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.
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.
So, having a way to mitigate it would be strongly advised.
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.
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.
The audio equivalent of having a homelab
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.
No RTR? Noobs
Even older, huzzah!
Yeah I found this which was more like what we had.
This is what we had, with no TV. You could store records in the center section.
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 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
I'm slightly younger so all of that would have been black plastic instead of brushed steel.
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 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
You call that old? It's got one of those fancy, new-fangled CD players! Not old at all.
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.
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?
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?
Look at Mr. fancy-pants having an EQ in his rack.
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
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.
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.
That and tower speakers in the 4 corners of the room were what we had for surround sound
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.
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.
Yeah, we both might be a similar age.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes… I’m that old
It was a black Technics tower in my family home. I loved to play around with the huge graphic EQ without having a clue. I've also experienced the jack slap a few times (much later though with my own gear) but thankfully never right into an eye but always close to the eyes.
99% of people that owned a graphic eq didn’t have a fucking clue what to do with it
That's true.
It wasn't a good one though because back then they all were just based on very narrow bell filters which barely changed the sound. It took a while until subtractive crossovers in graphic EQs became a thing.
I still don't
A right of passage for geriatric millenials
Hey, those slaps were really hard!
Wow, that is exactly the same tower I have.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's either 5000 dollars or 20 bucks because estate sales just want the fuckers gone.
So not an insane amount of money to spend on something that should last for decades.
Yes, yes, I am.
That’s still in my house. And if I have my way, it will outlive me.
Suicide hotline : dial 988
Even now, that looks like a pretty badass system.
And I took this personally.
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.
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.
God damn that takes me back. My parents had a stack like that in the 90s. Bottom portion was all CDs and the top was a 5 CD changer, tape player/ recorder, radio unit, an amplifier, and these really dope floor speakers that to this day are hooked up to a record player at my uncles house. I remember walking into the living room as Welcome to the Machine was playing. I didn't know the song, of course because I would have been < 5, but I remember being amazed at all the different sounds going on. And then immediately screaming when the air raid siren goes off at the end.
The music of the time these were being made would have sounded incredible through them.
Well, we were living in the land of tornado sirens. Which, got tested once per week during the season. Every week once a week in the afternoon repurposed air raid sirens go off all over town. It was the end of the world to 3 year old me every time it happened. That air raid siren at the end of Welcome to The Machine put that same fear in me. Damn good speakers.
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.