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

[Mart68]

Here in Europe it was used to make "compressed" copies of DVDs.

Indeed - I think I still have 'Attack Of The Clones' on VCD somewhere. Picture quality is terrible.

 

[sigbergaudio]

Yes, the move from cassette tape to CD... was a game changer.

Also, the shift from basic sound chips like the C64’s SID or early PC beeps to the power of the Amiga’s Paula chip and later soundcards on PCs was revolutionary for home music creation. The proliferation of "tracker" software in the late 80's and early-to-mid 90's let hobbyists and musicians compose music using sampled sounds.


JSmith

I also find it interesting how much our imagination patched up the graphics back in the day. I remember the games of the 90s as having really good graphics and I had no problem immersing myself in the stories, while in reality it looked like this.

 

[DavidEdwinAston]

From Radio Luxembourg on Mom and Dad's bakelite radio, everything, except that early rock and roll, has become sensationally better.

 

[DudleyDuoflush]

First CD player I bought was a Marantz to live alongside my Rega Planar 3, A&R A60 amp and Ruark speakers. The increase in quality wasn't substantial but the increase in convenience was massive as portable and car CD players came along. I think the main difference now is high quality sound reproduction is much more accessible and mainstream without delving deeply into the hi-fi world. A mainstream Sonos system really does sound very good.

The step to MP3, streamed media really was a backward step in quality for a long time but has now, to my ears, caught up with CD quality even using the likes of Spotify.

The biggest single improvement I can think of is car audio. The stock stereo system I have in my car would've been mind blowing in the 80s.

 

[Mart68]

I also find it interesting how much our imagination patched up the graphics back in the day. I remember the games of the 90s as having really good graphics and I had no problem immersing myself in the stories, while in reality it looked like this.

View attachment 444748

That was still a big step up from where I started with ZX81:



At the time we thought even that was amazing.

 

[whereisbrian]

I also started with a ZX81 computer and a Zenith green monitor, the soft keyboard was a kind of hell

 

[Esprit]

also find it interesting how much our imagination patched up the graphics back in the day. I remember the games of the 90s as having really good graphics and I had no problem immersing myself in the stories, while in reality it looked like this.

My first Mac had 4MB of RAM and 20MB of HD.
The monitor was 9" and it was black and white.
We did graphics for work.

 

[beeface]

I also find it interesting how much our imagination patched up the graphics back in the day. I remember the games of the 90s as having really good graphics and I had no problem immersing myself in the stories, while in reality it looked like this.

View attachment 444748

I like how the cool illustrations on the box art and manual helped to guide our imaginations, especially with games that had more primitive graphics than this

 

[beeface]

I'm Gen X, and was underwhelmed by CD, it's better, but not a game changer, good vinyl playback is good enough to get most of the music across. Adoption of DSP is the big one for me, I missed hifi with good tone controls when that was a thing, they had all vanished when I got my first good system.

You might like this book, it's an enjoyable read about the history of recording music.

Thanks for the rec - I’ll check it out

 

[bluefuzz]

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.

Largely unnoticable until recently.

I'm not a Boomer but only just. For the first decade or so of my life my family had a hundred or so classical 78s and a handful of 33.3 LPs. These were all played on a 1950s HMV record player like this:

It sounded fine as far as I remember. Obviously the LPs were a little less scratchy than the 78s but not a lot. It was 'repurposed' by yours truly as a guitar amplifier in the early 80s, much to the chagrin of my mum!

We got a proper stereo hifi in the early 70s with a nice Pioneer deck and some medium size 2-way bookshelf speakers. And that was essentially the limit of musical fidelity until very recently. CDs didn't really make a whole lot of difference to sound quality at the time as the limitation in playback quality was the speakers. I only began buying CDs in the mid 90s and largely stopped buying them barely a decade later when digital downloads and streaming became a thing.

I've always listened to music on what was available and affordable: small transistor radios, cheap tape decks and receivers to mid range 'hifi' separates. Although I've gone through quite a bit of gear through the years, none of it made a revolutionary difference to the sound quality be it digital or analogue. Only in the last half dozen years has the addition of a subwoofer and digital room correction made any truly appreciable difference ...

