Well, there certainly lots of audiophile features back in the 70s: Direct-Cut disks*, Quadraphonic music, dbX compressor-expanders, high-quality speakers that didn't sacrifice quality and efficiency so that they could be hidden away on a bookshelf, electrostatic speakers and headphones, feather-light stylus and tone-arm combos, very high quality tape decks, and so on.
Most music today is digitally compressed when it really doesn't need to be, as most storage media can hold hours and hours (weeks even!) of high-quality music.
Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-loss storage instead? SMH.
* A friend and I spent an evening listening to direct-cut disks and then put on a normal pressed LP. We thought there was something the matter with the stylus, the pressed disk sounded so muddy.
I got large numbers of 1970s garage-sale speakers, hooked them up to a modern multichannel home theater receiver and add a pair of powered subwoofers. I matched the stereo pairs but figured the room correction can handle the difference between the backs and the fronts. My center is a ridiculous speaker you'd expect to see on the stage at a live music bar that I recovered from an abandoned building and replaced the crossover.
It kicks ass!
If you compare 128 kbps MP3 files to a CD the difference is night and day. 320 kbps MP3 is transparent, 192 kbps is not bad for most recordings. As I am writing this I am working on a python script that recompresses FLAC files from my music server to put on a USB stick for the car or for my Garmin watch. Right now the target is 192 kbps AAC for the car and the high end of the spectral band replication range (maybe 64-96 kbps) for the watch.
The 1970s is before the era when manufacturers really focused on trying to get big sound out of little speakers. In the 1970s, if you wanted big sound, you got big speakers! Modern speakers are often (not always) designed to be small and inefficient, because you can always just pump more power into them... modern amplifiers are so efficient that you can just throw energy away like that.
The old speakers I've heard are not remotely flat. But they do sound big, and fun, and maybe you can just EQ out the speakers with a modern receiver's room correction.
I have a pair of Boston Acoustics CR95s in my lounge room. I used Room EQ Wizard and a UMik-1 and a MiniDSP to measure/tune them. They came out so close to flat themselves that the only thing the MiniDSP map ended up doing was bringing in a little bit of subwoofer under about 45Hz to prop the very bottom end up.
The sound beautiful, at least to my old and abused ears, for both music and movies. (I use them as stern + a su=ingle sub for music, and as part of a 5.1 system with a centre speaker and rears for movies).
They aren't quite 70's old. But they were a long way from new when I got em off eBay a decade or more back.
I also still have the first speakers and amps I ever bought, back in 1988. Boston Acoustics A60MkIIs and a NAD 1100/2200 opre/power amp pair. This speakers have has 3 or 4 new drivers (all due to party abuse) and the caps in the crossovers replaced every decade or so, and the amps have had all the electrolytics replaced a couple for times. They still provide great sound in my dining room.
(And I've become a bit af a NAD/Boston Acoustics brand-tragic. I end up drunk eBaying both brands every now and then, I have a pair of A40 speakers on my desk here, The lounge room home theatre amp is a NAD 70W per channel amp. And I've got most of a setup of a pair of A40s, a NAD 3020, and an Apple Airport Express together as a birthday present for a friend in a few weeks...)
> Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-loss storage instead? SMH.
Today, most users are listening to AAC or Ogg Vorbis, not MP3. At typical compression rates, the distinction between lossy compression and lossless is completely anaudible. There have been many many blind studies of this, including some you can take yourself online right now.
Fire up your nice headphone amp, plug in your electrostatic headphones and take a blind test yourself. You'll find that there's no audible benefit to lossless compression. It's just a waste of network bandwidth and disk space.
>You'll find that there's no audible benefit to lossless compression.*
* When the compression is done well. Shit compression makes itself known fast. If that shit compression possibly sounds okayish on 2000s style computer speakers, connecting the output to real speakers makes it even more obvious.
Not all compression is equal even if they do use the same codec.
You're conflating audio (dynamic range) compression with data compression. Dynamic range compression is an artifact of the mastering process. It very much can be done well or done poorly. Lossless data compression like FLAC isn't something that can be done "wrong". It's just encoding redundancies in the audio samples to save space. It's lossless so it will spit out the exact audio as was originally encoded.
Thank you, but it is about audio compression. You don't use this type of compression on text files. So, I'd agree with the other commenter in that I'm not talking about dynamic compression with hard/soft knees/attack and what not. Lossy compression done badly is horrible listening experience. It's all swishing and swooshing almost like being underwater. The top end is just all mushed together kind of like when you have a head cold and everything is all swimming sounding in your head.
* dynamic range compression, referred to above as "audio compression" (confusingly)
* psycho-acoustic aka "lossy" data compression
* lossless data compression
>* dynamic range compression, referred to above as "audio compression" (confusingly)
Because when you're in a recording/editing session it is referred to as compression. As is in, "we need to use some some audio compression for that last bit". Anyone within earshot would not think someone is suggesting throwing that last bit throw an MP3 encoder.
Interestingly I’ve recently found that master quality is more important than file/compression format at high quality. That is,
Rip a shitty 80s mastered CD, rip to wav, flac, etc.
Get a remastered version of the same album (watch out for loudness war, avoid 2000s), and rip 192+ mp3 or 128+ opus, high quality settings.
Compare. I’ve found the new master lossy sounds better than my old flacs, due to the better source.
Still, space is so cheap I’m mostly getting 16-44 or 48k flacs for new stuff these days, the cost of space is under ten dollars and can reencode forever.
However I see geeks debating file formats ad nauseum, and I did too for many years as well when storage was expensive. But when aiming for best quality, master quality becomes the primary factor.
I think the coincidence (in time, not necessarily causal direction) of master quality issues and growth in lossy codecs is probably one reason people get confused by this. People are hearing crappy recordings, listening to it on mp3s, and drawing conclusions.
I think measuring this stuff is tricky because there's so many variables involved, from the master, to the compression (or lack thereof), to the amps, speakers, quantifying perception, etc. I agree with you completely but suspect there's a bit more to it.
This is very true. Floyd Toole says in his book for a popular audience that with modern equipment, what you're hearing is roughly 1/3rd the speakers, 1/3rd the room, and 1/3rd the production quality of the recording.
>Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-loss storage instead?
