Paul McGowan "How Good was audio equipment of the 70s"

[Roadrash]

I'm good on my rung!

Me too. I want to buy a new car.

 

[Blue Shadow]

I love love love my Technics SA Receivers and my Ohm Acoustics Speakers.....
But...
I know full well that there's several Better sounding options from the 1970's... ..
But at the prices for a Sansui 33000 22000 & Pioneer 1250-80 , 1980, and Marantz and Technics SA 1000 etc..etc..it would be a perfect case example of the Law of Diminishing returns over what I already Have & Love

Without investigating the sound quality of some of the brands mentioned by Paul and other known great sounding pieces and limiting yourself to bigger receivers you are definitely not getting a lot more sound quality for those bigger prices. With correctly bought well chosen great sounding gear from the 70s you could have major improvements in that sound quality for nor much more than what some big but not largest receivers from the brands you mention. Much more than a diminished returns level, probably more like why didn't I do this sooner level of improvement. Unfortunately there isn't enough good discussion about these items as they didn't sell as well as the Pio/Mar/Suis mainstream units which folks like causing them some lust for the biggest receivers from those companies.

 

[Alobar]

Me too. I want to buy a new car.

Yeah I don't take it too seriously when some guru says my stuff is junk. I know there is better, perhaps much better but at my age I don't want to go back to work to buy it.

Sorry PS audio, this fish ain't biting!

 

[Djcoolray]

The real deal is that it’s all about the sound and not the equipment.....I mean like wow, there’s allot of possession obsession going on here. In reality, the equipment is only just a tool so anything else is the over romantics of a material item which is just a distraction from the sound itself. The point is to reproduce the best....SOUND that we can afford based on what we can actually hear. If someone wants to own equipment from a particular era, they are a collector and an enjoyer of music. The rest of us are more concerned with specifics....

The point is to find better soundingTOTL pieces at the lowest possible price.....

 

[Blue Shadow]

Sorry PS audio, this fish ain't biting!

I seriously doubt that AK is any part of a target market for much of their gear even though there are quite a few here with a few chunks of it that they enjoy.

 

[Blue Shadow]

The point is to find better soundingTOTL pieces at the lowest possible price.....

I might leave out the totl part of that. There are some excellent not totl units out there from sonically very highly respected companies. The ARC SP-9 was their best selling preamp and it does sound good but it is bested by both the SP14 and SP-15 from that era.

 

[Alobar]

I seriously doubt that AK is any part of a target market for much of their gear even though there are quite a few hear with a few chunks of it that they enjoy.

Yeah likely so but there must be some interest as I see PS Audio banner ads all the time here. Maybe they are targeting me by the Kenwood gear in my sig!
That would be some clever marketing, wouldn't it?

 

[damacman]

If Paul spent as much time attempting to bring us together as he did dividing us, I’d pay his opinion some attention. Can you imagine how exclusive this hobby would be had those products not served the market as they had?

This is a hobby of diminishing returns. If we have any hope of seeing the hobby grow, we’d sure better have some crap to recommend to friends to get them started.

 

[tubed]

If I may compare the Aker audio hobby to sports, the vintage experience to me is more like surfing, skateboarding, softball leagues, pick-up football games.
While the high end is like ball room dancing, scuba diving, sailing or polo.
All relatively enjoyable.

 

[Pio1980]

I remember Paul and Stan's first product as a purchaser, their budget overachiever outboard phono stage and still have the Noble 10k switchpoint black box pot they put in it for me special order in a passive controller.

 

[phantomrebel]

The video of this is up on Youtube:

 

[jlh3rd]

Interesting that folks don't have an idea of what the honey covered sound might be like. I guess it is because many find some gear and love the sound and don't continue to evaluate gear, listening to different brands, types of devices. Many here sold gear back in the day and they had opportunities to do comparisons of many of the units they sold to get an idea of the sound quality of what those units would be. Their own stereos would generally be gear from the manufacturers that they sold because of the 'salesman accommodation' pricing available. But many would use some of that gear as a stepping stone to what they really wanted. Or they would use the gear for a while and try something else.

