Ar 7 Speakers Vintage Audio

Vintage muscle cars, old stereo receivers, speakers fromthe ‘60s, and other cool relics are enjoying a resurgence. But are they betterthan the new stuff?Having been ateen during the 1960s, I became very enamored with audio gear and muscle cars.I owned some classic examples of both. I had my share of tube electronics, theobligatory Big Hi-Fi Speakers, and I even raced big-block Fords at the dragstrip. (Never on the street, of course; certainly not. Cough.) Those of us who livedduring this period often had a love of cars and hi-fi that could make a Venndiagram that looked like a total eclipse.Vintagemuscle cars are works of art, and I love them. But despite their lofty performancereputations, hyperbolically augmented with the passage of time, they were slugsby today’s standards. The nicest muscle car I owned was a new ChapmanAutomotive-tuned black 1969 Mustang with a 428 cubic inch engine.

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It had noluxury options, but it had every performance option offered that year. It ran a14-second-flat ¼ mile, which is, shockingly, the same as a pedestrianVolkswagen Passat V6 or a recent Nissan Altima. My Mustang rattled, handledpoorly, and got around 11 mpg on leaded premium. It was unreliable,uncomfortable, it reeked of raw gasoline, yet I loved it and I wish I stillowned it. Most performance cars of that era were similar in that as cool asthey were, they weren’t very good machines.1969 Classic Ford Mustang Muscle CarIn contrast,over the past twenty years, I’ve owned four new cars capable of running 11.6 to13.2-second ¼ miles. They all have yielded 25-33 highway mpg, and they’ve doneit safely and reliably.

Recently I read that the 2016 Mercedes AMG GLA45 SUV,with a diminutive 2-liter, 4-cylinder engine, will be rated at 375 horses. Thecurrent 355 horsepower model does 0-60 in a scant 4.2 seconds and the ¼ mile in12.8 seconds, which is faster than anystock vintage muscle car, whether it be a 426 Hemi Challenger, Yenko L-72Camaro, L-88 427 Corvette, or Boss 429 Mustang. Newer may be better, but notnecessarily cooler, and I’ve found this also applies to audio gear.I belong to afew vintage audio pages on The Interwebs. I expected to see posts of coolaudiophile pieces from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, and yes, there have been manyinteresting posts featuring the better components of the era. But much of theactivity features yard sale, thrift store, pawn shop, and found-at-the-curbfive-buck junk. And, truthfully, even many of the most respected vintage pieceswere terribly flawed and of laughably poor quality.

Like classic muscle cars,vintage audio gear is truly wonderful, magical, lovable stuff, but theperformance is, on average, way below what you can buy new today. (There is onecategory that is a notable exception, and we’ll look at that one later.)Loudspeakersfrom the ‘50s and ‘60s ignored many of the laws of physics, but so what, aslong as they were made with real walnut! Big speakers with 15” woofers rarelyextended much below 50 or 60 Hz. The woofers used flimsy paper cones, stampedbaskets, small-diameter voice coils, and inefficient “Alnico V” magnetstructures.

Tolerances weren’t tight. Enclosures were not considered especiallyimportant, and they were generally made of cheap pressboard or even plywood. Thecabinet walls were often thin and resonant, and rarely was any internal bracingused. If any acoustical material was used in the enclosure, it might have beena small bit of cheap batting or fiberglass, but not enough to control the backwaves within the enclosure. Those unmitigated back waves, unabsorbed, tended toexit the enclosure through the undamped walls or, even worse, through the paperspeaker cones, adding to distortion.

The worst offenders were the big, cheapJapanese speakers, but American loudspeakers weren’t much better. In fairness,of the Japanese speakers of the period, Yamaha, Onkyo, and Pioneer had some reallydecent products, especially at the top of their lines.Vintage Pioneer SpeakersDrivers ofvintage speakers were usually attached to the enclosure with wood screws,something you won’t see even in a modern entry-level speaker. Crossovers hadelectrolytic capacitors in the signal path, right up until (and after) WalterJung published his seminal papers on distortion in cheap caps. Electrolytic andceramic disc capacitors had poor tolerances over time, and generally had harshersound, possibly due to saturation. Sometimes three and four-way speakers didn’teven have crossover circuits; they just had a single capacitor on each mid andtweeter to filter out lower frequencies at 6 dB/octave.