When MP3s were "hot", storage wasn't available in the sizes now, nor was bandwidth available to make uncompressed practical. FLAC style compression wasn't really a thing then either.
MP3 was able to hit critical mass, and people have been unwilling to let it go. We see that in so many other areas as well like FB, shopping at Amazon, etc. People are aware there are less bad things, but it's just too engrained.
Not just that. Those times thanks to Napster one could easily find some amazing hidden gems that were simply not available on market. Those were mostly mp3 only. Take it or leave.
I appreciate good audio quality but if music itself is good I would listen to it even at low quality MP3. The quality of some really old stuff is low anyways.
According to wikipedia, the initial release was 20 July 2001. By 2001, we had been using mpeg type audio for some time, whatever audio Cinepak pushed, RealAudio, etc. Hell even AAC came out in late 90s, but didn't take off for much much longer. FLAC was a baby while other formats were wearing long beards and suspenders. Only audiophiles used it, and it really didn't take of until AFLAC and iTunes/iPods.
> Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-loss storage instead? SMH.
This one really boggles the mind indeed and I have a theory. But first basically: to me it's the same as saying, if you could have the real DaVinci's Gioconda painting at your home, "Look, I've got this 300 dpi color print of the Gioconda and I don't care, because from 10 meters away you cannot tell the difference". This, in itself, when you can save tens of thousands of songs in FLAC (CD quality) on a 1 TB is just seriously WTF.
But I think the reason people are still using mp3s when they could be using FLAC files is because there's an entire industry, operating at a loss, streaming non-CD quality. And they have to brainwash everybody into thinking lossy audio still makes sense in 2021.
Storage, however, is only going to get cheaper and cheaper. The mental gymnastics going to be needed in the upcoming years to keep arguing for mp3s over FLAC is going to be plain mindboggling.
I don't care if I can't consciously hear the difference. I still want the correct file/sound. I can put 60 000 songs at CD quality on a 1 TB stick / SSD. Soon we'll be able to put 600 000 songs at CD quality on memory sticks / SSDs. And you can bet you'll still have people nostalgic of Winamp and Napster explaining how mp3 makes perfect sense.
FLAC are also a bitperfect archival format btw, mp3 ain't.
I rip all my CDs (and I still collect CDs) to FLAC file.
The only time I convert to mp3 is because my car's media system reads mp3 but not FLAC: and when I need to convert I'm happy that I don't have a lossy format to start with.
I don't actively seek out mp3 format files, but I have a bunch dating back to when I was ripping cds, vinyl, and cassettes to 100MB Zip disks in the late 90s - where I'll probably never have access to the original sourced to re rip them. Forgotten local bands, mix tapes, desk tapes fro live gigs, stuff like that. I'd replace my Jump Back Jack, or Hungarian Rap Sadists 128k mp3 files in a heartbeat - if I could get my hands on the vinyl to re rip them.
These days I buy a lot of cds and vinyl from bands at merch desks or off bandcamp, but I can't remember the last time I ripped any of those, most of what I listen to is Apple Music streaming (a lot of which is lossless these days) or Spotify Premium. I have a few TB worth of media server space with a huge music collection on it, but I didn't even notice it was offline for a week or more recently, because it's way easier for me to stream off my phone, laptop, or AppleTV - and if I'm in the mood to listen to stuff that's not on streaming, I'm almost certainly in the mood to pull the vinyl out and give it a spin...
I once received a 96kbps copy of a very old studio album that became one of my favorite albums ever. I listened to the 96kbps version countless times. It sounded dark and otherwise colored in a way that I felt added to the vibe of the album.
I was travelling and didn't have the album on me, but I wanted to show it to a friend. I downloaded a 256 or 384kbps version, and much to my surprise, I didn't like the way it sounded at a higher bit rate at all! The added clarity made some instruments stand out a bit more than others, and I found it distracting and too lively.
The delta in quality between 384kbps and FLAC (to my concern-worn ears) is narrow enough that I can't really tell a major difference.
That probably had less to do with the higher bit rate than it did a remaster. A huge amount of music that was great on the LP/cassette/8-track release, and even on the early CD (if it happened after the very early brick-wall-filtered era), was absolutely ruined by remastering post-2000.
> Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-loss storage instead?
I can't hear the difference. While I love music, I've never had good hearing. Further worsened by live music and clubbing (without protection). Aging too, of course.
Just from a practical matter, I prefer lossless encoding. Some of the MP3 files I encoded have glitches. It simplifies deduping my library (just pick the best quality instance).
True... today there is lossless streaming in abundance and speaker systems that are very good for a reasonable price.
I bought some bose home speaker today for my office and its amazing how good they sound.... and I got one of those "high end" systems at home.
Today's audio production makes production in the 70s look like it was made with bubble gum and bailing wire. Then again, they were litterally making stuff up. Taking things apart, rewiring, tying together things not normally together.
People today just get to re-create things digitally using the things from the previous times as a basis. The folks making the originals had no basis, and just made shit up as they went.
I chatted with a dude in the 90s who was into making guitar pedals; almost exclusively weird distortions. He collected fucked up electronics and hunted for damaged transistors specifically, to the point of microwaving / cooking / soaking new ones to see what new properties he could give them.
"throw it at the signal and see what it sounds like" but he did get some unique and cool effects.
Ironically, being a music producer myself, a whole bunch of the things in my mastering FX chain are intended to simulate the inaccuracies of analogue equipment that, by happy accident, enrich timbre with warmth through mild saturation, with sparkling high end by emphasising upper harmonics.. I have a whole cavalcade of painstakingly simulated tube amps and preamps, old analogue compressors/mixers/EQs, tape machines, delay plugins that simulate the artefacts of old bucket-brigade chips and the warbling of tape delay systems. Professionals and studios would have 10x as many doodads to, technically-speaking, fuck up the accuracy of the sound in some way.
Yeah - having grown up in the era the author describes I agree. Audio today sounds better and is far, far cheaper than it was back in the day. It's fun to reminisce but I wouldn't go back.
If nothing else, knobs, toggles, and slide potentiometers, in glorious brushed nickel on wood-tone. My current receiver is festooned with black buttons on a black case with light grey silkscreened text with an LED display bright enough to communicate with satellites. It's maddening.
Not to mention utterly brain-dead UI and defective implementations. I have a "high-end" NAD T758 receiver and it is an unmitigated piece of shit, from design to execution.
