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Older cd players = warmer sounding. Newer tech will be cleaner because they use super quality modern dacs. Late 80s and early 90 tech is a good place to start.
Rega makes new equipment with older tech. Not a cheap brand, but it might be worth it if you want new and warm. Check out the rega saturn
Do you see this as a fad?
No, not since I started in the 60's, and I'm still at it. Still have the original Wharfedales, altho they've been rebuilt twice, thanks to Pink Floyd. 2 sets of Wharfedale, 2 sets of Klipsch and a pair of Polk in my listening room. Music is always on in my home.
Yes! Same with me!
In 1972 I went with a Pioneer PX 4000 Quadrophonic Receiver, a Thorens TD-160 turntable, and Harmon Kardon speakers. I play music when I'm home a lot!!
I remember in the 1970s when it was popular for people (mostly younger men) to have really elaborate, big home stereos. B&O was a company that made sleek, ultramodern turntables. They also had a thing called Discwasher which you'd use to clean your records. It had a really nice wood handle.
There was also Stereo Review magazine, which still exists. Audiophiles also claimed reel-to-reel tapes were the way to go. Really expensive Bose headphones.
Do you see this as a fad? Maybe it's just me.
Clearly the fad of "big" elaborate stereo systems in stack racks or full-blown furniture cabinets is long gone thanks to huge advancements in downsizing electronic componentry. Physically separating the bass driver(s) from the main speakers as a subwoofer also helped make the systems even more compact. Any more, all you really need is a Blu-Ray player that will play CDs, HDCDs, and Blu-Ray audio discs and stream audio from Bluetooth-capable devices, and you have pretty much every modern high-quality format at your disposal (as well as some not-so-high quality formats that happen to be popular and convenient). Vinyl fetishists of course will want a high-end turntable.
Reel-to-reel was indeed the state-of-the-art back in the 1970s in terms of audio quality available to consumers: far better sound quality than cassettes and especially 8-tracks, and better dynamic range than vinyl plus none of the clicks and pops. But it was expensive and clunky and eventually cassettes won out as the best compromise between sound quality (better than 8-track anyway) and portability compared to reel-to-reel and vinyl, especially for in-car audio).
That said, there will always be audiophiles who will chase purer and purer sound reproduction and will pay for high-end equipment to get as close to it as they can. Speaking of which, Bose isn't even close to state-of-the-art and there are far more expensive headphones out there.
I was surprised that people had graphic equalizers where the sound is broken into 5 or even more frequencies (it's usually just bass and treble). Unless you are a pro working in a studio. I admired Fisher receivers because they all had a little graphic equalizer.
Another thing that's gone is stereos that looked like big wood cabinets. Those started to disappear, I guess, in the late 70s. Also turntables that allow you to stack more than one record.
I always bought a pad for the turntable, possibly made by the company Discwasher. I'm not sure if it affected the sound but I just liked it. Also smoother inner sleeves for records instead of the scratchy paper.
Do you see this as a fad?
No, not since I started in the 60's, and I'm still at it. Still have the original Wharfedales, altho they've been rebuilt twice, thanks to Pink Floyd. 2 sets of Wharfedale, 2 sets of Klipsch and a pair of Polk in my listening room. Music is always on in my home.
Not a fad for me either. I still have my Pioneer 1250 receiver. Bought it used in the late 80's. A set of older Klipsch KG bookshelf speakers are hooked up for our main living room.
Unfortunately it is time for me to have the 1250 rebuilt. Bright side it will be good until I die!
I miss the days of inexpensive (relatively) turntables, amps and speakers. Those AR and Boise 901 speakers sounded so much better than today's stereo speakers. Can't beat the sound of a clean album either. People are so used to listening to massively compressed digital music on earbuds now, they don't have a clue what real home music can sound like.
"I read that vinyl is now outselling CDs. I can't understand that, except that they may be cheaper. But you can't play vinyl in a car or computer."
Sure you can. Just dupe the album to tape, or convert it to a digital file. it will sound like crap compared to the album, but in a car w/ all the other noises that go on you'll be fine.
I miss the days of inexpensive (relatively) turntables, amps and speakers. Those AR and Boise 901 speakers sounded so much better than today's stereo speakers. Can't beat the sound of a clean album either. People are so used to listening to massively compressed digital music on earbuds now, they don't have a clue what real home music can sound like.
I bought a vintage media cabinet, it came with custom made matching speaker boxes. About 4 feet talk, with a drawer at the bottom.
I've converted them to shelf units to display barware.
"I read that vinyl is now outselling CDs. I can't understand that, except that they may be cheaper. But you can't play vinyl in a car or computer."
Sure you can. Just dupe the album to tape, or convert it to a digital file. it will sound like crap compared to the album, but in a car w/ all the other noises that go on you'll be fine.
Maybe if you convert it to some lossy format like mp3. If you save it as a flac or wav file at full 16-bit depth/44.1khz sampling rate and a proper LUFS setting, it will be -- for better or worse -- virtually indistinguishable from your vinyl source.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stephenMM
I miss the days of inexpensive (relatively) turntables, amps and speakers. Those AR and Boise 901 speakers sounded so much better than today's stereo speakers. Can't beat the sound of a clean album either. People are so used to listening to massively compressed digital music on earbuds now, they don't have a clue what real home music can sound like.
Those Bose "direct/reflective" aka "MonoEverywhere" speakers with most of the sound coming out the back(!!) absolutely annihilated a track's sound stage. "Do you want your music to sound like you're sitting in the 10th row at Carnegie Hall? Great, these speakers will deliver that in spades! Don't want that and it's not how the artist/producer/sound engineers intended a particular recording to sound? Too bad, that's what you're getting anyway!"
Meanwhile it had no woofers, no tweeters, just a bunch of 5" drivers that required a proprietary amp eating massive amounts of power fed through a proprietary equalizer boosting the treble and bass signals just to get something approximating a balanced sound.
In short, those things were absolutely ludicrous.
No doubt they'd effortlessly fill a room with sound (at the expense of stereo separation of course), which I suppose comes in handy if you throw a lot of parties and you don't want any of your guests to miss a single note of the music no matter where they happened to be standing with their cocktail in hand. But their reproduction accuracy left a lot of room for improvement.
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