If you haven't spent time with different gear, especially some nice older tube gear vs. the late 70s receivers and just collect receivers, you might not have been exposed to that sonic difference.

When folks drop by at one of our get togethers, they frequently haul along a chunk of gear that they have built, finished refurbing or just got for the group to listen to. Some here don't understand that, thinking that the rig they have is just fine and they don't need to make changes. Others understand listening to different gear to see what its sound signature is. Whatever, it is all part of the hobby.

If you can't understand the comments Paul made about the the sound of the SP-3 preamp, don't be dissing that as some general audio bs as that is a common comment about that preamp. More listening to more gear will help you understand some of the differences. @musichal mentioned similar differences with the same company's products. So much gear so little time to evaluate. Oh well.

lol....really?....so someone who doesn't understand a honey covered sound in someone's book is , what, ignorant?....or we're just beneath the elite few that do......i got it...lol again.
interesting is right...

 

[Mister Pig]

Just because a receiver can't handle a speaker that goes down to 2 ohms doesn't mean it is poorly built. They are similar but designed to do something a little different. Like a 5 iron and a mace,both are clubs and you could mess somebody up or hit a golf ball with either of em but they're designed for different clubbing activity's. Both are quality made.

Big issue here, those are known to require certain separate amplification. Those loudspeakers are owned and used by a small minority of audio users, and are upper end. I'd rather have a good, well made, very efficient loudspeaker which is easy to drive, and can work in the space I have available, and can be driven with a 50 watt amplifier than a big behemoth amplifier which takes 2 people to move. Your post is a good one. That gear is great for those who have the space, the budget, the desire for, and ability to integrate such speaker systems into their homes and can deal with such loudspeakers in their environments. My real world is very difficult. And most of my listening is done near field, in smaller rooms. Many of us are in between the two extremes. YMMV. My amplifiers and even receivers must also be locally or area repairable within one hour drive in Eastern Tennessee. Which also rules out most of those makes you mention. I love them and admire them. You have many good points here to say, they're very well reasoned. But those speakers and amplifiers are also very much, unique, specialist items. Used by a very small subset of users.

Yet it is possible to look at these speakers as an important point in time from where the modern speaker we have owes its development from. These are speakers that were ground breaking, and were high water marks in their categories for performance. They were points of light that defined what was possible. Now to achieve that excellent performance they have certain characteristics that were hard on amps, and there were many other speakers like this that I did not mention. Such as the Proac Tablette which comes to mind, various ribbon tweeter based models...while none may have been as hard on amps as the others, they had a level of resolution that showed deficiencies further up the audio chain. But these are speakers that set the bar for modern speakers, and the driver manufacturers refined their offerings that allowed designers to use far more favorable crossover arrangements that eliminated those nasty impedance curves and angles. But these speakers like the SL 600, the Thiels, the Infinities were targets, or set the bar of what was possible. Designers don't mention these speakers specifically by name, but they were the class that defined high performance speaker design, and they contributed to audio improving during that time period.

Are there great speakers from the years before them? Of course, speakers like Altec 604's or 19's, the large format JBL, some of the Infinities, many Brit speakers like Spendor, Rogers, KEF, and so on. But those speakers from the 80's and 90's were iconic in their own right. They just had specific demands on electronics, and not all pieces would hold up to being used with them.

Yes a lot of the electronics from the big Japanese manufacturers were solid components, and they were built for a more benign application. To paraphrase what I said previously, they are fine pieces of electronics, lets just not pretend they are something they are not. To give them some kind of level of excellence retroactively is revisionist history. They are good given their limitations, but never strived for greatness.

Cheers
Mister Pig

 

[GordonW]

Hook up those Kenwood and Pioneer receivers to vintage Apogee Scintillia, Acoustat 1+1, Martin Logan CLS, Infinity Kappa 9, early Thiel, or Celestion SL 600. You will find out what the build quality is in anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months. Heck hook up a Kenwood L series amp, or Yamaha M series amp, and you are going to get the same result, but closer to the 6 month mark.

Hook up an 80's or 90's era PS Audio amp to those same speakers, and you get different results. There is a different level of build and performance to those early American amplification companies like PS Audio, PSE, Audio Research, Conrad Johnson, Bedini, and so on and so forth.