One of the most famousthree-way speakers in history utilized the woofer full range, high-passed themidrange, and then high-passed the tweeter. Throughout the midrange, all threedrivers were simultaneously reproducing the same frequencies, and the resultwas an annoying, blurred mess. My friend Scott Lowell has made it his missionto modify vintage Bose, Infinity, and JBL speakers by replacing the caps (and evensome drivers) with higher-quality components, yielding better sound. Wecertainly have learned a great deal over the past decades.Midrangedrivers and tweeters ignored physics by being placed randomly on their baffles,disregarding the acoustical interaction among the drivers. Multiple midrangedrivers, placed next to each other, or even a foot apart, inducedcomb-filtering effects. Often baffles were recessed with as much as a half-inchlip around the edge, which caused diffraction, which is, (duh), called edge diffraction. Beyond tuning theenclosure to the resonant frequency of the woofer, not much real engineeringwent into the design of many vintage loudspeaker enclosures.There weremanufacturers who did try to address some of these acoustical and electricalissues.

In the early 1960s, Wharfedale used a double wall enclosure for many oftheir loudspeakers, and filled the void between the outer and inner walls withsand to damp the enclosure. This worked very well, and I’m a bit surprised thistechnique isn’t used more today. (Please note that I did not say “dampen” theenclosure, because that would have meant making it wet. Damp ≠ dampen.)Over theyears, I’ve owned dozens of speakers, some of which are considered classicvintage. I owned a pair of Altec A7 Voice of the Theater horn speakers in theearly ‘70s.

They were used as P.A. Speakers for one of my working bands, andthey did a very nice job in that application. On a rare off week, I wrestledthem up into my apartment, salivating in anticipation, and hooked them up to myvintage Dynaco tube electronics, expecting them to handily outperform the two LargeAdvents I owned at the time. Instead, I was shocked at how horrible the Altecssounded. They had no bass extension (60 Hz at best), no treble extension (12kHz at best), and they possessed a forward, harsh midrange, something that canbe confirmed by looking at their frequency response curve. I happened to relatemy saga of disappointment as my first post on a vintage hi-fi Facebook page,and I got pummeled by enraged enthusiasts who, unlike me, had never owned Voiceof the Theaters. My observations are validated in.

The fact that these speakers arepretty much unlistenable does not take anything away from their cool factor,though, much as a ’68 Dodge Charger with a 383 4bbl is coolalbeit with clumsy handlingand lethargic acceleration.There were some nice speakers from the ‘50s and ‘60s,actually, and some exception speakers from the ‘70s and ‘80s. While many had anappealing but unnatural sound, there were a few that strived for accuracy. Ialways loved the pure midrange of the original 1957 Quad ESL-57, aninefficient, fragile speaker that blew up solid state amplifiers due to itsreactive load. I owned a single AR-4 (before there was stereo), and it was anaccurate if not somewhat boring and subdued speaker, with surprisingly goodbass. Powergold 12 keygen generator download. The AR-2ax and AR-3a models were much better, and they were probably themost accurate speakers of the period, if you didn’t consider dynamic range orhigh output very important.

Other notable successes from this era were Bozak,JBL, Klipsch, and a few other designs that had an impressive and satisfyingsound. I would rank the big JBLs near the top of my favorites from back then.Electronics,too, have improved markedly since the 1950s, with a few caveats. I remember thedisappointment when I “upgraded” my Dynaco tube gear to their new solid stategear, an SCA-80Q. Bass performance was much more authoritative, but midrangeand treble performance was like the proverbial fingernails on a blackboard. Aswith most newer technologies, transistor electronics rapidly improved since thefirst wave was introduced, and some of those vintage separates still sounddecent when compared to today’s separates.The componentwith the most checkered history is definitely the receiver, and this is the“notable exception” I referred to earlier.

Early tube and solid state receiversdidn’t offer much in power and sound quality. As time passed, we got into the“watts war” which was much like the “horsepower war” in the automobile world.Receivers got bigger and bigger, and more powerful, culminating in monsterslike the 270-watt per channel Pioneer SX-1980. Unlike the receivers of today,this boat anchor weighed a hefty 78 lbs.

