Retro Audio Musings - the "old days" vs 2020

[Xulonn]

This thread is being created for the purpose of rambling on about vintage and retro audio - with a hope that the significance and lasting power of various innovations and technologies related to high fidelity audio will be included. I expect the discussion to be random thoughts on the subject rather than a discussion with a clear and coherent focus. At age 78, I am one of the oldest members at ASR, and we won't see much if any first-hand information posted about audio before 1958 - the year stereo LPs went commercial and I got my first component HiFi system.

Let's start off with the oldest stereo amplifier comparison list I could find. While replying this morning to a post about cheap ChiFi components and the quality and support issues in that market segment, I thought about the first used monaural 6L6 vacuum tube amplifier my father bought for me in 1958, and the evolution of audio since then. While researching the topic via Google, I stumbled across ItIsHiFI.com, a fascinating website dedicated to retro and vintage HiFi where I found the below chart. (I will likely spend many hours at that website over the next few days, especially since our province in Western Panama is being put back on full "cannot leave your property" Covid-19 pandemic quarantine for the weekends starting Saturday.)

Shortly after my father helped me to build a big bass-reflex DIY speaker with Jensen drivers as the foundation for my first monaural HiFi system in 1958, the new development of HiFi consumer stereo took off. The below list comparing stereo amplifiers in 1959 includes prices and factory specifications. For your reference, the price of a $100 ChiFi amp would be about $11 in 1958-1959 US dollars. In 2020 US dollars, the $75 - $250 range of listed amplifiers would, with currency inflation, jump up to $665 - $2,400.

It is also interesting to note that there is good a correlation between power rating and weight (which is heavily influenced by the size of the power and output transformers), with the heavier Pilot being an exception, and a wide range of damping factor ratings. If I could have any of the listed amplifiers as a collectors item, it would probably be the Leak.

 

[Xulonn]

My first amplifier was a used Bell 2300 6L6 monaural model, which my father bought for me in 1958 when I was still in high school and living on the south side of Chicago just north of Marquette Park. I don't remember how much it cost, but was probably $70-80 new and $50-60 used.

He also built a custom bass-reflex cabinet for a Jensen 3-way system - a 12" coax speaker with the multi-cell concentric tweeter crossed over to a super tweeter. Sources were a Garrard turntable/record changer, and the AM/FM section of a table radio was my first tuner, tapped before the internal amplifier with the help of my father's ham-radio friend.

--------------------------

Somebody in Japan is trying to sell one of these for almost $1,300 - no thanks!

 

[GXAlan]

Among vintage gear, I have a JBL SA600 which I've begun to restore. $429 in 1968 dollars, so $3000 with inflation.

They definitely go for more in Japan than the US, but the integrated is unique in that it's easy to run the amp separately from the pre-amp. The amp itself is incredible and is easily on par with modern gear when it comes to subjective listening. With my ear to the tweeter, residual noise is similar to my modern amplifiers with 120 dB rated SNR. At the test points, it was rated to +/- 1.5 dB from 3 Hz to 200 kHz.

On the other hand, the pre-amp itself is noisy compared to modern equipment. Back then, as an integrated, its performance exceeded the threshold of test equipment but I think the pre-amp probably brings the system performance to around 85-90 dB.

The biggest problem is channel balance which I have determined to be the potentiometers, all of which were only good to +/- 2dB matching when factory new. The SA600 does have a "test mode" where it only outputs the difference between the two channels (letting you feed the amp a mono signal, and balance the volume pot's mismatch using the balance control). You can easily determine how the channel mismatch occurs through the potentiometer's range.

All in all, listening to this is humbling in that it sounds pretty good and I find that I'm not left wanting for more performance. This is paired with the JBL 4319 which has very low distortion and a woofer with differential drive and electromagnetic braking coil, so presumably it's less sensitive to damping factor.

I've left the unit as-is, but if I replaced the potentiometers with modern flagship designs, I bet the performance would be competitive with modern gear at the 5W SINAD level.

 

[Speedskater]

Link to 'Audio' magazine archive, all the way back to 1947.
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Audio/Audio-Magazine.htm

Link to 'High Fidelity' magazine archive, back to 1951.
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Audio/High-Fidelity-Magazine.htm

and link to countless more:
https://worldradiohistory.com/index.htm

 

[Old Listener]

Among vintage gear, I have a JBL SA600 which I've begun to restore. $429 in 1968 dollars, so $3000 with inflation.