Nothing wrong with liking a nice mid tier receiver. Lets just not pretend its something different than what it is.

Cheers
Mister Pig

Well... a number of those cited speakers, are IMHO, designed badly in the first place. Impedance dips to below 1 ohm (Apogee and Infinity especially)- those speakers were known as "amp killers"- and I've seen many a "high end" amp of the era (Conrad-Johnson, Hafler, Audio Research, Belles, Counterpoint and the like) blown up by people trying to get room-filling volume level out of those speakers. If you frequented audio repair shops like I did, in the 1980s and 1990s, you'd have seen plenty of these amp carcasses there- many of them smoked to the point where circuit board replacement was the only way to reliably repair them. I personally remember seeing ARC and Counterpoint amps going up in showers of sparks, in that era- it was an adventurous time to be involved in the higher-end part of this hobby!

There's a very good reason why speakers aren't designed that way anymore, for the most part. These speakers were "equal opportunity amp eaters"... it wasn't just cheap amps.

I had one client with Apogees- the final solution for him for an amp, was a Urei 6260. 300w/ch of studio-grade professional amplifier. That was the only amp that could survive for any length of time on his Scintillas, at the volume levels he preferred...

Regards,
Gordon.

 

[danrclem]

I don't doubt that there is better gear than what I have but like many I just haven't been able to listen to it. I don't have any idea what anything sounds like unless I own it. I just don't know anybody personally that has stereo gear and I bet there are a lot of people here who are in the same boat as I am.

No matter what you have chances are there are people who can look down on your outfit and tell you how it's not that good and that there is a lot better out there.

I'm slowly climbing the ladder when I can but I'm not going to put my life savings into a fantastic outfit. If you want to show people how good gear can sound invite some of the bottom feeders (talking about myself in jest) to come listen to your equipment.

 

[Hawkeye83]

Sometimes I think I'm just not very picky. I've enjoyed the sound of almost every piece of gear I've had (a few exceptions)! Some more than others, sure. I've had a few silver-faced 70's receivers, liked them just fine with "period" speakers. Also had a couple of what most here would consider "good" set-ups (not world-beaters, but good, $5k+ systems, modern stuff). It's all good, to me. I think it all depends on the "presentation" you prefer. I do think aesthetics and brand loyalty come into play more than most would like to admit, too.

 

[Bodyblue]

If Paul spent as much time attempting to bring us together as he did dividing us, I’d pay his opinion some attention. Can you imagine how exclusive this hobby would be had those products not served the market as they had?

This is a hobby of diminishing returns. If we have any hope of seeing the hobby grow, we’d sure better have some crap to recommend to friends to get them started.

Self perceived big fish like the podcaster we are talking about make the kind of "edgy" remarks he does for the very reason seen here: The off chance somebody will post a thread about it and his podcast will get a few more clicks and he will scrounge up more cash. Does he actually believe half of the crap he says? Maybe. Is it more likely he tries to come up with the next remark that will spark threads like this. Just another tiny voice in an ocean noise struggling to be relevant.

 

[4-2-7]

Hook up those Kenwood and Pioneer receivers to vintage Apogee Scintillia, Acoustat 1+1, Martin Logan CLS, Infinity Kappa 9, early Thiel, or Celestion SL 600. You will find out what the build quality is in anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months.

Blue Smoke

 

[GChief]

Blue Smoke

Most of the time if you let the smoke out your F’ed

 

[JoeESP9]

What cracks me up about guys like him is saying sound has taken huge steps up for the Kenwood and Pioneer trash and that they were dreadful sounding. With all these improvements in gear over the years modern gear should sound better than the original recording by now. I want someone to quantify exactly,"huge".

It's sort of narrow minded to think that there has been no progress in the audio arts since your favorite receiver was manufactured 30 years ago.

The only negative comment I've ever made about receivers is that the majority of them are incapable of driving the speakers I like. I have never made any comment as to their sound or quality.

FWIW: I like the old Silver faced look. That's why I like the latest Yamaha gear.