We had this in my house growing up
I was 4 years old, listening to a record on headphones connected to this rig. Leaned too far back, and caught the 1/4 inch input jack on the headphones right in my fucking eyeball.
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That one appears to have a CD player, which most certainly wasn't included in the one I grew up with.
My parents' cabinet (console) didn't even have the cassette tape unit, just turntable and reel-to-reel.
Ours has an 8 track, but no real to real, a later one has a cassette and 8-track (long after 8-tracks were obsolete.
No problem, since it's all modular, you could always add one later
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.
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!
Lol, this comment at least makes up for it some 😂
Also, i love the aesthetic of these old stereos. Kinda makes me want to hunt one down now. Of course with my luck the market is probably hot for them these days so it's probably not as cheap as it would have been 10-15 years ago and given the age there's a chance they'll need some TLC to get them working properly again... Then i would probably plug my phone in through the Aux and just end up using it that way like 90% of the time if I'm being real, lol 😅
The phone-aux concern is real. An old system like that is nice for decor if you like the look, but having a physical collection of music is so inconvenient when you're used to streaming and mp3s, I fucking feel that.
If you do want one for the aesthetic, though, I'd recommend checking brick and mortar thrift stores or garage/estate sales. My nearby charity shop always has a few components stacked up on a shelf, same corner as the pandemic breadmakers, haha.
That's a very good suggestion!! Next time I'm cruising past the goodwill or thrift store I'm gonna have to do a little exploring...
I have a mismatched stack of ancient shit as pictured and run my PC audio through the EQ and amp. Could use some tightening up for hiss, but good enough. Haven't wired the tape deck yet, no CD player.
Getting matching gear together will cost ya. If you're willing to take some time and mix and match, the thrifts and FB Marketplace have deals now and again.
We were decidedly middle class. My dad pounded tin for a living. He just liked music I guess.
I remember dorking around the EQ sliders, though having to reach a bit to get at them. This thing (black eye excluded) is probably why I'm hugely into music to this day. Some core memory forming shit or something
The coolest thing ever was when those old receivers had a motorized volume knob that would move when you used the remote. I'm a simple man, but that always made me happy.
You just unlocked an ancient memory in me
they must still do that? i have a denon receiver thats maybe 7 years old that turns when you change volume
My Onkyo solved it by removing the marking on the volume knob.
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
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.
I assume engineering and materials used on higher end speakers today are better, but most are still hand made like their older counterparts. The reason why low-end mass produced speakers are much better today is because the manufacturing process is more automated. Usually handmade for mass produced stuff isn’t going to be as high quality as mass produced stuff made by a machine. This is me just speculating because I don’t work in that industry.
Compared with the 1980's? IMO, absolutely, yes. At the very least we have stronger stationary magnets (neodymium) that make for more compact designs. They also need to hold up for higher and lower-end frequencies, due to how music has changed. I think the media used to make speaker cones uses more composites these days, instead of just stiff paper.
The market for a "nice stereo" kind of died, didn't it?
Audiophiles get ridiculously high end gear that is intentionally fiddly. Like fully manual turntables where to change the speed you have to move the actual belt to a different pulley. Or you get a sound bar for your TV.
Boom boxes aren't a thing anymore. Like, is that a symptom of a dying society?
To be fair, the whole act of playing music on LP's and 45's is just... fiddly. Sleeves, cleaning the vinyl, occasionally replacing the needle, and flipping the album over after 20-30 minutes. It's like reading a book - you dedicate time to fuss with all this stuff. So, futzing with the turntable itself is kind of like a "while I'm already here" sort of thing.
Maybe just a changing one. Boomboxes were the combination of conspicuous consumption (yet down-market-ish), ready to party on the go (aspirationally), and building space for yourself with music (loud, annoying). The form-factor was also a product of its time: all the parts couldn't be miniaturized any further than what you typically got. Portable bluetooth speakers do most of that work these days, while letting your phone do the heavy lifting of playing media, and the battery life is WAY better. If that was available back in 1984, everyone would have used that instead.
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.
Not to mention that the advent of touchscreens on literally everything makes accessibility a lot harder for a lot of people.
Apple used to sell all this shit as accessible. Now it’s barely an afterthought. Pisses me off.
