things digital (and cheap) have more sophisticated electronics in them than a lot of " no vacation this year" audio equiment.

 

 I do think though progress is being made and at lower price points. Driver manufactures out of necessity have to do R&D, to keep up with competitors, and their drivers end up in different companies speakers. There is a lot of good stuff out there and at least some of it is within reach. But if you are thinking of buying a $15,000 audio item and that's a lot of money to you, and its their bottom of the line "budget" model. You just might be making a silly life move.   

[Richard Dale]

On 5/23/2020 at 3:47 AM, Digi&Analog Fan said:

Thanks for the speaker ID and pic. I will look into those. My Linnaeum speaker I bought on a whim. I figured any company who went to the trouble of developing a new kind of tweeter must be seriously dedicated to good sound. They are a 2 way also, using a 6 inch Peerless bass/mid. They use a mono pole tweeter (not the lesser 360 degree Omni tweeter that they llicensed to Optimus). It possibly is the cleanest tweeter I have ever heard, but it is confusing. Its a little soft sounding. Reversing the phase helps. Sometimes it sounds like it lacks extension and at other times not. It can sound "big" on massed violins but for instance on a triangle strike... well you've never heard a triangle sound so tiny. Some people with high end Magneplaners have added the Linnaeum tweeter to the top of their speakers and they say it improves their sound. For me any serious flaw detracts too much from potential near realism.

I’ve had a pair of the Tandy LX5s with the Linaeum tweeter for nearly 30 years. A few years ago I upgraded the crossover which consists of two components, an inductor and a capacitor. I replaced the ferrite core inductor with an air cored one, and the cap with a better SCR polypropylene one. The sound certainly improved a great deal. Just recently I upgraded the speakers again. I replaced the internal wiring with Duelund DCA16GA, instead of the Chord Carnival I’d used before. I replaced the 6.2 mF SCR cap with a ClarityCap SA and an 0.1 mF Audyn True Copper as a bypass cap. The new caps are still breaking in, but there has been a large jump in the sound quality. I had thought the Linaeum tweeter was very clear and transparent, certainly after the first upgrade, but maybe it was lacking in a bit of tonal richness. But the new caps and Duelund cable have given them a lovely tone and timbre to go with the transparency.

 

I don’t know anything about the crossover in the Linaeum speakers, but it is quite possible that the crossover components might be the limiting factor, giving the soft sound you describe rather than the tweeter itself.

[Digi&Analog Fan]

Thanks for the info on the Linnaeum tweeter. The tweeter appears identical to the Linnaeum tweeter in the 1980s Optimus Pro lx4 (Linnaeum licensed Radio Shack to use it).. I have those speakers also. The tweeter sounds identical in character with the different crossover that the Optimus speaker used with it. The tweeter is front firing only, as opposed to the Linnaeum omnidirectional that Optimus  used in different other models and it is a w whole different beast and is considered superior in sound to the omnidirectional version of the tweeter. The defunct Fi magazine reviewed the LX4 back then and called it the speaker bargain of the decade. It is a very clean tweeter but in other ways it lacks. I read where its supposed to be hybrid between a ribbon and a planar tweeter. The lx4 was a 2 way which also used a kevlar driver which are known to be low in distortion. The speaker literature says that as the frequencies go downward the distortion in the speaker increases. In other words as clean as kevlar sounds, the tweeter is the real star. The lx4 had a very short production run. Not a serious speaker as far as scale, dynamics, bass or power handling. Overall within its limits, it sounded as clean as most $5000 speakers at the time for an on sale price of only $120 a pair. 

[Digi&Analog Fan]

I use ebay mostly, to find and experiment with vintage audio equipment of exceptional quality. I do have some equipment that is still being made today or was a year or two ago, but if I had to guess, the average age of my stereo equipment is 25 to 35 years old, with several pieces pushing 60 years old and currently selling for prices many times their original list price. Most of it works fine, even after all those years.

 

I don't really buy that there are all kind of new cheap speakers on the market now that make products of yesteryear sound like they are broken. Its more like people who say that have never come into contact and were not familiar with many of the exceptional products of the past. I've seen circa 1983 used Celestion sl 600 speakers on ebay, go off at less than $500 a pair occasionally. Their cabinets are among the most inert ever, being made of something called Aerolam, which is an aerospace material used in upper end quality aircraft. The sl 600 came out in the 1980s, and had the same drivers as the cheaper sl 6; the only difference said to be the cabinet. If you listened to the 2 models side by side, there was no comparison; the sl600 with its Aerolam cabinet trounces the sl 6 with its cabinet made of ordinary wood or MDF. The sl600 is considered to have one of the better upper midranges ever and some say it  is still the imaging champ among bookshelf speakers along with its upper brethren the sl700, made with the same cabinet material. That a bunch of cheap newcomers would make speakers like this sound bad, I just don't buy. I do think some of the newer cheaper speakers do have great sound quality for the money,(the Celestions were expensive), but thinking that they have performance unobtainable a few decades ago. On an absolute basis. I don't think that's so at all.

 

 The vintage equipment that intrigues me most of all; usually from the 1980's or so, some of it earlier, was from the "we are the most advanced" wars.. There seemed to be a time period when a bunch of mainstream Japanese audio companies were trying to prove that they were the best, among their close competitors. They came out with impressive power amplifiers for one thing, whose looks and sound are stunning even to this day. They seemingly hired the best most advanced engineers they knew of, and simply told them to build the best no compromise amplifier that they know how to build. Companies like Technics, Sony, Sansui, Yamaha, Onkyo etc. Most of these products are very rare on the used market to the point that you almost never see one, as they were outrageously expensive for their day and not that many were sold, but many of them hold their own and more against much of today's better equipment. The know how was there that long ago; if price constraints were thrown out the window. With products like these; these companies were really trying to go all out and to come out with the best equipment they could possibly conceive. Sony even came out with a speaker line whose tweeters were made of bio-cellulose material. Something that a certain bacteria spews out whose properties are lighter and faster than berrylium. They used it in a series of equipment called Sony La Voce.