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It had a sophisticated (for the time)quartz-lock FM tuning system, and the robust amplifier stages used discreteoutput devices, just like the better separates. There were many formidablereceivers of that period from Sansui, Yamaha, Marantz, Luxman, and others. HarmanKardon, NAD, and Proton receivers weren’t very powerful, but they punched abovetheir weight class with high current and the ability to drive low impedanceloads.Vintage Sansui ReceiverBut thenreceivers took a step backwards in the early ‘80s, especially in their outputstages. While the preamp and tuner sections continued to improve over the years,manufacturers figured out that if they eliminated discrete output transistorsand big power supplies in favor of IC output devices, they could hit the ratedoutput on a test bench and save money. The problem was those integrated circuitoutputs wouldn’t drive a low-impedance load, they could fail spectacularly, andthey didn’t sound especially good.

And although receivers did get better soundingover subsequent years, when they became multi-channel products with five,seven, or more channels, mostmanufacturers went back to skimping on the expensive power supplies and outputstages. This practice exists even today, which is why I often recommendseparate components instead of a receiver, if economically feasible.See:AnAtmos-enabled receiver can have eleven output stages, which take up a lot ofreal estate and add cost. This has somewhat been mitigated by receivers goingfrom heavy, complex Class B or Class AB output stages that generate a lot ofheat to more efficient and smaller Class D circuits. Now if only they would alldrive a 4-ohm load, I’d be a happy camper.You may find the following twoexcellent articles by Steve Feinstein interesting:ConclusionI fullyunderstand the romance with old cars and funky old hi-fi gear. I even own some1962 McIntosh tube stuff that I hook up once in a while. There are certainlyexceptions, but nearly all cars and most audio equipment are far superior todaythan fifty years ago. Progress is generally a good thing, whether it’s cars oraudio gear.

We still need to remember and appreciate that cool, funky oldstuff, but I’ll take today’s offerings over vintage, hands down. I'm a vintage guyI own heavily modded Klipsch Cornwalls with ALK crossovers and Crites Tweeters, these speakers would certainly be considered vintage. However, what about the new vintage? High End speakers from the 90's before speaker prices went through the roof? That's what I'm using now - I'm using Infinity Composition Prelude P-FR's and I must say they are some of the best sounding speakers I've ever heard!!! I like them more than almost anything I heard at Axpona in 2012 (I put them right there in the class with Legacy Focus, JA Pulsars, and the Tidal speakers - only the Scanea's and a few others sound a bit better - but not for the money spent)!

I believe that's the competitive point of “vintage” the 90's when many a great speaker was made and now is actually affordable!!!! I could not choose any answer from the poll.

I can't afford today's high end, but I can find middlin' high vintage toys affordably. I just acquired a pair of Khorns, which I'm thoroughly enjoying, and a custom-built tube amp based on the ST-70 is even now in shipment. Beefier power tranny with 4-8-16 ohm taps, updated driver with separate tube biasing, greater cap storage and a slightly larger chassis, all for which I have highish-end hopes, and a dated old Lexicon DC-1 and feel as though my money goes further with this approach.

However, I am not so delusional as to believe “it blows the crap they make today out of the water” as a few of the more rabid vintage enthusiasts seem to believe. We all pays our money and makes our choices. I like how the term vintage is applied to old audio components which are on the used market for one reason or another, like the original owner passes and his adult children want to get rid of Dad's audio gear but they don't want to just toss it out.A year or two after I purchased a Marantz 2230 Receiver back in 1973 my receiver was regarded as an antique.

Now that same receiver in working order sells for more on ebay than I paid for it new over 40 years ago. Is it better than any of today's $300 dollar receivers? Its case definitely has a better look and feel; but, I don't think it performs better. It does make me wonder though how much one of these old receivers would sell for if produced today. I also wonder what my JBL L100t3's would sell for if still made today.

I suppose they are not made today because few could afford them.At any rate, I can see how the search for vintage audio components could be a very nice distraction. Some today, as I understand it, have a passion for the Sony ES components from the 1980's to the mid 1990's. I can appreciate their enthusiasm for a mint condition find from that period.

It must give them great satisfaction. Gene, post: 1106686, member: 4348Are the glowing memories of vintage audio gear and vintage automobiles justified, or were they just mediocre machines whose performance has somehow “improved” over the decades?Both!Glowing memories were justified because the quality of what you could get then vs 5-10 years earlier was dramatically improved. That kind of progress makes for a Golden Age!Modern gear should have at least a marginal improvement over vintage, but you can't take away my fond memories of the gear I recognized as seminal in the development of quality sound.I love it that there is a cadre of people buying refurbed/tweaked Dynaco/Hafler ST-70's which does make for a reasonable argument that good vintage designs still have value (though I'll stick with my Denon AVR).