Definitely. When I was a kid we had a Pioneer SX-1250 just like the one pictured in TFA. Compared to modern equipment (or even most stuff that was made only a decade later), it's hard to overstate the incredibly solid, high quality 'feel' of every switch, knob and button on the thing.
I know that sounds like overstatement and wishful memories of the good 'ol days, but it's not--that thing really was beautiful.
When I went to college in the 90s my dad gifted me his receiver from the 70s. I used that all the way through the 00s as my primary and through the 10s as a secondary boost until I finally retired it. That thing still had better sound quality than anything else I owned, it was just heavy as a brick and had to be manually powered on and switched.
For all the reasons the author gave, especially the cassette tape, I agree it was the golden age of audio. Somehow 70's hi-fi gave way to boom-box, Walkman....
Still more of a fan of the hi-fi era that preceded the 70's when tube amps were king, reel-to-reel was spinning....
Solid-state begat a "watt wars" where amplifiers/receivers could boast numbers far in excess of what a typical tube amp could (the voltages would have to be crazy high, the transformers too heavy).
Then speaker efficiency fell (who needs efficient speakers with 80 Watt solid-state amps?). Woofer, mid-range, tweeter and the accompanying crossovers made for, arguably, crappy sound where all the "sound stage" was blown with out-of-phase audio signals washing over the listener.
2021: 1TB SD cards available for portable audio at any quality level you could desire. Arbitary quality DACs available at almost any price point. Powered speakers with matched internal amplification. Subwoofers.
Anyone who thinks the 1970s is the golden age of audio isn't paying attention.
[ EDIT: also, huge shout out to Bandcamp, where I can sit at home in the comfort of whatever listening system I want (typically for me a set of Genelec studio monitors), peruse vast quantities of music for free (typically listening to whole albums several times before I buy), and then finally choosing anything from MP3 to FLAC as the download format. I mean, my 70s self would not have believed this if I had described it to them. ]
My listening experience has never been better. I have no doubt that my amplifier sounds the same as a high fidelity amplifier made in the 1970s. The measured fidelity of the rest of my signal chain is profoundly better.
I think that digital recording and distribution has been a game changer for the kind of music that I listen to, often obscure, indy musicians. YouTube is a blast.
About a decade ago, I sold my ReVox B77 open reel tape recorder and bought a pocket sized digital recorder.
The gear for live music has improved. I'm a jazz bassist, and a quality amplifier plus speaker now weighs 12 pounds.
At the low price point, you can get a digital audio player with a human-ears-perfect DAC and a human-ears-perfect amplifier for under $100, that will feed headphones of sufficient quality for between $50 and $200 depending on your criteria.
You can have a look at https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php and its reviews section. This is a good site in general (there are others) if you are interested in audio reproduction topics and reviews that are supported by science, not flowery prose of reviews in so called HiFi magazines and sites.
If it doesn't need to be portable, that's certainly a good way to go. Note that the Allo Boss2 gets you everything except an amplifier and speakers, incluyding a Pi4, assembled, in a nice case, for $185. You might like to run Owntone (formerly forked-daapd) on whatever machine holds your storage - or anything else; the Pi can mount your storage via NFS or CIFS or basically anything else.
24 bit FLAC sent bit-for-bit perfect to my Burr-Brown converters and then to my Genelecs? This is better quality than anyone in the 1970s could have imagined [ EDIT: including the engineers in the studios where the music was recorded. ]
Convenience for shopping? Well, perhaps. But it's about more than convenience. I discover more music, by more artists, than Tower or HMV could ever have introduced me too.
No, the availability argument. Even people who are dirt-poor (by developed country standards, of course) can have top-quality means of listening to and producing audio, thanks to computers, the internet, and Free Software. In the 1970s this was restricted to affluent people. So quite a narrow perspective to say things like that.
We take it for granted but when I think about it I'm amazed that I can on a whim decide I want to listen to Beethoven and 10s later I'm listening to world-class musicians playing any piece I want.
And all of that fun 1970s and 80s audio gear is dirt cheap at most thrift stores. You might have to hunt a bit but people are happily dumping old turntables, stereo amps, etc. for nothing. So if you want a fun little retro stereo setup it's never been a better time.
We take it for granted but every now and then, when I think about it, I'm amazed that I can on a whim decide I want to listen to Beethoven and 10s later I'm listening to world-class musicians playing any piece I want. Imagine saying this even 40 years ago.
Modern sound sources hooked to vintage receivers will give you the ease of use of the old shit and about the same quality and content selection as the new shit.
I'll grant that the cassette tape was a major advance on what came before, but I had a few too many get stuck in tape decks and get wobbly and otherwise degrade that I don't miss them at all.
They were not high-quality audio, but they were convenient as hell. MiniDisc was the format that should have made it but never did (in the US; it was wildly popular in Japan and well-accepted in Europe).
Another medium was FM and the advent of specialist DJ’s playing deep album cuts on certain US radio stations. This for most listeners would have been a step up in audio quality from jukeboxes and AM even if they couldn’t afford a full system.
That really is a thing of the US. I am born '76 and throughout Europe we ever had FM radio, AM is and was on no ones radar except medium wave hunters. The only addition was FM stereo where I remember a local radio station which didn't broadcast stereo until the mid 80ies.
It really was in the 1970s that rock music on FM took off in the US. Before then, it was almost exclusively the domain of classical music and local broadcasting. The typical top 40 stations were on AM, and the phrase "clear channel" meant a 50 kW AM transmitter that was allowed to run at max power 24x7 (so it could be received over a vast region after dark).
Rock on FM was local, and very experimental in those days. Then, in the 1980s, consolidation started happening, and the 1996 removal of all ownership limits turned radio in general (both AM and FM) into the cesspool it is today. There are precious few rock stations from those days that have managed to stay around, not get borged into the cesspool, and keep their format without going stale. In my neck of the woods, WXRT 93.1 in Chicago is the best example.
It was before my time, but some British stations broadcast on AM from ships outside of territorial waters in the North Sea to get around strict broadcasting regulations (it was a state monopoly for a long time). They had no choice but to use medium wave because they needed the long range propagation. Some of them were apparently very popular and one of them (Radio Caroline) recently went against the trend of closing AM stations down and re-opened on the old BBC World Service MW channel.