Then I forked an app, to fix the text so I could read it and added a bunch of additional accessibility features and settings. Apple’s App Store rejected the submission under the grounds that it was “spam” I.e. too similar to an existing app.
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.
It's the battery driven stuff that drives me nuts, nothing beats the "just push the button and it all works" kind of thing.
CDs are so small though, I'm tinkering with "USB stick playlists".
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.
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!
Have you ever heard of the 'loudness wars' of the end of the 90's.
As CD players became standard in cars, they decided the best way to counter road noise, was the max out the levels on new releases... which created a horrible sound... but worse still, then then applied this to re-releases of older albums too.
I had originals (still do) of a lot of 90's bands, especially grunge, metal and indie bands... and I was round a friends once and they played an album I had and it sounded awful. So I went and got my copy from the car and played it on their system and the difference was ridiculous.
Of course, im well versed in it! Been recording and mixing for 15 years.
I hate squashed dynamic range. But it's sad the young generation cant even hear it or they PREFER 2 db of DR. Luckily we still have old school mixers and masterers but once they die off we will see a huge quality decline.
Which speakers?
99% of people that owned a graphic eq didn’t have a fucking clue what to do with it
I still don't
A right of passage for geriatric millenials
Pfft. I had one of these.
Yeah I found this which was more like what we had.
I keep threatening to write a book about this.
I have a theory that the craft of furniture making died in the 1940's or so, when furniture became fully industrial and commodified. Which is why craftsmen build 100 year old designs, and things like these console TVs and stereos were manufactured. We went from not having radios, to war, to radios as furniture, to particle board TV stands.
Proper craftsman built furniture is stuck 100 years ago, somebody somewhere built a Morris chair this afternoon, I've got a dining room hutch 90% finished on my workbench right now, but furniture designed for the electronics age is all factory manufactured.
A typical episode of the New Yankee Workshop would have Norm go to some location to look at an antique piece of furniture, and then he'd build "our version" in the shop. In episodes where he built coffee tables, he would point out that there is no such thing as an antique coffee table, the term arose in the 20th century. In a similar vein, I don't think there's going to be such a thing as an antique computer desk.
I have seen some outfits like Vermont Woods selling "Credenzas" which are nominally intended to be media centers, but there's a kind of pigheaded approach where they'll maybe size shelves, drawers and doors kind of appropriately but they add no space for wiring, power management, accessory devices, so when installed it's always a mess. And I want to fix that.
Dude write that book.
I second it. I’m an amateur woodworker myself.
When you write your book, do not confuse 'craftsmanship' with the modern materials, design needs, and modern aesthetics. Craftsmanship is merely the act of building something. It might be good or bad or somewhere in between.
One thing that often annoys me about woodworkers who enjoy cabinetry or furniture, is that they are often trying to copy old designs and ideas. I have a Son in Law that is really skilled at woodworking and he just copies things. Like Norm going to a museum to study an old piece of furniture, it's very often about copying something old and not about trying your own new ideas. Maybe you fail, maybe you don't. Now, I do understand that there are only so many ways you can design and build a kitchen cabinet or coffee table. But I'm not sure Norm ever had an original idea. He just copied things and encouraged others to copy him.
Not sure what the problem is with that approach, I'm looking for a kitchen cabinet, not a personal expression of the artist's lived experience as a trans-disabled Iberian who grew up as the only rich kid in the holler in the Appalachians, just build me a kitchen cabinet.
It's not about the "Artisan's lived experience." It's about designing and building those cabinets to fit modern day needs. Like that computer desk that doesn't quite fit your setup. Or not being able to get that air fryer or food processor on that shelf because it's literally 1/2"/12mm too tall. Unless you custom build everything, more often than not, those older designs are difficult to smoothly integrate into how we live today.
I think you're on the same track that I am. It feels to me that the craft of woodworking is kind of stagnant and mostly in a state of reinactment at this point.
Woodworking is a very old craft, we've had a long time to establish what works and what doesn't through trial and error. And yet. The village carpenter in the year 1800 would have made furniture that did what the customer needed it to do, a writing desk was well suited to the task of writing as it existed at the time, with a place for the ink well and such. Sometime in the 20th century, furniture design ossified, and now we get "It's a low cabinet that's 3 feet wide" for a TV stand or "It's a table" for a computer desk.
