We had this in my house growing up
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Separate Tuner, Cassette Deck, Amplifier, CD player, Equalizer, and Turntable?
I am old enough and if that system were in good shape I would set it up in my living room right now. Would probably leave the cassette deck and CD player in storage though.
Definitely going for this setup next month when I move ..just going Vinyl and speakers was too little. (I know it's sacrilegious to say this but Bluetooth speakers for the record player also let me connect my phone and gives me the other sources... Is it high Fidelity it's fine... I'm an audio engineer I can say that.)
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Love to spend $3000 in 1980s money to get the sound quality of a modern day $150 pair of headphones. Also, really cool to dedicate a full wall of my house to a series of machines that will be obsolete inside six months. Double plus also too, the music cassette was a garbage medium for a garbage era.
Anyone old enough to remember this can tell you about the day they turned a refrigerator sized cabinet of music into
this little guy. Absolutely changed my life.
Hard disagree: well maintained vintage audio gear sounds better than 150 dollar headphones. But, I would usually rather listen to a sound system than headphones.
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I feel called out
To be clear, I think homelabs are great!
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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.
I grew up on crt as well, but that's because my parent's kept working until like 2015 when they swapped it for a 4k lcd with dimming zones
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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.
My parents had a JVC setup. Dual cassette deck with the click buttons like a VCR, a separate tuner, turntable and a CD player. The JVC amp had a digital EQ with buttons for each bands and the meters were florescent with waterfall displays for each band. The speakers were 12 inch with 12 Inc passive radiators and we're as tall as me when I was a kid. It was black brushed aluminum.
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Lol, this comment at least makes up for it some
Also, i love the aesthetic of these old stereos. Kinda makes me want to hunt one down now. Of course with my luck the market is probably hot for them these days so it's probably not as cheap as it would have been 10-15 years ago and given the age there's a chance they'll need some TLC to get them working properly again... Then i would probably plug my phone in through the Aux and just end up using it that way like 90% of the time if I'm being real, lol
Getting matching gear together will cost ya. If you're willing to take some time and mix and match, the thrifts and FB Marketplace have deals now and again.
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The phone-aux concern is real. An old system like that is nice for decor if you like the look, but having a physical collection of music is so inconvenient when you're used to streaming and mp3s, I fucking feel that.
If you do want one for the aesthetic, though, I'd recommend checking brick and mortar thrift stores or garage/estate sales. My nearby charity shop always has a few components stacked up on a shelf, same corner as the pandemic breadmakers, haha.
I have a mismatched stack of ancient shit as pictured and run my PC audio through the EQ and amp. Could use some tightening up for hiss, but good enough. Haven't wired the tape deck yet, no CD player.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I was likely in uni when this came out. I am cassette, 8-track and LP old. The CD came out when I was in uni. I remember having to decide whether to get a Betamax or VHS tape player when they came out.
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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.
Which speakers?
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Yeah I found this which was more like what we had.
I keep threatening to write a book about this.
I have a theory that the craft of furniture making died in the 1940's or so, when furniture became fully industrial and commodified. Which is why craftsmen build 100 year old designs, and things like these console TVs and stereos were manufactured. We went from not having radios, to war, to radios as furniture, to particle board TV stands.
Proper craftsman built furniture is stuck 100 years ago, somebody somewhere built a Morris chair this afternoon, I've got a dining room hutch 90% finished on my workbench right now, but furniture designed for the electronics age is all factory manufactured.
A typical episode of the New Yankee Workshop would have Norm go to some location to look at an antique piece of furniture, and then he'd build "our version" in the shop. In episodes where he built coffee tables, he would point out that there is no such thing as an antique coffee table, the term arose in the 20th century. In a similar vein, I don't think there's going to be such a thing as an antique computer desk.
I have seen some outfits like Vermont Woods selling "Credenzas" which are nominally intended to be media centers, but there's a kind of pigheaded approach where they'll maybe size shelves, drawers and doors kind of appropriately but they add no space for wiring, power management, accessory devices, so when installed it's always a mess. And I want to fix that.
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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.
The market for a "nice stereo" kind of died, didn't it?
Audiophiles get ridiculously high end gear that is intentionally fiddly. Like fully manual turntables where to change the speed you have to move the actual belt to a different pulley. Or you get a sound bar for your TV.
Boom boxes aren't a thing anymore. Like, is that a symptom of a dying society?
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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.
I have some bad news for you, your Dad didn't want you watching those cartoons...
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I keep threatening to write a book about this.
I have a theory that the craft of furniture making died in the 1940's or so, when furniture became fully industrial and commodified. Which is why craftsmen build 100 year old designs, and things like these console TVs and stereos were manufactured. We went from not having radios, to war, to radios as furniture, to particle board TV stands.
Proper craftsman built furniture is stuck 100 years ago, somebody somewhere built a Morris chair this afternoon, I've got a dining room hutch 90% finished on my workbench right now, but furniture designed for the electronics age is all factory manufactured.
A typical episode of the New Yankee Workshop would have Norm go to some location to look at an antique piece of furniture, and then he'd build "our version" in the shop. In episodes where he built coffee tables, he would point out that there is no such thing as an antique coffee table, the term arose in the 20th century. In a similar vein, I don't think there's going to be such a thing as an antique computer desk.
I have seen some outfits like Vermont Woods selling "Credenzas" which are nominally intended to be media centers, but there's a kind of pigheaded approach where they'll maybe size shelves, drawers and doors kind of appropriately but they add no space for wiring, power management, accessory devices, so when installed it's always a mess. And I want to fix that.
Dude write that book.
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To be clear, I think homelabs are great!
Do you want to hear about my homelab?
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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.
we had some classical LPs - gershwin, copeland, holst etc., and I remember getting them on CD and hooking that to the high fi. no flutter. no dust. no pops and hiss..... and all played at the right time, apparently our record player was 10-15% slow and no one knew.... blew my mind.
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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.
Buttons are an reminder of the luxury of space we used to have.
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Definitely going for this setup next month when I move ..just going Vinyl and speakers was too little. (I know it's sacrilegious to say this but Bluetooth speakers for the record player also let me connect my phone and gives me the other sources... Is it high Fidelity it's fine... I'm an audio engineer I can say that.)
It's the battery driven stuff that drives me nuts, nothing beats the "just push the button and it all works" kind of thing.
CDs are so small though, I'm tinkering with "USB stick playlists".
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Buttons are an reminder of the luxury of space we used to have.
The absolute smoothness of the giant volume knob and heft to it as you turned it.
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Buttons are an reminder of the luxury of space we used to have.
You can still buy brand new HIFI gear with buttons and VU meters, for example: https://nadelectronics.com/product/c-3050-stereophonic-amplifier/
The above unit has a ton more additional functionality such as room correction, streaming support, digital connectivity, a DAC, multi room support, and far better audio quality.
Sure, not all of it is cheap, however neither was a full stack like the OPs picture.
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Dude write that book.
I second it. Iām an amateur woodworker myself.