It's fetishism. Music must sound better with pretty knobs ! Meanwhile in the real world high quality audio equipment is dirt cheap and far more flexible since it can be software-defined.
I still run my Carver M-200t power amp circa 1981 or so, every day, all day, for 40 years now. A couple years later I added a Carver C-1 preamp, still doing its job. A Technics SL-Q2 turntable and Dahlquist speakers, too. Same era.
The difference today is the source is streaming audio from my computer.
First I used a Turtlebeach Audiotron. Then TB bricked it by shutting down their web site, which the Audiotron would query on startup. The Audiotron would look for shared folders with music in them on my LAN.
I replaced it with a Grace Digital IRTP800. Used that for many years, until GD bricked it a few months ago by shutting down their web site.
So I replace that with a Galaxy Audio RM-IRD. Unfortunately, and I'm pretty mad about it, it has some small number of songs it can "shuffle play". I have more songs than that, so it will only play them starting from the beginning, meaning I only ever hear the first 100 songs or so. GA support does not respond to my queries.
So now I'm just using Windows Media Player with my computer's 5 cent DAC until I can find another streaming box. I have a Roku box which does streaming, but apparently none of the engineers at Roku use that feature because while it technically works, it is useless because all the files must be in one folder. Who organizes their music like that?
I'm actually baffled why today, 2021, I cannot find a decent streaming audio player.
I'm fond of my '70s/80s audio gear from a perspective of build quality and maintainability.
Yes, pretty knobs matter. The right heft and feel is part of a quality user experience. I bought a bottom-of-the-range new Sony AVR in like 2010, and the experience sucked because too many options were buried behind a complex OSD and menu, while on the equivalent 40-year-old model was a single direct-access button.
You can crush a Harman/Kardon 730 to its component atoms, and there's an enthusiastic community that will help you restore it to operability. Virtually all the parts are available on Mouser or Digi-Key, and many can be replaced with better ones (tighter tolerances, smaller physical sizes) for peanuts. I doubt that new Sony AVR will ever be close to as fixable, let alone 40 years from now.
It's entirely possible that the right new kit will sound better, but I suspect as much as anything I'm room and layout limited more than gear limited. No point getting to -200dB signal to noise when there's a constant AC and CPU fan whine in the backdrop.
What are the knobs for? EQ? that's terrible. Digital room correction can do it almost infinitely better. Balance control? just say no.
And you can't have been talking about tuning controls because that's radio, and why would anyone listen to radio on high quality audio systems today?
So maybe just a big fat volume knob, milled from virgin aluminum, and used a heat sink for the non-existening heat production from the non-existent amplifier (it's all in the speakers). Yeah, I can go for that.
I like radio, especially when I'm working on the PC containing digital media. Have a top-end Yamaha tuner from the 90s that I paid $15 for at the thrift shop. It's actually sort of disappointing in knob feel, but it pulls signals better than other tuners I've tried.
> why would anyone listen to radio on high quality audio systems today?
I do, it was useful when I had flakey internet and the habit stuck. Analogue FM sounds a lot better than the “compressed to buggery and probably in mono” tone of DAB as well in my opinion. There’s also the aesthetic factor, I’m a huge fan of glowing dials and physical analogue controls.
I deeply love my local nonprofit/coop radio stations; the personalities, the history, and the diversity of the music they play all add up to a strong feeling of community. They do stream, but the streams are 128k. I concede the irony of listening to some dj's scratchy 45s transmitted to my middling radio setup by FM in the context of an article about high fidelity audio, but what can I say, I love it, and the sound is part of what I love.
Edit: PS, I also deeply love Ardour and routinely learn a lot from you here and elsewhere. Thanks.
It seems the Harman/Kardon 730 was originally around $400, which in present-day dollars is around $2000. Do you happen to know if a $2000 receiver today might be closer in quality? I ask partially because I'm into this myself, and I'm not sure what things are like these days.
I never did any close comparison, but a class D amp, if well built, sounds really clean with no audible noise in background, drawing a fraction of the power and costing a fraction of the money.
Some people think they're of inferior quality for being "digital", but class D amps aren't digital at all, they're 100% analog just like traditional ones. The best way to explain how they work is comparing them to power supplies: a traditional class A/B amplifier is to a linear power supply what a class D is to a switching one: they work as PWM drivers wrt the load, but being the frequency really high (hundreds of KHz) there's no way they could produce unwanted noises, which would be easy to filter anyway using small cap+inductors networks. Those filters usually are also enough to avoid inaudible rf noises and audible heterodyne-generated noises in case two different amps in the same room work at slightly different frequencies. That however is not the case for amps enclosed in the same box (stereo or multi channel amps) as they have their clock sync signal in common and wouldn't generate any unwanted signals anyway.
It feels like it's hard to find a "well built" Class D product.
A lot of what's on the market seems to have ambitious or vague specs. It makes me suspicious when I see those Lepai-style amplifiers that are the size of a CD-ROM drive and claim "30 watts per channel... at 10% distortion." Would it even be able to meet those numbers under the test conditions, used for rating amplifiers in the '70s? I suspect they get much tighter numbers at less ambitious wattages, and honestly, most real world listening isn't going to break 1 watt, but it feels like they're not really starting from a place of credibility.
From there, even a competent design seems to usually be sold as half a unit-- typically paired with a laptop-style PSU. I'm sure there's a huge range of quality and suitability of pairing, and it's another ugly cable management game to play. It's not going to fit neatly anywhere designed for traditional-sized components.
There are probably some decent all-inclusive units once you move past the $50 AliExpress market, but then you're looking at more complex products and more elaborate competition: the fact it's Class D architecture is one bullet point among things like the number of inputs and outputs, video handling capability, and user experience.
> It makes me suspicious when I see those Lepai-style amplifiers that are the size of a CD-ROM drive and claim "30 watts per channel... at 10% distortion."
I know what you're referring to; I bought one of those years ago and it sounds terrible at any volume, no matter the power supply, the input or what pair of speakers I connect it to. I believe it's a defective unit since the high distortion is audible at any volume. However, I tried some of those small modules sold on Ebay and other (more costly) class D speakers or amps for instruments, and they're generally really good. The modules in particular cost peanuts for what they offer quality wise. But yeah, the chance to save on BOM costs is too appealing, so there are manufacturers going further then making class D amps with junk power supplies or no filtering at the output to save pennies.