There was an episode of the New Yankee Workshop where Norm built a computer desk. His approach was to make it look like any old two pillar desk with very large drawers that slid out, housing the PC tower itself on one side and a printer or scanner on the other, with the monitor and speakers plunked on the desktop. I've seen the exact same approach from commercial flat pack furniture, with desks designed to look like old fashioned paperwork desks, dining room cabinets or even armoires.
I will say, Norm would build a "new antique" using more modern methods (correcting for the show being made in the 90s). He was fond of power tools, biscuit joinery, made significant use of plywood and other manufactured materials, but his design work is rather...conservative.
This is what we had, with no TV. You could store records in the center section.
Yep totally remember the record slot part. I would love to take one of these and modernize it. Not sure how but it would be cool anachronistic tech.
I've thought of that, too, but they take up so much space. I can create a much better performing and sounding audio system in a much smaller space. This much floor real estate could house a shelf that could hold hundreds of LPs (or CDS).
Yeah they were quite huge.
I have an Electrohome turntable cabinet much like this one holding up my TV.
My grandparents had one like that! Eventually the built-in TV broke so they put a newer one on top but just left the whole thing there for years.
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.
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.
Now that you mention it, yeah I remember that now. You ain't old yet. Just getting your second wind.
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 have some bad news for you, your Dad didn't want you watching those cartoons...
So that explains all the getting up at 5am to milk cows, feed calves and steers and pigs, (my sisters fed the chickens, ducks and geese), shoveling shit, picking rocks, and pulling weeds..........
Vacuum tubes hate that, so that's probably why they lost their vacuum on Fridays like clockwork...
Them cows were getting milked TV or not. Dead or alive, there weren't no days off.
Then the vacuum tubes failing on Friday evenings is truly a miracle of the modern age.
You call that old? It's got one of those fancy, new-fangled CD players! Not old at all.
I dont feel like vhs tapes and cds are old at all. People were foolish throwing away all their media for corporate owned garbage streaming.
Cds were honestly the perfect form. You still get physical media. You can rip it. Its portable. Its perfect. Reel tape of course is peak audio of all time but insane expense.
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
Look at Mr. fancy-pants having an EQ in his rack.
The audio equivalent of having a homelab
I feel called out
To be clear, I think homelabs are great!
Do you want to hear about my homelab?
Heck yes
Well, I started with a lowly single Dell 2950 back in the day. I was working for VMware at the time, so naturally, I used that.
Since then I upgraded to a c6100 with an R710, and I'm not even sure how I got where I am right now, but I have an R630, R330, FX2s with 3x FC630 nodes and an FD332 (currently empty), and a powervault somethingorother for storage which I desperately want to upgrade.
I finally decided on disks to buy for my FD332, I'm going with Intel DC S4500 (used) at 1.92GB. I have yet to purchase one, and the FD332 can take 16(?) disks.... I'm going SATA SSD for this and moving away from the RAID 6 I'm using on the powervault (this model is basically a slightly modified R510, with 22.5" disks in the back for the OS, and 123.5" in the front for storage). The current primary storage for my VMs (still on VMware) is 64TB WD Red plus, and I have additional storage of 68TB WD Red plus for media content (large files mostly, 90%+ read).
I have over 30 virtual machines, currently all on one FC630, for all kinds of self hosted stuff. I've noticed that they are starting to run incredibly slow, especially after upgrading from the c6100 nodes over to the FC630, so I picked up the FD332 to build a new storage array for the OS data, which will be all flash.
I decided on all flash early on in my thought process, but struggled with deciding what drive I should buy. I want all of the drives to at least be the same make/model for consistency. I finally landed on the Intel DC S4500, because the performance is quite good, and the endurance is 1DWPD, so in the used market, they should have a lot of life left. I picked 1.92 TB because of my space requirements, if I do some version of raid 6, I'll lose at least two drives. Raid 60 would be four drives. So all of my data needs to live on the 12-14 that remain, and it should comfortably fit on 20TB with some room to grow.
I'm currently evaluating alternatives to VMware. I looked at OpenStack for a bit but found it to be too restrictive for my homelab. I'm currently looking at xcp-ng, which shows promise but the GUI is clunky and there's still a nontrivial number of things that you need to drop to the CLI to do. I'll probably be looking at proxmox next.
