Question for the boomers: what was it like to live through major improvements in audio fidelity?

[pinger]

Jewel cases are the devil's work. Have detested them since day 1. I would like to strangle the team that designed them (I know, I should try decaf I guess).

LOL I've bought maybe 500 CD's and very few problems with the cases. Better than the cardboard crap some labels are starting to use

 

[xanalog]

Jewel cases are the devil's work. Have detested them since day 1. I would like to strangle the team that designed them (I know, I should try decaf I guess).

More so, if you made your own compilation CDRs for road music.
You had to perfectly align your printer/paper, so that you can print the 5mm thin, sticky-back label strips for those jewel-cases!
After about a year, those sticky labels would harden and start peeling off... Curses!

 

[Barrelhouse Solly]

The first record I broke was a 78 that I was going to play on my folks' Magnavox radio/phono console with twin 12" electromagnetic speakers. 20 years later when they got rid of it I used the cabinet for my used mono equipment as well as the 2 stereo setups that followed. The last one was a Dynaco stereo 70 with a Dynaco preamp and tuner and an A/R turntable. I've seen 78s, LPs, CDs, reel to reel, cassette tube and solid state. My first good speakers were ADC 303AX acoustic suspension, based on the A/R model. In a way audio has changed a lot and in a way it hasn't. The electronic side has been implemented with a lot of different hardware but class A and class AB amplification have been around longer than I have. Speakers have different materials but the basics of pushing air involve a vibrating surface driven electrically. Digital media is probably the biggest change. I welcomed CDs. They're fragile but friction and erosion aren't a problem. If you take good care of them they'll sound the way they did when you bought them for a long time. Taking the material from the storage medium to sound electronically rather than mechanically is a huge improvement. Oh, 1 more thing. Stuff has gotten cheaper. Inflation has raised prices by roughly a factor of 10 since I bought my first audio gear in 1965. A moderate priced receiver back then was about $300. That's $3000 in today's money.

 

[Tom C]

As a youngster, a transistor was something you took to the beach to listen to AM radio. Not nearly as good as the tube consoles everyone had in their homes. We couldn’t believe transistors could be better than tubes. The differences were more about the speakers than the amps, but average little kids like me didn’t realize.
The biggest change with CD was that now you had a playback system that could deliver everything that was in the analog tape. But most recordings were still made on analog tape. Such discs were labeled AAD for analog recorded, analog mixed, digital disc. My first DDD was The Nutcracker Fantasy, with Andre Previn conducting, a rarity when I got it in the later 1980’s. Things sounded different enough that it took some getting used to

 

[krabapple]

Jewel cases are the devil's work. Have detested them since day 1. I would like to strangle the team that designed them (I know, I should try decaf I guess).

Are they really worse than extracting and reinserting an LP from its sleeve, all the while being careful not to leave a dreaded fingerprint?

 

[beeface]

I grew up with a lot of cracked CD jewel cases, but I guess that's what happens when you're a kid

Digipaks aren't great for CD storage

In an ideal world, they would have been like a DVD case with its soft plastic, but square shape

 

[Robin L]

I grew up with a lot of cracked CD jewel cases, but I guess that's what happens when you're a kid

Digipaks aren't great for CD storage

In an ideal world, they would have been like a DVD case with its soft plastic, but square shape

In an ideal world they would be in the cardboard sleeves one finds in multi-disc sets of CDs these days.

 

[beeface]

In an ideal world they would be in the cardboard sleeves one finds in multi-disc sets of CDs these days.

not familiar. easy to identify a record by its spine?

 

[Frank Dernie]

Inflation has raised prices by roughly a factor of 10 since I bought my first audio gear in 1965

A pet subject of mine
It is difficult to compare inflation really, it depends what currency and what items.
I think the world's financial "industry" has done much worse than it quotes in its published inflation calculators - probably by judicious choice of items to compare.
TVs are much cheaper than when I first started work, for example, but now we have home computers and game consoles with no real equivalent back then.

I finished my engineering degree and 2 years in service training in 1972 and got my first proper job as a Noise and Vibration research engineer. My first salary was £1100 per year. On that we married, saved for our first car and first house. Admittendly my generation nimby-ed our way into not building anywhere enough houses so here the price of houses has gone up from around 3x annual income to over 10x in places. I apologise on behalf of my generation for our selfishness and greed in this respect.
When I retired at the end of 2009 the starting salary for a job like that one was around £22,000 per year - 20x more than we had, and I am pretty sure I couldn't have lived as well on that in 2010 as I did on £1100 in 1972.

So based on living standards I would say the pound sterling lost at least 95% of its value during my working lifetime - whatever bank calculators say.

And it has maybe lost a substantial percentage more since 2010, some food items have doubled in price in that time.
My pension savings lost almost half their value following the 2008 collapse for example. Investments look like they do well, but compared to how badly currency has plummeted in its ability to buy stuff, nowhere near well enough.
The first pound I saved could have bought a 3 course lobster meal, or 5 imperial gallons (23 litres) of petrol when I saved it. Now it can buy half a loaf of bread or 0.71 litres of petrol.