So there's little question modern receivers are far higher quality, primarily because of digitization and what it's enabled. In particular, the better room correction systems make a dramatic difference, and that's based on research that correctly correlates subjective preference to objective measures.
But the problem is none of this stuff is engineered to last in the same way. Many of the products are taking a base board design from an upstream vendor and only doing the minimal amount of work to give it a unique looking physical and OSD skin. They cheap out on the components they use as much as possible, even the mid tier brands considered to have high build quality. You're lucky if you get a decade out of one now, though admitted part of what's driving that is the assumption that features and interconnect standards are going to keep advancing fast enough that designing for a longer lifespan is pointless.
But it does feel a bit aggravating to throw something out every 10 years or so when you know it's probably just a couple caps or the like that have gone toast, but it's just not feasible to repair these DIY.
When I was a kid I got a hand me down Zenith stereo set from my grandmother. I'm sure the materials in the speaker drivers had degraded somewhat, but it still worked as perfectly as the day it was sold decades earlier. Not sure what my folks did with it, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if I found it in the attic, plugged it in, and it was still just fine.
Sadly, I have a beautiful condition Technics turntable from that period. Cast Aluminum, made in Japan. However, I could not find a comparable receiver from that period at any reasonable price, with the expectation that it wouldn't require work, so it's hooked up to a modern receiver that's commodity on Amazon. The sound of this setup is pretty solid given that the vinyl is as old as the turntable, but like the receiver, the 3-ways are contemporary. I've replaced modern receivers at about 1 in 10 years going back to a Sony ES and my current Yamaha is about that old. I'm sure if I had the skills, it's just a power supply or amp or something similar.
Lifespan of modern electronics is pretty good. Just happen to have that 2010 Sony AVR, likely the same model GP has mentioned. It's doing fine, along with its contemporary HDTV panel.
And I don't think it's the luck; people get a bit nostalgic for the reality that never existed. Most of the iconic 1970/80s systems now touted as an example of build quality were top shelf equipment, no costs spared in their day. Yes they are repairable, but it was more a function of low integration technology of their time than any deliberate philosophy of their designers.
> Yes they are repairable, but it was more a function of low integration technology of their time than any deliberate philosophy of their designers.
I'd dispute that - they came with schematics and proper, useful, troubleshooting. I used to have a bit of a collection of partially working Phillips SA-4xx series stereo amps, I wanted a 7.1 surround system using them for no good reason, (2000s I suppose, got as far as flakey 3.1 iirc) and they all had such diagrams, where ~nothing modern does. They were all before my time, fwiw.
Philips used to be amazingly service friendly, to the point of having a special store where they sold all of the parts to all of their gear, from washing machines to tape recorders and everything in between. It was called the Philips TSC and it really helped my keeping a whole neighborhoods electrical gear in working order (and by extension: to keep me in dough to satisfy my endless need for electronics parts and test and measurement gear).
> But it does feel a bit aggravating to throw something out every 10 years or so when you know it's probably just a couple caps or the like that have gone toast, but it's just not feasible to repair these DIY.
It’s often a power supply that’s failed and those are quite easy to test and DIY replace if it’s the caps that have failed. I know a lot of people don’t even consider doing it, but for those few who are inclined to ask the question “could I fix this?” the answer is often “yes”.
That depends on how it failed. Sometimes rectifiers fail open and there is no problem, other times they fail closed and then you might end up having to replace all of the semiconductors that that particular rectifier fed.
I don't think so, or perhaps we have had multiple golden ages of audio?
The article talks about the "receiver becomes king". How about streaming services or the mp3 player/iPod.
I'd say the biggest golden age was when anyone could play any song, from almost any artist anytime, anywhere. In the 90's when I grew up if I wanted to listed to a particular song, I'd have to walk down to my local store and buy the single or the album, walk back home and play it on our CD receiver.
Nowadays the day the song is released I can listen to that song immediately and better yet, I can share with my friends and have them listen to it immediately.
In the 70s when I was quite young everyone we knew had the giant “all in one cassette/ radio /record player.” With 2 speakers. Big dials and switches for volume and tuning.
When I got to high school we got a separate component system and a certain player. Oddly the tuner my brothers and I bought (Sony) powered a tv which was just a monitor.
As a HiFi collector and restorer, I don't have a lot of interest in 70s gear. The US Made 50-60s tube stereo gear by Marantz, McIntosh, Fisher, and Dynaco is my jam.
I'm guessing late 50s onwards, as stereo was introduced, what, 1958?
I'm a fan of the quad stuff from that era, ESL57s and Quad IIs as well as Tannoy speakers. I imagine you're more US centric in your appreciation, but it was a wonderful period of innovation in music reproduction when individuals with a vision could shape how music was appreciated.
My earliest piece is an early Marantz 7 from 1958. I don't get into mono era or cinema gear too much. I'd definitely be into Tannoys if I could find a pair of reds for a reasonable price. The only truly vintage speakers I have are Altecs.
Never did get rid of hum. Used a lot of different gear. Hum just followed me around. Ground loops, touching the tone arm, sometimes even the chassis of the amp. Hum.
I surprised myself how much I liked quad valve gear. I still have a quad22 but it's in pieces suffering the effects of the tropics on wax potting of discrete components. A later generation quad 405 driving electrostatics was just amazing.
I've inherited a complete Pioneer Deck (Amp, Tape, Vinyl) as pictured but have no use for it — Are these things increasing in value or does it make sense to sell before it collects even more dust?
I was surprised by my late 1970's era receiver value a couple of years ago (Technics SA-400). I ended up selling it to a coworker for probably half of what it would have fetched on Ebay.
Literally the only expensive thing my father ever bought for himself was a gigantic stereo gear which combined a vinyl player / radio / cassette deck and hundreds of other features he never used. He bought it around 1982, long before he had kids: http://www.graetz-radio.de/images/radios/1981/HMC_400A.jpg
He is a carpenter and build the living room furniture (which my parents still have) around this contraption. When I was a child, it was the holy center of the living room, and we were not allowed to touch it. It is still working. In the 90ies, the family CD player was hooked to it, later various DVD players.