I'm not in a hurry to populate the new storage because I'm planning on setting it up on whatever hypervisor I pick to move to after VMware, and I haven't made that choice yet. Once I do, the new storage will need to be in place before I make the leap. I will basically export the VMs from VMware, then import them to the new hypervisor, placing them on the "new" Flash storage as I go.
Among my VMs, I have a full Windows active directory set up, with exchange, and a dedicated MS SQL server. I had a remote desktop server for a while, and I maintain a small handful of gaming server VMs. There's more but I don't want to detail every system I run.
Current standard spec is 2* Intel Xeon E5-2618L v4, with 256GB RAM, and 2* 480G Intel DC S4500 drives for the bare metal OS. I have 2 of 3 fc630 nodes all specc'd out, or very close to being all specc'd out (the VMware node is using a set of Samsung SSDs for it's OS, since I hadn't decided on the S4500 yet, and I had them laying around... This will be replaced when I move away from VMware and need to reformat the node). The R630 is almost the same but was built before the FC630s, and only has 128G of RAM; it is using an 8 drive RAID 6 array of Corsair 500G SSDs. The powervault is my oldest server and has a pair of 300ish GB spinning disks for OS, as well as the two six drive WD Red plus arrays for my main storage.
All of this is connected to a Cisco catalyst 4948. The FX2s is 10Gbit linked, while everything else has a number of 1GbE ports, some aggregated, some are just multi-link/multi-path for iSCSI.
I have two main gateways, the one that serves the servers is a sonicwall firewall. I used sonicwall a lot at work when I bought it, I've since changed jobs, but it's still a decent piece of gear, so it stays. I also have a full ubiquiti network running the main access for the people at home, so they won't be disturbed by my activities. It includes a UDM Pro, an enterprise 48 Poe switch, and a handful of U6 Pro access points with one U6 mesh to fill in a gap. Four ubiquiti access points in total. On my lab side I have a Cisco wlc 2504 wireless controller with a pair of 2802i access points, powered by a 48 port catalyst 3750x PoE which is 10G linked to the 4948. I have a Cisco 2911 router I've been meaning to get set up as a phone server. I have a collection of 7940/7960G phones from Cisco and I recently acquired a couple 8841 phones to use with it as well.
My current project is to update my exchange server from 2010 to 2019.
Physically, almost everything is in a 42RU rack in my basement. It's a complete mess right now. I need to finish doing in-wall ethernet runs before I can clean it up, and get some new patch cables to tidy up the wiring. I also need to physically relocate some servers as my FX2s is currently on a table since the c6100 was taking up too much space in the rack when I got it, and has since been decommissioned. I'm kind of waiting to decom the powervault before I start racking everything properly. Idk.
My hero
I'm slightly younger so all of that would have been black plastic instead of brushed steel.
Yeah, we both might be a similar age.
I just finished donating my Marantz with "digital tubes" to an archival library
80s were weird like that. Digital tubes are an oxymoron. Like saying you have a fuel injected carburetor engine or something
Everything in the manual and product guide described integrated circuits. But in the '70s, people either didn't know what ICs were or they thought those were only in computers and Atari cartridges. With a name and pedigree like Marantz, hearing that the warm dulcet sounds you always loved were now being coldly processed by transistors would have likely been too much.
Yes, yes, I am.
Does anyone know what that stack would have cost new? I bet it would sound amazing though.
At least $1000 to get properly started back in the day, although usually family that could afford these would not have purchased it all at once. Modules were added later in a couple of cases that I knew.
In 2025 money, that's like $5000-ish to fill the cabinet.
So not an insane amount of money to spend on something that should last for decades.
It's either 5000 dollars or 20 bucks because estate sales just want the fuckers gone.
And I took this personally.
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).
we had some classical LPs - gershwin, copeland, holst etc., and I remember getting them on CD and hooking that to the high fi. no flutter. no dust. no pops and hiss..... and all played at the right time, apparently our record player was 10-15% slow and no one knew.... blew my mind.
I'd have to ask how old this system is. Ours was black, made by Kenwood, and had a wooden cabinet. Tinted glass door. Tape player was a dual front loader. That looks like a CD cartridge loader. We had that too. Our cartridges held six discs and they swiveled out.
Wasn't mine, it was my mother's, and she still has it. It still works. The doors on the tape deck have snapped off (we were rough with them) but you can still snap tapes into it and they play.