[MacKlipsch]

On 5/23/2020 at 8:23 AM, SoundAndMotion said:

I think you can find crazy-expensive everything!

 

 

Did you include the Duparquet 12.5" saute pan for $9800 or the $41000 Meneghini La Cambusa refrigerator?

 

 

How about a $96,000 pair of speaker cables to go with that setup?

 

https://soundapproach.com/wireworld-platinum-eclipse-8-pes-standard-speaker-cable-bulk.html?gclid=Cj0KCQiAz9ieBhCIARIsACB0oGJYexf2fC3fWPv8NoMPzIGqRoq9BYIinor9GWUeVDQ7xJoSdbxTZ98aAqndEALw_wcB

[JaredM42]

personally i love the older speakers they just sound better to me i still have my dads dh 10's big squares with alot of good sound  but yeah i have to agree good speakers are way to pricey for todays market they just dont seam to hold up to the old school 

[Kal Rubinson]

FWIW, I've been involved in home audio from the late 1950's and, frankly, I do not see any reason to dwell in the past.   What has changed is that audio (read "HiFi") has gone from a niche hobbyist passion to broad popularization (thank Hugh Heffner for that) and it has driven the hobbyist end to differentiate itself from the mass market.  Superimposed on that is a remarkable explosion of the luxury ("bling") market for all things including audio.  The world has changed, not just audio.

 

As to the matter of objective progress, I see it as undisputable unless one needs to believe otherwise because of an emotional attachment to older technology or a general "bah humbug" attitude.   I've confirmed this by going through a cycle of buying familiar older equipment in an attempt to save money for a second system, of being disappointed with it and of replacing it with modest modern stuff.     I have a few products that I've kept but for nostalgia only. 

[firedog]

3 hours ago, Kal Rubinson said:

FWIW, I've been involved in home audio from the late 1950's and, frankly, I do not see any reason to dwell in the past.   What has changed is that audio (read "HiFi") has gone from a niche hobbyist passion to broad popularization (thank Hugh Heffner for that) and it has driven the hobbyist end to differentiate itself from the mass market.  Superimposed on that is a remarkable explosion of the luxury ("bling") market for all things including audio.  The world has changed, not just audio.

 

As to the matter of objective progress, I see it as undisputable unless one needs to believe otherwise because of an emotional attachment to older technology or a general "bah humbug" attitude.   I've confirmed this by going through a cycle of buying familiar older equipment in an attempt to save money for a second system, of being disappointed with it and of replacing it with modest modern stuff.     I have a few products that I've kept but for nostalgia only. 

Yep.

In every area of audio, there is equipment that is better than that of years ago, and cheaper. Usually much better and much cheaper.

There are inexpensive (below or well below $1000) speakers and electronics that would have been state of the art in the 50's-70's, and even 80's.  In fact, sometimes their quality couldn't have really been imagined then (for example close to zero distortion in electronics).

 

It doesn't mean the great stuff back then wasn't really good. It was. It still sounds good. But todays hifi is better. 

Audiophiles have fallen into the trap of thinking that "audiophile quality sound" means spending 5 figures, multiple 5 figures or even six. 

[PeterG]

I bought a terrific pair of EPI 100V's for $200 in 1976 with my Bar Mitzvah money--they were awesome!  But I agree that performance is better at every price point today.  What I do miss though is that in the 70s-80s stereos were much more of a "thing".  "Everybody" had one as a centerpiece of their living space--be it bedroom, dorm room, living room.  Today I have only one friend with a stereo.  (Home theatre with music as a distant afterthought don't count)

[firedog]

12 hours ago, PeterG said:

I bought a terrific pair of EPI 100V's for $200 in 1976 with my Bar Mitzvah money--they were awesome!  But I agree that performance is better at every price point today.  What I do miss though is that in the 70s-80s stereos were much more of a "thing".  "Everybody" had one as a centerpiece of their living space--be it bedroom, dorm room, living room.  Today I have only one friend with a stereo.  (Home theatre with music as a distant afterthought don't count)

$200 in 1976 is a about $1000 in todays dollars. I'm not familiar with the speakers you had then, but I guarantee there are better speakers for that money now.

There have been great advances in cabinet and driver materials, and there's better understanding of design today. 

I had a couple of different models of Advents - classic speakers - but no question I could probably get a better pair of speakers today even starting at about $400-$500 a pair. Much cheaper in real dollars.  In the 80's I had some Kef stand-mounts (They are still around, for an emergency, in my closet). Good sound but VERY limited bass and volume. Todays KEFs kill them for less money in real terms. 

 

[Norton]

On 5/23/2020 at 5:49 PM, NOMBEDES said:

I blame the Russian

Returning the boss’s CD player for service would have been a much better excuse for FSB being in Salisbury…

[AnotherSpin]

7 minutes ago, Norton said:

Given their location, not sure he can count on great backup from Naim now though…

 

This guy is a fan of heavy rock. At least he used to be, until the Russians went crazy and started a crusade against the West. He once invited Deep Purple to his estate during their tour of Mother Russia and they played at his place, I suppose there is enough space. Russian oligarchs supported not only Western audio industry, but also Western artists. I guess nobody paid such fabulous fees. Ask Roger Waters, the poor fella still can't come to his senses and is probably discussing his next concerts in Moscow. One still could fly in via Iran or Turkey.