 

[JeremyFife]

Streaming as the main source of new music was weird (still feels odd) ... how do people get into new stuff when they are not forced to buy one album and listen to it over and over again until it is driven into them - and until it is time to buy the next album days or weeks later!

All this was pre-ASR for me too, so I was still convinced that vinyl was the pinnacle source anyway and the real improvements passed me by at the time

 

[JustJones]

The 8 track tape in automobile stereo followed by the necessary paper match book.

 

[Godataloss]

Gen x here- got my first cd player at 11 in 1984 and listening to REM, Butthole Surfers, and Bob Marley (my sister's boyfriend ran a record store) through Denon headphones was transformative.

 

[Mart68]

The 8 track tape in automobile stereo followed by the necessary paper match book.

My father got a brand new car in 1984 (Honda rebadged as a Rover) which was the first car he ever had with a tape player. That was actually my best quality audio source until I left home in '87. He never used it himself and only ever used the radio to listen to the football commentary.

 

[jhwalker]

I absolutely hated the clicks / pops / wow / distortion of vinyl and the hiss of tape. And the "kerchunk" of 8-track tapes moving from one track to another just made my skin crawl!

When CDs became available, I was the first person I knew to buy a CD player, and the first album I bought was the movie soundtrack to "The Sound of Music" (yes, I was a theater kid). I still remember the wonder of hearing that music come out CRYSTAL CLEAR, with no clicks / pops or distortion of any kind - my ears just relaxed

Since then, I've invested in many improvements (higher-end equipment, digital downloads, DSP, whole-house audio, etc.), but those are all incremental compared with the giant leap that was the advent of the digital age with the introduction of the CD.

 

[SoonToBeRetired]

My parents were in Hong Kong around 1979 when the Sony Soundabout--later known as the Walkman--came out. He bought one and brought it home for me and within seconds of putting down their bags he handed it to me and told me to listen to it. I was astounded by the quality of the headsets--I think they were among the first to use rare earth magnets. I thought at the time that if they ever brought this to the U.S., they would sell like crazy.....

I still have the player, but, unfortunately, the ground breaking headsets are gone.

 

[Neddy]

All the usual boomer stuff in my early years, 78s of my parents (until I decided the turntable was a bus steering wheel, and drove that bus all over the place - I don't think my Dad ever forgave me for that.
My teens were in an area with lots of WWII surplus, second hand, pawn and a few 'hi-fi' stores (also panhandlers; got good at the 'bum's rush' at an early age), which I had to walk by to/from school.
That led to 2nd hand tube gear (surprisingly good for the time), and then HeathKits (amp and preamp) and Sony R2R tape deck (152 sounds right?).
That in turn led to the brand new and radical Advent speakers.

Off to college and discovered JBL (a good dozen college hi-fi /record stores all in a few blocks...so lots of sales people and opportunities to listen to various gear)...which led ultimately to buying the big JBL L200s (leveraged my first car loan to buy them!)...which I'm still using as my mains (upgraded to L300 MF/HF, 4367 woofers now).

I stuck with mostly hi-end Sony pre-amps/tuners and various amps (all on college budgets). I had pretty bad luck with Marantz gear in the late 70s, so moved on to others.

I had a huge LP collection (stopped at record stores twice a week when on campus), then a variety of tape machines, Revox, then several 3head cassette tape machines.
I wrote Basic programs on a sinclair (I had most of them), then Apple II, to enter/store cassette 'play lists' (I was pretty good at segues)..and print them.
Best printer was a small olivetti 'spark-jet' that blasted essentially pencil lead to the page...and I still have some of those cassette lables too.

The odd thing was that, about the time CDs were available, the quality of electronics (from seperates to 'AV Receivers') dropped horribly (late 80s, early 90s, IRCC), where Cheap won out over Good; the beginning of the End of Civilization).