Back around 1993 when my dad was also buying every CD in the damn world, he bought a giant Sony setup, amp, receiver, CD changer, dual tape deck...
It was all garbage after a few years. Funny enough, the 70's Marantz stuff my mom has all still works. Nothing like hearing the speakers 'pop' when it turns on, the bluish glow of the receiver, turning those knobs, and watching the meters jump around to the music.
I remember when I was very little there were those special occasions when my father allowed us to pick a record from his collection and he would play it, songs from strange and ancient looking albums which, as I realized decades later, were all the classic albums of the 60ies and 70ies. I also remember the "pop" sound when you pressed the ON button on the stereo, and then the thing lit up like a christmas tree, literally dozens of red LEDs and golden background lighting and the speed checker light of the turntable.
As a kid, I had dozens and dozens of cassettes and later CDs that I carelessly threw around my room, they were cheap and it was nothing special. My father, on the other hand, valued the vinyl collection he built up as a teenager in the early 70ies higher than anything else of material value in our house. His generation had a completely different relationship to music than the following ones.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] threadMost music today is digitally compressed when it really doesn't need to be, as most storage media can hold hours and hours (weeks even!) of high-quality music.
Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-loss storage instead? SMH.
* A friend and I spent an evening listening to direct-cut disks and then put on a normal pressed LP. We thought there was something the matter with the stylus, the pressed disk sounded so muddy.
It kicks ass!
If you compare 128 kbps MP3 files to a CD the difference is night and day. 320 kbps MP3 is transparent, 192 kbps is not bad for most recordings. As I am writing this I am working on a python script that recompresses FLAC files from my music server to put on a USB stick for the car or for my Garmin watch. Right now the target is 192 kbps AAC for the car and the high end of the spectral band replication range (maybe 64-96 kbps) for the watch.
The old speakers I've heard are not remotely flat. But they do sound big, and fun, and maybe you can just EQ out the speakers with a modern receiver's room correction.
The sound beautiful, at least to my old and abused ears, for both music and movies. (I use them as stern + a su=ingle sub for music, and as part of a 5.1 system with a centre speaker and rears for movies).
They aren't quite 70's old. But they were a long way from new when I got em off eBay a decade or more back.
I also still have the first speakers and amps I ever bought, back in 1988. Boston Acoustics A60MkIIs and a NAD 1100/2200 opre/power amp pair. This speakers have has 3 or 4 new drivers (all due to party abuse) and the caps in the crossovers replaced every decade or so, and the amps have had all the electrolytics replaced a couple for times. They still provide great sound in my dining room.
(And I've become a bit af a NAD/Boston Acoustics brand-tragic. I end up drunk eBaying both brands every now and then, I have a pair of A40 speakers on my desk here, The lounge room home theatre amp is a NAD 70W per channel amp. And I've got most of a setup of a pair of A40s, a NAD 3020, and an Apple Airport Express together as a birthday present for a friend in a few weeks...)
I met a guy who had a pair about 10 years later. I offered him double what he had paid for them new. He wouldn't let them go, either.
Combined with this software: https://www.roomeqwizard.com
Today, most users are listening to AAC or Ogg Vorbis, not MP3. At typical compression rates, the distinction between lossy compression and lossless is completely anaudible. There have been many many blind studies of this, including some you can take yourself online right now.
Fire up your nice headphone amp, plug in your electrostatic headphones and take a blind test yourself. You'll find that there's no audible benefit to lossless compression. It's just a waste of network bandwidth and disk space.
* When the compression is done well. Shit compression makes itself known fast. If that shit compression possibly sounds okayish on 2000s style computer speakers, connecting the output to real speakers makes it even more obvious.
Not all compression is equal even if they do use the same codec.
The original point: lossless compression is not worth it, lossy is OK.
The counter-claim: only when the lossy compression is done well.
This is not about audio compression.
There is:
The last two have nothing to do with the first.Because when you're in a recording/editing session it is referred to as compression. As is in, "we need to use some some audio compression for that last bit". Anyone within earshot would not think someone is suggesting throwing that last bit throw an MP3 encoder.
Rip a shitty 80s mastered CD, rip to wav, flac, etc.
Get a remastered version of the same album (watch out for loudness war, avoid 2000s), and rip 192+ mp3 or 128+ opus, high quality settings.
Compare. I’ve found the new master lossy sounds better than my old flacs, due to the better source.
Still, space is so cheap I’m mostly getting 16-44 or 48k flacs for new stuff these days, the cost of space is under ten dollars and can reencode forever.
However I see geeks debating file formats ad nauseum, and I did too for many years as well when storage was expensive. But when aiming for best quality, master quality becomes the primary factor.
I think the coincidence (in time, not necessarily causal direction) of master quality issues and growth in lossy codecs is probably one reason people get confused by this. People are hearing crappy recordings, listening to it on mp3s, and drawing conclusions.
I think measuring this stuff is tricky because there's so many variables involved, from the master, to the compression (or lack thereof), to the amps, speakers, quantifying perception, etc. I agree with you completely but suspect there's a bit more to it.
When MP3s were "hot", storage wasn't available in the sizes now, nor was bandwidth available to make uncompressed practical. FLAC style compression wasn't really a thing then either.
MP3 was able to hit critical mass, and people have been unwilling to let it go. We see that in so many other areas as well like FB, shopping at Amazon, etc. People are aware there are less bad things, but it's just too engrained.
I appreciate good audio quality but if music itself is good I would listen to it even at low quality MP3. The quality of some really old stuff is low anyways.
My ears are almost fifty years old and were never that great to begin with.
This one really boggles the mind indeed and I have a theory. But first basically: to me it's the same as saying, if you could have the real DaVinci's Gioconda painting at your home, "Look, I've got this 300 dpi color print of the Gioconda and I don't care, because from 10 meters away you cannot tell the difference". This, in itself, when you can save tens of thousands of songs in FLAC (CD quality) on a 1 TB is just seriously WTF.
But I think the reason people are still using mp3s when they could be using FLAC files is because there's an entire industry, operating at a loss, streaming non-CD quality. And they have to brainwash everybody into thinking lossy audio still makes sense in 2021.
Storage, however, is only going to get cheaper and cheaper. The mental gymnastics going to be needed in the upcoming years to keep arguing for mp3s over FLAC is going to be plain mindboggling.