I remember when my mother got it. She'd just gotten divorced, had a bit of money, walked into a Circuit City (this woulda been like 1989?) and asked for the best stereo they had. And I think either she or I asked about Sony, because I remember the guy saying Sony was for people who want people to think they have an expensive stereo. Kenwood was for people who wanted a good stereo. I don't know how true it was. Maybe he just wanted to make a commission. I think she paid a couple grand for it. I don't recall. I didn't pay for it. I bought my Super NES from that same Circuit City though, and I paid for that out of my allowance. $150. I didn't bring the tax though. My mother did cover the tax. But anyway.
But while it wasn't mine, I was the one who put it together, because back then you didn't have Geek Squad (which is Best Buy, but you get the idea). I think they might have had "professional home installation" but that has never been cheap or affordable. Plus, my mother's oldest son (me) was a computer guy. She figured, if he could put together a computer (that is, connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to a computer and turn it on — I wouldn't start building them for another 15 years — I could assemble a stereo. Which just meant stacking them on the shelves, and connecting them via the wires in the back. Two wires — one red, one white — connected to each component and plugged into the... switcher? Whatever it was called. Pretty easy. Did it again when we moved. And then again when it came from the garage, which was like a family room, to the living room when we turned the garage into a granny unit for family who would move in. And then, when I did that, I was able to connect the TV to it, which greatly improved our sound.
Oh yeah, OP doesn't show the speakers. Did that Sony kit include them? I'm sure it must have. My mother's Kenwood came with speakers as tall as the cabinets! Two of them. The speakers only lasted maybe 20, 30 years though? My brother, then grown, found her better, more modern speakers to hook up to it.
We had very a similar home audio system, except the CD player for mine could pull out, it had ports for a headphone jack and power, and when you pulled it out the main system just had the headphone male and power male sticking out. It was such a an odd design to have it be portable. It was most definitely not meant to be a walkman because it had zero skip protection, it just played CDs. It was bulky too, a square that was larger in length and width than a CD case, and depth was about four or five CD cases.
The double deck tape player was huge for making mixtapes, that was always so much fun.
And as for SNES, my brother and I saved up to drop the $150 on that as well. You may be a little older than me, I was born in '87, my brother '86.
The '90s were good.
A little, but none of us are young anymore. ‘79 here. Love being able to claim the 70s though I don’t remember them.
I'm the same way about the '80s. I got a little more of them but don't remember anything obviously. I'm sure your '80s are my '90s, there was something special about the time that I really started to get into music.
It's funny, because when you're a kid, a fan of 8 years is a lot, but 38-46 is essentially the same these days, just some not-so-young kids.
Yep. The kids born in the late 80s/early 90s were my little buddies, kids, who kids my age, would look after. Just like the kids born in the late 60s/early 70s would look after us. But now, I work with people that age, and we're all just old. Like you're still young in your 20s, you hit 30 it starts to be over for you as far as doing young people stuff. I have friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and I identify with all of them age-wise. 60-65 and up I respect but I think of them as "older and wiser." Younger people (20s) seem like they're too young to relate to. We're cool, but they're a generation apart.
As far as generations go, I'm technically GenX, but I identify with most of GenX and older Millennials. I feel like we had a lot of the same experiences. I don't really buy into generational divides anyway. They're fine if you're in the middle. When you get closer to the edge and start mashing the names together, I feel like you're admitting the groups are not that distinct after all.
Buttons are an reminder of the luxury of space we used to have.
The absolute smoothness of the giant volume knob and heft to it as you turned it.
You could spin it up like a fly wheel. It'd move after you let go.
All the way to 11.
It was great!
You can still buy brand new HIFI gear with buttons and VU meters, for example: https://nadelectronics.com/product/c-3050-stereophonic-amplifier/
The above unit has a ton more additional functionality such as room correction, streaming support, digital connectivity, a DAC, multi room support, and far better audio quality.
Sure, not all of it is cheap, however neither was a full stack like the OPs picture.
I'm referring more to floor space and somewhere to put that stuff. An iPad is multi-functional, so in a one-bedroom apartment where space is at a premium, it's better than the full hi-fi setup.
Cd player? Oh you sweet summer child
Old? Buddy not only did I have an RCA system like that with surround sound as a kid, I have a Technics one in my living room now that I literally found on the side of the road. Full cabinet system with the floor speakers and everything. Radio tuner, cassette player, 6 disk CD player, phono preamp for my record player as well. I use it instead of a shitty sound bar or the tv speakers because it was free and sounds loads better.