And though I had snagged some good used gear (Bryston), the 'lack of fiddle-ability' of the new 'receivers' largely got me out of the audio hobby; spending more and more money on electronics was a waste of time, esp compared to the electronics artistry and talent that I was used to see coming out of Japan. (Still have most of those!).

So, from my boomer perspective, CDs, while a vast improvement in SQ, crippled my interest bc the electronics (in my budget) was so poor...tho CDs were a vast improvement, it was a decade or so before I could rip them (high quality, not mp3) and thus recreate my best playlists.

Another boomer thing was that income growth sustained my hobby interests into the early 90s - as career blossomed, I could afford better gear....but again, by the early 90s the electronics were - IMO - just black boxes that didn't sound very good to me. So, the audio industry seemed to follow boomer career/expendable income growth until the 90s, when a lot of us just lost interest/family growth, etc.

From there, it wasn't until Amir started ASR, and I'd retired, that I had time or interest again. I also 'found' AK and Lansing Heritage then (2000s).

I still have most of the good electronics, though little of it works anymore (exception: Bryston!), and have actually 'reached' back to aquire a few of the other early JBL speakers (cheap).

Today, with Amir's help, we have absolute bargain basement (pricewise) electronics, largely now solved for price/performance - choose your features and price, Go.
The very first Topping D50 really got my attention (still have that, too!) as the first very HQ (see Amir's definition) DAC for around $100. The next step up was Amir's speaker testing, then the new JBL M2s and then 4367s (and 305s). True 'bargain basement' super high quality gear - had finally arrived!
Then the 8 channel OktoDAC (still amazing).

About the only (affordable) improvement left for me is Dirac (just added a Minidsp Flex for bi-amp crossovers).

Still, most of my music library is local, mostly ripped CDs.
Someone broke into my house and stole all my LPS (over a 1000) to which I now say Thank You, as lugging those things around was a huge headache), so I had to reproduce - mostly from memory - most of my favorite LPs, plus of course, all the new high quality CDs and digital releases that came after.

The FUN part: I'm slowly re-creating some of my early playlists- from those cassette labels I made so carefully!
(The sequencing isn't as preserved, as it was with tapes.)



It's been a wild ride for boomers, I'd say, and fairly costly, but seems like a truly New Age of low cost high quality has arrived - and now mostly well defined, thanks to Amir.

And now I have, for all intents, as close to the perfect audio system, at affordable costs.

I do not particularly like streaming - picking a specific song, then being 'told' to listen to This Next, just annoys the heck out of me, bc the 'next suggestion' is usually horrible and hugely disrupts whatever mood the selected song has provided.
So I doubt I'll ever be that much in to streaming, though I am enjoying the 'create once (playlists) play EVERYWHERE' capabilities.

Its been a fun ride (insert funny meme here) and I'm not quite over yet, either.

Many thanks to Amir from getting us (finally) to solid ground and away from opinionated test reviews!

 

[ta240]

Not sure about my boomer status, born in -62. The advent of cd felt exciting from sound quality point of view but that’s about it.

It was fun being able to select a track without having to wait for fast forward or rewind.

 

[ta240]

I also find it interesting how much our imagination patched up the graphics back in the day. I remember the games of the 90s as having really good graphics and I had no problem immersing myself in the stories, while in reality it looked like this.

View attachment 444748

I really wonder what not using the imagination is doing to our brains and especially children's. I heard of a study where taxi drivers, especially ones that don't use GPS have lower instances of Alzheimer's because they are using part of their brain more for planning routes. Grade school teachers I know say that when kids do creative writing now they are almost all just writing about movies or shows instead of anything they've actually thought up. There is no time to daydream when they are entertained 24/7.

 

[Yuhasz01]

Agree with many others( born 1947, grew up in LA), it was the cd format and players appearing in late 80s and early 90s that really got me engaged with audio hobby at home. Record companies ported their entire catalogues to the new cd format. All the late 50s, 60s, 70s Blues and R&R available again in better sound.

I was never very involved with vinyl records, too fussy; preferred the transistor radio and car radio and live music venues.