I don't care if I can't consciously hear the difference. I still want the correct file/sound. I can put 60 000 songs at CD quality on a 1 TB stick / SSD. Soon we'll be able to put 600 000 songs at CD quality on memory sticks / SSDs. And you can bet you'll still have people nostalgic of Winamp and Napster explaining how mp3 makes perfect sense.
FLAC are also a bitperfect archival format btw, mp3 ain't.
I rip all my CDs (and I still collect CDs) to FLAC file.
The only time I convert to mp3 is because my car's media system reads mp3 but not FLAC: and when I need to convert I'm happy that I don't have a lossy format to start with.
These days I buy a lot of cds and vinyl from bands at merch desks or off bandcamp, but I can't remember the last time I ripped any of those, most of what I listen to is Apple Music streaming (a lot of which is lossless these days) or Spotify Premium. I have a few TB worth of media server space with a huge music collection on it, but I didn't even notice it was offline for a week or more recently, because it's way easier for me to stream off my phone, laptop, or AppleTV - and if I'm in the mood to listen to stuff that's not on streaming, I'm almost certainly in the mood to pull the vinyl out and give it a spin...
I was travelling and didn't have the album on me, but I wanted to show it to a friend. I downloaded a 256 or 384kbps version, and much to my surprise, I didn't like the way it sounded at a higher bit rate at all! The added clarity made some instruments stand out a bit more than others, and I found it distracting and too lively.
The delta in quality between 384kbps and FLAC (to my concern-worn ears) is narrow enough that I can't really tell a major difference.
I can't hear the difference. While I love music, I've never had good hearing. Further worsened by live music and clubbing (without protection). Aging too, of course.
Just from a practical matter, I prefer lossless encoding. Some of the MP3 files I encoded have glitches. It simplifies deduping my library (just pick the best quality instance).
However, the golden age of audio is right now and tomorrow will be platinum. Everything else is nostalgia.
People today just get to re-create things digitally using the things from the previous times as a basis. The folks making the originals had no basis, and just made shit up as they went.
"throw it at the signal and see what it sounds like" but he did get some unique and cool effects.
I know that sounds like overstatement and wishful memories of the good 'ol days, but it's not--that thing really was beautiful.
See: Betteridge's law of headlines.
I miss that beautiful sound.
Still more of a fan of the hi-fi era that preceded the 70's when tube amps were king, reel-to-reel was spinning....
Solid-state begat a "watt wars" where amplifiers/receivers could boast numbers far in excess of what a typical tube amp could (the voltages would have to be crazy high, the transformers too heavy).
Then speaker efficiency fell (who needs efficient speakers with 80 Watt solid-state amps?). Woofer, mid-range, tweeter and the accompanying crossovers made for, arguably, crappy sound where all the "sound stage" was blown with out-of-phase audio signals washing over the listener.
Anyone who thinks the 1970s is the golden age of audio isn't paying attention.
[ EDIT: also, huge shout out to Bandcamp, where I can sit at home in the comfort of whatever listening system I want (typically for me a set of Genelec studio monitors), peruse vast quantities of music for free (typically listening to whole albums several times before I buy), and then finally choosing anything from MP3 to FLAC as the download format. I mean, my 70s self would not have believed this if I had described it to them. ]
I think that digital recording and distribution has been a game changer for the kind of music that I listen to, often obscure, indy musicians. YouTube is a blast.
About a decade ago, I sold my ReVox B77 open reel tape recorder and bought a pocket sized digital recorder.
The gear for live music has improved. I'm a jazz bassist, and a quality amplifier plus speaker now weighs 12 pounds.
(And it's all portable.)
https://ifi-audio.com/products/zen-dac/
https://shenzhenaudio.com/products/topping-dx3pro-bluetooth-...
https://drop.com/buy/massdrop-sennheiser-hd6xx
Worth perusing
Enough that I am tempted to build my own with a raspberry pi running the Exaile media player.
24 bit FLAC sent bit-for-bit perfect to my Burr-Brown converters and then to my Genelecs? This is better quality than anyone in the 1970s could have imagined [ EDIT: including the engineers in the studios where the music was recorded. ]
Convenience for shopping? Well, perhaps. But it's about more than convenience. I discover more music, by more artists, than Tower or HMV could ever have introduced me too.
We take it for granted but when I think about it I'm amazed that I can on a whim decide I want to listen to Beethoven and 10s later I'm listening to world-class musicians playing any piece I want.
Rock on FM was local, and very experimental in those days. Then, in the 1980s, consolidation started happening, and the 1996 removal of all ownership limits turned radio in general (both AM and FM) into the cesspool it is today. There are precious few rock stations from those days that have managed to stay around, not get borged into the cesspool, and keep their format without going stale. In my neck of the woods, WXRT 93.1 in Chicago is the best example.
The difference today is the source is streaming audio from my computer.
Am noob, just want to reuse my gear, avoid the Siri & Alexa & Google "smart" stuff.
I replaced it with a Grace Digital IRTP800. Used that for many years, until GD bricked it a few months ago by shutting down their web site.
So I replace that with a Galaxy Audio RM-IRD. Unfortunately, and I'm pretty mad about it, it has some small number of songs it can "shuffle play". I have more songs than that, so it will only play them starting from the beginning, meaning I only ever hear the first 100 songs or so. GA support does not respond to my queries.
So now I'm just using Windows Media Player with my computer's 5 cent DAC until I can find another streaming box. I have a Roku box which does streaming, but apparently none of the engineers at Roku use that feature because while it technically works, it is useless because all the files must be in one folder. Who organizes their music like that?
I'm actually baffled why today, 2021, I cannot find a decent streaming audio player.
Yes, pretty knobs matter. The right heft and feel is part of a quality user experience. I bought a bottom-of-the-range new Sony AVR in like 2010, and the experience sucked because too many options were buried behind a complex OSD and menu, while on the equivalent 40-year-old model was a single direct-access button.
You can crush a Harman/Kardon 730 to its component atoms, and there's an enthusiastic community that will help you restore it to operability. Virtually all the parts are available on Mouser or Digi-Key, and many can be replaced with better ones (tighter tolerances, smaller physical sizes) for peanuts. I doubt that new Sony AVR will ever be close to as fixable, let alone 40 years from now.