Saving turned out to be mainly feeding the greed of the financial "industry".

 

[Barrelhouse Solly]

A pet subject of mine
It is difficult to compare inflation really, it depends what currency and what items.
I think the world's financial "industry" has done much worse than it quotes in its published inflation calculators - probably by judicious choice of items to compare.
TVs are much cheaper than when I first started work, for example, but now we have home computers and game consoles with no real equivalent back then.

I finished my engineering degree and 2 years in service training in 1972 and got my first proper job as a Noise and Vibration research engineer. My first salary was £1100 per year. On that we married, saved for our first car and first house. Admittendly my generation nimby-ed our way into not building anywhere enough houses so here the price of houses has gone up from around 3x annual income to over 10x in places. I apologise on behalf of my generation for our selfishness and greed in this respect.
When I retired at the end of 2009 the starting salary for a job like that one was around £22,000 per year - 20x more than we had, and I am pretty sure I couldn't have lived as well on that in 2010 as I did on £1100 in 1972.

So based on living standards I would say the pound sterling lost at least 95% of its value during my working lifetime - whatever bank calculators say.

And it has maybe lost a substantial percentage more since 2010, some food items have doubled in price in that time.
My pension savings lost almost half their value following the 2008 collapse for example. Investments look like they do well, but compared to how badly currency has plummeted in its ability to buy stuff, nowhere near well enough.
The first pound I saved could have bought a 3 course lobster meal, or 5 imperial gallons (23 litres) of petrol when I saved it. Now it can buy half a loaf of bread or 0.71 litres of petrol.

Saving turned out to be mainly feeding the greed of the financial "industry".

In the '70s I worked in a pizza parlor in Berkeley. One of our regular customers was a grad student in econ. His specialty was indexing. He said that because the criteria were arbitrary and the data not always clear no index was objectively true. You always had to look at them in context. I think it's still true. Working in a college town was always interesting if you got to know your customers.

 

[xanalog]

Saving turned out to be mainly feeding the greed of the financial "industry".

A previous 'devil's advocate' rebuttal to the ^above^:

A recent radio advertisement starts with "most people spend more time planning for their vacation rather than their retirement"!

Would you [we?] have been better off if you [we?] had spent those lost savings on vacations instead of feeding those financial 'industries'?

I don't think you [we?] have to make any apologies for the ills of the 20th century.

 

[Frank Dernie]

A previous 'devil's advocate' rebuttal to the ^above^:

Would you [we?] have been better off if you [we?] had spent those lost savings on vacations instead of feeding those financial 'industries'?

I don't thing you [we?] have to make any apologies for the ills of the 20th century.

I am reasonably well off, just nowhere near as well of as if the financial industry had remained properly regulated and honest.
IMHO.

 

[LtMandella]

Are they really worse than extracting and reinserting an LP from its sleeve, all the while being careful not to leave a dreaded fingerprint?

In one way at least, jewel cases are worse: I have never had an LP cardboard sleeve fall apart in my hands while I am using it. Had that happen MANY times with those CD devil cases.

 

[Chrispy]

In one way at least, jewel cases are worse: I have never had an LP cardboard sleeve fall apart in my hands while I am using it. Had that happen MANY times with those CD devil cases.

I've had disintegating cardboard for LPs, but usually with a great amount of handling. I hate jewel cases so generally discard them as soon as I receive one, I rip the disc to a couple hardrives and archive the disc as backup (but do put artwork along with disc in something like this type of binder)

 

[David1955]

As a millennial, I feel like there hasn't really been any massive improvements in fidelity in my lifetime.

CDs had already been invented when I was born, so unless you're an audiophile, redbook has been as good as it gets for as long as I've been alive.
In fact, at some point, mainstream audio quality got worse, when CDs gave way to 128kbps mp3s etc. Thankfully, we recovered when Internet speeds got faster and storage got cheaper.

Before anyone jumps on me for my first sentence: I don't want to diminish how great it is that you can buy excellent IEMs from Amazon for $25. I do appreciate that audio equipment has gotten better and generally cheaper in my lifetime, but:

I'm fascinated to know what it like to go from 78s to 45s and 33 1/3s, mono to stereo, tubes to solid state, analogue to digital.
The improvements to fidelity in my 36 years have seemed comparatively iterative.

Were there any moments that stood out to you? Anything that blew you away the first time you heard it?

