OLD HIFI THOUGHTS & VIEWS. FROM 1930s GRAMS TO 1980s AMPS.
"What's the Best Vintage Receiver?" "What's the Best Vintage Amplifier?" "Why buy a 30+ year old amplifier instead of a New One?" "Does it take a CD player or i-pod?"
You see these questions asked a lot online. We've been into Vintage hifi for 20 years & we're still learning them in a current wave of interest. The more "classics" you buy the better the knowledge. We've had some great amps for £30 to £100, but they generally need a service or some work to sound right, which may put buyers off. Buy a serviced one is the answer, raw loft to ebay buys are very risky sometimes. The best ones are still only about £300-500 which compared to the £2000+ "super-fi" of today that generally disappoints, you're onto a bargain. Read our many pages on our findings & info. Of course you can go blow £10k on a wonderful valve amplifier & not care about a 1970s Receiver with Medium Wave. But many are & because we can buy them, service them & sell on at a profit if we've bought the right ones, we're getting through quite a few. We're not going to spend £1000+ to get a Pioneer SX1980, but we've got 5 other quality Pioneers in our vaults to tell you about.
You won't find many sites that offer so many Vintage comparisons & daring to Rate as a Top Amps. We are Qualified Techs with years of experience off & on & still learning. We buy to initially make a profit or we like them & then testing & comparing finds out more. Each new amp adds to our interest & often ideas get rewritten. We've thought there can't be more worth trying or better sound, then one turns up resetting ideas. We are Valve Amp users on our main system that we heavily redesigned based on several ideas & designs & using the Sony STR6120 as a basic reference for quality sound, which we still rate highly now. It perhaps makes transistors more interesting as we can't use headphones on our monoblocks, like we do testing the transistor amps, so apart from one Trio valve receiver, we don't know valve sound much through headphones!
Certain brands are always popular & make big prices, ie 60w+ Marantz & Pioneer from the mid-late 1970s. Some 1980s ones like Naim make illogical prices for the low power & soft sound they are. There are other amps that sound as good or better for less money & don't have the fan base though be sure they are known about. Though you can improve amps if you know how, our opinion on Marantz is the sound can be sweet but they don't play very loud & lack punch. The Pioneer have more punch & volume, but with lots of cheap components they sound coarse & shouty though you can hear there is quality beyond it and will improve up a lot with the right changes. Our trying these amps over the last year got us trying interesting amps, some sounding better than bigger ££ selling ones. Some disappointed, some we recapped to the max to see how good they were. Results weren't always as expected & some untouched ones sound better. Comparing recapped to old capacitors amps is like focussing a blurry picture, though sometimes you will focus too closely on weaknesses like ICs & op-amps.
THESE PAGES ARE FOR INFO ONLY, WE LIKE TELLING INTERESTING INFO TO THE INTERNET AS YOU CAN SEE ON OUR RECORDS PAGES. YOU CAN SEE WE KNOW OUR STUFF TO A GOOD LEVEL & ARE STILL LEARNING AS ALL TECHY TYPES ARE.
BUT WE DON'T DO REPAIRS OR GIVE FREE ADVICE ON EXACTLY HOW TO REPAIR AN ITEM OR ANY SORT OF SAFETY TYPE ISSUES ETC FOR GOOD REASON! MUCH INFO IS OUT THERE, SO GOOGLE IT & TAKE YOUR PICK OF THE VARYING MISINFORMATION YOU'LL FIND
These pages cover 1920s HORN GRAMOPHONES and a 1932 RADIOGRAM to FATMAN I-DOCK and much in between ! A fairly random page of opinionated but mannered thoughts added to and altered as things change all about old record players & hifi your vintage records got first used on. A bit of tech stuff is here, but as that usually doesn't tell most readers too much, words say it better. Much was typed day-by-day on using & trying things. This first was on the 78s page until it got too big & diverse. Lots of old hifi stuff too valves & transistors & techy unique hints and insight into the world of hifi you won't read elsewhere & even what we say is a good general buy & not. Reviews of amps purely in sound terms as we get them & have them here to cruelly test one after the other!
Looking at our webstats, page hits are coming from search engines mostly. B+O, Leak, Sony, Trio & Old Players are the most popular pages.
We're certainly not fans of the minimalistic "hair shirt" type hifi with no tone controls & user-unfriendly features, so no interest in Linn LP12 that won't play 45s or the hideous Naim stuff we've loathed for years as it looks so vile & has silly connectors no-one else uses. Playing music flat sounds flat & lifeless, some like it, we've tried it & it has no warmth or dynamics. The only time "flat" is acceptable is when playing at PA studio levels when the sound is as loud as it was recorded, domestic hifi needs tone controls as we play it much quieter. The Loudness curves of yesteryear we don't feel the need for, but thin bass & recessed treble are not music.
Today's newer buyers need to know Just about ANY Transistor amplifier from 1966 you can plug any line level CD or i-pod into once you've bought the right cables. Valve amps may have different input levels. Phono plugs or 5 pin DIN are the usual inputs. 4mm banana plugs are only a recent speaker connector so you'll find many types from weird plugs you can't buy easily to spring connectors & putting wires thru holes & tightening.
Old hifi is fascinating & if buying vintage you can buy it try it & sell it on getting your money back or making a profit. We do. Gets us to try ones that interest & with all the info online what looks a good amp can be seen as being average & left alone. A lot is best left alone. You can so easily fool yourself one is better than another only to compare X to Y and rewrite your ideas over again. Life's fun in hifi. This page is one of our more popular ones based on page hits. These pages get updated & change often as do some opinions!
We've been in & out of Hifi since the late 1980s, what helped recapture our interest of late was finding a wrecked but fixable Sansui G xxx receiver literally in the gutter behind an Oxfam shop, clearly put there in hope it'd be taken. We're having that said we & methodically fixed it with several parts just to see if we could & we did & then sold it on just to cover costs. Then came the Sony STR-6120 & all the rest we type acres about.
The Brands section are getting photos added from items we've sold. Yes lids off & show you the workings. On buying an amp you're not too familiar with, seeing specs, original price, service manuals & the inside photos helps a lot. Certain amps we like but are not much around & when they are they're unappreciated. So see for yourself what these early Solid State amps are about & why you should be buying them, restoring them & using them instead of those overpowered overdesigned amps from the late 1970s onwards. Solid State when done right is so close to being as good as valves.
There are sites that appear to help saying how great one amp is over another, but unlike with us, you don't know what else they've been using. Seeing how we initially raved about the early Trio-Kenwood seems odd just months later as we dived in deeper, though the basic clean quality of then is not to be overlooked. We've found other surprises, changed our mind on some amps & found out why some amps sound bad because the makers wanted you to buy a more expensive one & put "spoilers" in that can be upgraded extra cheaply!
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