My family had something similar to this. Cassettes were fancy and the radio was furniture.
Yeah it was a slightly weird transition going from big pieces of furniture to just like, a pair of Bluetooth speakers and nothing else.
At the time it felt like losing something, and as time goes by I'm more convinced that my feeling was correct. I reckon if I ever move out of an apartment building into a proper size house, I'll build myself a hifi stack and become one of them vinyl wankers.
That’s still in my house. And if I have my way, it will outlive me.
Suicide hotline : dial 988
I loved to play with the equalizer to shape the sound (those sweet sweet bass frequencies). You feel magic when you can change the sound with one finger.
Playing with eq on a PC or any digital screen is not as fun.
Is that a CD player? Yeah I’m older than that.
But this was a pretty common setup most households would have had around that time.
A setup like this had the feel of luxury and high tech. Not something every upper middle class household afforded, mostly audiophiles.
I was young and had a JVC stereo cassette player with radio. Attached a discman when the time came.
As I got older, I started building a Hifi system (Panasonic), but after amp and boxes, the digital era came. Bought a previous gen used tape player for my tapes and attached my 2nd and last discman, and that's where it's still at.
It's still as I left it. I kept my old tiny apartment as an office, with all that and other 80s & 90s tech in it, and visiting is like time travel. For the era, and my life. Should you ever visit, don't trip over the BNC cable in the hallway.
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?
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.
I had a victrola. My grandma raised me.
Wow, that is exactly the same tower I have.
I was likely in uni when this came out. I am cassette, 8-track and LP old. The CD came out when I was in uni. I remember having to decide whether to get a Betamax or VHS tape player when they came out.
well, which did you go with?? you can't leave us hanging!
VHS
Did you have to hide from the T Rex on your way to school?
I kid. I started out buying records and cassettes, but 8 tracks were "outdated" by the time I was a kid. Though our huge old school "console"* could play 8 tracks and when I was 13 I found my mom's box of old tapes. She had Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Queen etc. It was quite the musical education.
We had one of the giant console things but it was just a radio tuner and turntable. The radio tuner had short wave in addition to Am and FM which was pretty cool at the time. One of my uncle's was more into hifi back then had a reel to reel machine which was rare then and really rare now.
Hell, I still think that is pretty damn cool.
Those all-in-one audio systems were fantastic, I will not hear any more of this slander
You are looking at 6 separate pieces of equipment in a purpose built cabinet.
Idk what you mean all in one.
They mean All the Things in One cabinet 😁
They're the same color!
They are*, plenty of them still around and pretty much all of them superior to soundbars.
Soundbars are cute, but they are form over function. You just cannot expect good sound out of cheap single-driver applications where the tiny amplifier, power supply and electronics are all shoved into the same package with no regard for anything but keeping it slim. They need a separate subwoofer at a minimum.
Most people dont seem to own a stereo anymore. I know so few people who have anything more than an amazon echo or something similar. Sound quality is impressive for the size, but not at all good. They all use the same cheap 2" single speaker that has to produce high and low frequencies at the same time, so the sound is always muddy.
If you get an inexpensive (and tiny) class d amplifier from Fosi and a modest pair of bookshelf speakers, the sound is far better than smart speakers that cost 5x the price.
I'm not that old, and we were in poverty growing up so didn't have anything even remotely like this.
But now that I'm older with a decent job, one of my favourite things I've bought for myself is a nice stereo system. It feels like such a nice luxury, especially when all my friends rely on tv speakers or Bluetooth speakers
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
Even now, that looks like a pretty badass system.
Yes… I’m that old
The music of the time these were being made would have sounded incredible through them.
That EQ is worth its weight in gold.
And I would literally kill somebody for that record player and by literally killing I mean figuratively so not really at all.
My ex had this. You can crank an astonishing amount of noise out of these things in a way a Bluetooth speaker paired to a device cannot. The first time I was over and he put it on as I was leaving, we were then outside his place and I still couldn't hear him talking.
These things may be old, but they still have their uses today.
I still have a used, fairly high-quality audio system from the late 90s, i.e. an amplifier with good speakers, which is connected to my computer – a Bluetooth receiver for my cell phone is also connected (as well as a mixer and preamplifier for a record player).