I had an SA600 for some years in the 70s. I thought it was quite satisfactory but it was hard to repair after a failure so I gave up on it. Maybe I should have tried harder to get it repaired.

 

[eddantes]

Radio Shack catalogues 1939-2005

 

[Xulonn]

Audio and High Fidelity were my first go-to audio mags. Another electronics mag I read back then was "Radio-TV Experimenter" - a Science & Mechanics publication. I bought my "No. 191. Tesla Coil" plans from the advert below...

That 811A-based Tesla Coil was based on the one still used at the Boston Museum of Science in their Electric Theater presentations-. In the image below, it's the smaller one with the vertical spark and the 811A tubes visible inside the clear case. Based on some crude experiments and rudimentary hypotheses I made about my observations, as a high school senior, I took 2nd in physics at the Chicago city-wide science fair in 1960 at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry - something I jokingly refer to as the pinnacle of my scientific "career."the phenomena

 

[Xulonn]

Santana Soul Sacrifice at a deafening level (on Bose 901's)

Good observations, Rebbi. I never heard Santana's Soul Sacrifice on Bose speakers, but I did hear it live at a little fish and chips joint just off the Stanford University campus in 1969 just before the release of the first Santana album.

I was 27 y/o, and it was almost three years after finishing my 4+ years stationed as a Hospital Corpsman at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. I was living in Menlo Park at the time, and working as a research technician for a company named RayChem (for radiation chemistry - electron beam particle accelerators used to crosslink polymers).

Although I was a member of "non-hippy" straight society during the week, and working at a high-tech company, I was just beginning my era of weekend pot and psychedelic pleasures. Some friends came down from San Francisco and Oakland to check out my new Saturday night hangout - the Poppycock at the corner of University and High streets. LINK1 LINK2 None of us has had heard of this "Santana" band - their first album was finished, but not due to be released for a few more weeks. I hoped the music would be good so my friends would not be disappointed, and man, were my expectations met. My group of friends was mostly straight (with respect to drugs), so only beer, and no pot for me that night - but it didn't matter. Santana live in that little club was one of the most incredible rock (technically "Latin rock") experiences of my life. Santana drummer Mike Shrieve was 20 years old at the time, and had previously played at the Poppycock with a jazz group when he was a high school student.

This was 1969 and the San Francisco Bay Area had recently established itself as a psychedelic/flower children mecca, and the Grateful Dead were a core band of that era. Although their music and fan bases were very different, I believe that Jerry Garcia and Carlos Santana and their band members were friends. Santana opened for the Grateful Dead upon occasion, including another time I saw them at San Francisco's Cow Palace for the annual Grateful Dead New Years Eve concert on December 31, 1976.

Now, as I look back on my decades of enjoying my three favorite genres - rock, classical and jazz - my favorite Santana songs are Baila mi Hermana (Dance Sister Dance) from the Amigos album in 1976, and Bella from Blues for Salvador in 1987 - "official" video from the fuzzy old VHS days below.

 

[tomtoo]

Link to 'Audio' magazine archive, all the way back to 1947.
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Audio/Audio-Magazine.htm

Link to 'High Fidelity' magazine archive, back to 1951.
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Audio/High-Fidelity-Magazine.htm

and link to countless more:
https://worldradiohistory.com/index.htm

I realy enjoy reading this old US magazines! I have the impression the realy old had much more technical backround in them and then they changed slowly into more advertising like. I did start reading german magazines at around 78. Poor that you cant get that old german magazines free online. I have also the feeling that advertising style did grow and technical backround did go back.
The beginning of the snake oil era.

 

[mhardy6647]

Retro audio, eh

well...

some resources (some of which straddle retro and cutting edge, in idiosyncratic ways)

https://jelabs.blogspot.com/ (Joseph designed the SE 2A3 amp that is my daily driver -- most days)
http://hifiheroin.blogspot.com/ (Dave Slagle -- an ironic fellow... and I mean that ironically, of course)
http://www.itishifi.com/

I am - as you all may have noticed - something of a tubes and horns kind of fellow.
But... due to my age (OK, boomer) I also have something of a soft spot in my head heart for a certain class of mid/late 1970s hifi ephemera, too.

DSC_0241 by Mark Hardy, on Flickr
DSC_9835 by Mark Hardy, on Flickr

as you all also may have noticed.

 

[tomtoo]

Tell me how, as a boy you should not fall in love with her?
https://www.ebay.fr/itm/Marantz-211...Sammler-Zustand-Garantie-Legale-/283921984241

Ok much to expensive for a boy, but the faszination is still there.