We had this in my house growing up
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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]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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That was my dad, sorry. He was 100% the crabass who had the system and never let anybody touch it, and, worst of all, barely ever used it himself. It was just as fun being his daughter as it sounds. Plbbbt!
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
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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.
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
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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.
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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.
You call that old? It's got one of those fancy, new-fangled CD players! Not old at all.
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...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.
Yeah, I'm not sure why they'd tell you to plug a set top box into that.
It works as an input too, but if you run something like Netflix from the TV app, that's where the audio output from it goes.
Personally I run it all into the AVR, and from there to the TV, because I've got an older ARC set. ARC was limited to older DVD-era audio formats like stereo PCM, DTS 5.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1 (with the limited Atmos support). More modern sets have eARC which supports all the fancier Blu-ray-era formats, DTS-MA, Dolby TrueHD & Atmos, and 7.1 PCM. All the major streaming services use the older formats though, so most people won't notice any difference.
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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.
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.
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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.
That and tower speakers in the 4 corners of the room were what we had for surround sound
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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.
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?
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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.
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?
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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.
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
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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.
I'm slightly younger so all of that would have been black plastic instead of brushed steel.
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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.
Even older, huzzah!
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Even older, huzzah!
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.
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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 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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