I highly recommend it: great sound quality for little money.
Stereo racks like this? This is childhood home stuff.
Me? When I moved on my own for university, all I had on audio front was a CD/cassette boombox.
And it never got better. Had 4.1 speakers for my computer at one point. Now, not even that.
(Side note: I swear, people who came up with HDMI don't know what they're doing. Ethernet? Who the hell asked for Ethernet? We have Ethernet cables for Ethernet. Anyway: in a sensible design, televisions/monitors would have HDMI Audio Out ports. Which you then could wire to your brand spanking new digital input based amplifier in a giant stereo rack. Or a D/A converter box that feeds your ancient amplifier. Do any TVs and monitors work that way? Of course not, we have janky audio output nonsense. New TVs and monitors don't necessarily even have headphone jacks. Why.)(Edit: Apparently I was talking nonsense. I definitely should get my morning coffee now.)
TVs do have HDMI audio output. It's the ARC/eARC port, and you connect that to your AVR or soundbar.
...Thanks for the clarification. Oh cool, all I got in my instructions was "here's our crappy set-top box, you should plug it in the 'ARC' thing if you have one." Does this set-top box have output options? Well it's a crappy set-top box, what do you think. *sigh* One more reason I'm canceling that service the moment the contract allows.
Yeah, I'm not sure why they'd tell you to plug a set top box into that.
It works as an input too, but if you run something like Netflix from the TV app, that's where the audio output from it goes.
Personally I run it all into the AVR, and from there to the TV, because I've got an older ARC set. ARC was limited to older DVD-era audio formats like stereo PCM, DTS 5.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1 (with the limited Atmos support). More modern sets have eARC which supports all the fancier Blu-ray-era formats, DTS-MA, Dolby TrueHD & Atmos, and 7.1 PCM. All the major streaming services use the older formats though, so most people won't notice any difference.
I plug everything up to my AVR besides my Xbox and PlayStation. I use eArc for them, since HDMI 2.1 sometimes can be finicky on my AVR even though it has it.
Yeah, I remember them finding all sorts of issues around the launch of the new consoles, since they were the first proper test for the HDMI 2.1 AVRs.
My AVR is only a 2.0, but I found it could actually pass 120Hz at 1080p because that's what my 2017 TV supports.
Shit, my folks still had their 8 track player when I was a kid, although I don't remember them using it much in favor of records instead
I bought a similar set up from a thrift store not long ago, came with the cabinet and everything. $60. The speakers it came with with put my newer tv speakers to shame, and I started building a vinyl collection because of it
No RTR? Noobs
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.
I was given one of these by my brother when I was about 10yrs old, as he'd just bought some new fangled Pioneer with multi CD changer.
I had it for a few years before getting my own system with CD player... the innards were removed as they were failing, and I used it on it's side to keep all my records in with my stereo on top.
That was the stack my dad had in the 80s! I can distinctively remember the dial layout on the amp, the feeling of the switches when they changed position on my fingers and the heft of the volume dial in the middle.
I don't know what happened to them; i'm a little bit sad about that now.
Later on he built his own amp. He never had a formal education in electronics, but he taught himself quite a lot, including fixing TV's with bad solder spots.
My dad had a 70's twin tape deck stereo when I was a kid, it had balance sliders on it for recording tape to tape... which we found out was perfect for copying computer games that more modern stereos struggled with. It was a counter top system rather than a tower and probably at least close to 1m wide. I remember him replacing it at the end of the 80's with some weird little stereo that could play both sides of an LP without turning it over.
That has a frigging CD player in it. Ours had an 8-track.
We have this right now
That and tower speakers in the 4 corners of the room were what we had for surround sound
Yes.
Missing an 8-track player. Not sure if Sony ever made one, but I imagine they might have.
Love to spend $3000 in 1980s money to get the sound quality of a modern day $150 pair of headphones. Also, really cool to dedicate a full wall of my house to a series of machines that will be obsolete inside six months. Double plus also too, the music cassette was a garbage medium for a garbage era.
Anyone old enough to remember this can tell you about the day they turned a refrigerator sized cabinet of music into
this little guy. Absolutely changed my life.
Hard disagree: well maintained vintage audio gear sounds better than 150 dollar headphones. But, I would usually rather listen to a sound system than headphones.