It's entirely possible that the right new kit will sound better, but I suspect as much as anything I'm room and layout limited more than gear limited. No point getting to -200dB signal to noise when there's a constant AC and CPU fan whine in the backdrop.
And you can't have been talking about tuning controls because that's radio, and why would anyone listen to radio on high quality audio systems today?
So maybe just a big fat volume knob, milled from virgin aluminum, and used a heat sink for the non-existening heat production from the non-existent amplifier (it's all in the speakers). Yeah, I can go for that.
Funny enough, the art of setting up a good stereo system (using said knobs) seems to have been lost.
Probably because few can afford more than a closet these days (and good headphones are cheap).
I do, it was useful when I had flakey internet and the habit stuck. Analogue FM sounds a lot better than the “compressed to buggery and probably in mono” tone of DAB as well in my opinion. There’s also the aesthetic factor, I’m a huge fan of glowing dials and physical analogue controls.
Edit: PS, I also deeply love Ardour and routinely learn a lot from you here and elsewhere. Thanks.
A lot of what's on the market seems to have ambitious or vague specs. It makes me suspicious when I see those Lepai-style amplifiers that are the size of a CD-ROM drive and claim "30 watts per channel... at 10% distortion." Would it even be able to meet those numbers under the test conditions, used for rating amplifiers in the '70s? I suspect they get much tighter numbers at less ambitious wattages, and honestly, most real world listening isn't going to break 1 watt, but it feels like they're not really starting from a place of credibility.
From there, even a competent design seems to usually be sold as half a unit-- typically paired with a laptop-style PSU. I'm sure there's a huge range of quality and suitability of pairing, and it's another ugly cable management game to play. It's not going to fit neatly anywhere designed for traditional-sized components.
There are probably some decent all-inclusive units once you move past the $50 AliExpress market, but then you're looking at more complex products and more elaborate competition: the fact it's Class D architecture is one bullet point among things like the number of inputs and outputs, video handling capability, and user experience.
I know what you're referring to; I bought one of those years ago and it sounds terrible at any volume, no matter the power supply, the input or what pair of speakers I connect it to. I believe it's a defective unit since the high distortion is audible at any volume. However, I tried some of those small modules sold on Ebay and other (more costly) class D speakers or amps for instruments, and they're generally really good. The modules in particular cost peanuts for what they offer quality wise. But yeah, the chance to save on BOM costs is too appealing, so there are manufacturers going further then making class D amps with junk power supplies or no filtering at the output to save pennies.
But the problem is none of this stuff is engineered to last in the same way. Many of the products are taking a base board design from an upstream vendor and only doing the minimal amount of work to give it a unique looking physical and OSD skin. They cheap out on the components they use as much as possible, even the mid tier brands considered to have high build quality. You're lucky if you get a decade out of one now, though admitted part of what's driving that is the assumption that features and interconnect standards are going to keep advancing fast enough that designing for a longer lifespan is pointless.
But it does feel a bit aggravating to throw something out every 10 years or so when you know it's probably just a couple caps or the like that have gone toast, but it's just not feasible to repair these DIY.
When I was a kid I got a hand me down Zenith stereo set from my grandmother. I'm sure the materials in the speaker drivers had degraded somewhat, but it still worked as perfectly as the day it was sold decades earlier. Not sure what my folks did with it, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if I found it in the attic, plugged it in, and it was still just fine.
And I don't think it's the luck; people get a bit nostalgic for the reality that never existed. Most of the iconic 1970/80s systems now touted as an example of build quality were top shelf equipment, no costs spared in their day. Yes they are repairable, but it was more a function of low integration technology of their time than any deliberate philosophy of their designers.
I'd dispute that - they came with schematics and proper, useful, troubleshooting. I used to have a bit of a collection of partially working Phillips SA-4xx series stereo amps, I wanted a 7.1 surround system using them for no good reason, (2000s I suppose, got as far as flakey 3.1 iirc) and they all had such diagrams, where ~nothing modern does. They were all before my time, fwiw.
It’s often a power supply that’s failed and those are quite easy to test and DIY replace if it’s the caps that have failed. I know a lot of people don’t even consider doing it, but for those few who are inclined to ask the question “could I fix this?” the answer is often “yes”.
The article talks about the "receiver becomes king". How about streaming services or the mp3 player/iPod.
I'd say the biggest golden age was when anyone could play any song, from almost any artist anytime, anywhere. In the 90's when I grew up if I wanted to listed to a particular song, I'd have to walk down to my local store and buy the single or the album, walk back home and play it on our CD receiver.
Nowadays the day the song is released I can listen to that song immediately and better yet, I can share with my friends and have them listen to it immediately.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/174964794345
When I got to high school we got a separate component system and a certain player. Oddly the tuner my brothers and I bought (Sony) powered a tv which was just a monitor.
I'm a fan of the quad stuff from that era, ESL57s and Quad IIs as well as Tannoy speakers. I imagine you're more US centric in your appreciation, but it was a wonderful period of innovation in music reproduction when individuals with a vision could shape how music was appreciated.
I surprised myself how much I liked quad valve gear. I still have a quad22 but it's in pieces suffering the effects of the tropics on wax potting of discrete components. A later generation quad 405 driving electrostatics was just amazing.
As are the loss of tactile buttons and illuminated displays, analogue and digital monitors.
It feels like the same trend in software, where more of the inner workings are concealed and the user is at yet more loss for what happens underneath.
He is a carpenter and build the living room furniture (which my parents still have) around this contraption. When I was a child, it was the holy center of the living room, and we were not allowed to touch it. It is still working. In the 90ies, the family CD player was hooked to it, later various DVD players.
It was all garbage after a few years. Funny enough, the 70's Marantz stuff my mom has all still works. Nothing like hearing the speakers 'pop' when it turns on, the bluish glow of the receiver, turning those knobs, and watching the meters jump around to the music.
As a kid, I had dozens and dozens of cassettes and later CDs that I carelessly threw around my room, they were cheap and it was nothing special. My father, on the other hand, valued the vinyl collection he built up as a teenager in the early 70ies higher than anything else of material value in our house. His generation had a completely different relationship to music than the following ones.
https://www.fryderykdanielczykstore.com/