My introduction to Hifi came as a child in the UK science museum. We had some old 78s at home. They had a Quad ESL 57 setup one year to demonstrate stereo. They were playing a recording of a string quartet. At the time I hated string quartets but nonetheless the strength of the illusion and the realism of the sound blew me away and hooked me. I remember CDs’ introduction. I bought the Marantz interpretation of the first Philips machine with a Marantz receiver I owned previously. I could hear the weaknesses of my record system (I went to concerts too) and remember thinking why the increased clarity was so emotionally unimpressive. My other blow-away came when I swapped a Cyrus One amplifier with an EL34 valve design by Audio Innovations at double the cost on a sale-or-return basis. Initially sounded much worse than the Cyrus; thin, reedy. Continued like this for a couple of days. I was just about to send it back (regrettably because it was very pretty, with its exposed valves arranged like an Art Deco cityscape) when I was listening to a CD of some Bach organ music on an old French organ and its sound suddenly expanded and soundstage, resolution and dynamics deepened, completely blowing the Cyrus away and dropping my jaw. I still puzzle over why an amplifier that measures worse was able to (after it was run in) sound so much better. I suspect that valve distortions somehow trick the ear into processing sound differently to the objectively better but qualitatively different transistor ones (my memory says second order vs fourth order). The only people these days who I notice still reflecting on this are electric guitarists with their valve Marshall’s, and the way many audio technicians prefer different speakers for mixing vs listening. “Speakers” is an another change over time. When I started the debate was whether to spend the money on higher quality mono vs stereo. Then came amplifier flexibility (filter, slope, rumble controls to manage reproduction imperfections). The UK hierarchy was Quad, Leak, Armstrong, and then for a while Sinclair vs the Japanese storming the budget market (where I was). The UK market was transformed by Linn and Naim, shifting to emphasis to primacy of the source and minimalistic amplification. Then valves came back (I guess others had my experience too) and now forums like this one are bringing the focus back to speakers and DSP is reviving amplifier flexibility and adaptability.

 

[Chrispy]

My introduction to Hifi came as a child in the UK science museum. We had some old 78s at home. They had a Quad ESL 57 setup one year to demonstrate stereo. They were playing a recording of a string quartet. At the time I hated string quartets but nonetheless the strength of the illusion and the realism of the sound blew me away and hooked me. I remember CDs’ introduction. I bought the Marantz interpretation of the first Philips machine with a Marantz receiver I owned previously. I could hear the weaknesses of my record system (I went to concerts too) and remember thinking why the increased clarity was so emotionally unimpressive. My other blow-away came when I swapped a Cyrus One amplifier with an EL34 valve design by Audio Innovations at double the cost on a sale-or-return basis. Initially sounded much worse than the Cyrus; thin, reedy. Continued like this for a couple of days. I was just about to send it back (regrettably because it was very pretty, with its exposed valves arranged like an Art Deco cityscape) when I was listening to a CD of some Bach organ music on an old French organ and its sound suddenly expanded and soundstage, resolution and dynamics deepened, completely blowing the Cyrus away and dropping my jaw. I still puzzle over why an amplifier that measures worse was able to (after it was run in) sound so much better. I suspect that valve distortions somehow trick the ear into processing sound differently to the objectively better but qualitatively different transistor ones (my memory says second order vs fourth order). The only people these days who I notice still reflecting on this are electric guitarists with their valve Marshall’s, and the way many audio technicians prefer different speakers for mixing vs listening. “Speakers” is an another change over time. When I started the debate was whether to spend the money on higher quality mono vs stereo. Then came amplifier flexibility (filter, slope, rumble controls to manage reproduction imperfections). The UK hierarchy was Quad, Leak, Armstrong, and then for a while Sinclair vs the Japanese storming the budget market (where I was). The UK market was transformed by Linn and Naim, shifting to emphasis to primacy of the source and minimalistic amplification. Then valves came back (I guess others had my experience too) and now forums like this one are bringing the focus back to speakers and DSP is reviving amplifier flexibility and adaptability.

Paragraphs?

 

[Tom C]

The problem with CD jewel cases was not so much getting the discs in and out. It was the flimsy little arms the hinge pins were on snapping off.

 

[Frank Dernie]

The problem with CD jewel cases was not so much getting the discs in and out. It was the flimsy little arms the hinge pins were on snapping off.

That and the little lugs the disc clips onto breaking if the case has ever been dropped with a disc in - so can be the case for "new" sealed discs.

 

[Mart68]

The problem with CD jewel cases was not so much getting the discs in and out. It was the flimsy little arms the hinge pins were on snapping off.

True. I bought a box of new cases and replaced all the broken ones.

The original 1980s cases - the ones with the Compact Disc logo moulded into them - are better quality than most of the later ones.

 

[Mnyb]

This thing changed music playback for me. Having my entire music collection connected to my amplifier, where I could access it from any computer in the house or just a remote control was amazing.
View attachment 444774
I remember when I first got it in and everyone else was using an ipod in a docking station (usually with its own speakers) to listen to their music. The people I knew looked at me funny when I'd tell them about it and they'd usually go "why not just use an ipod". Now, 20 years later nobody would go "why not just plug something into your stereo when you want to listen and get up and walk across the room to change the song and not be able to see what is playing from across the room?"

SB2 I only got into it at the SB3 stage , but truly inventive, multiroom music in the early 2000’s