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Audiophile snobbery...?

I own a Yam A-S2100. Picked up for a not too unreasonable 1300 quid, just before announcement of the latest iterations.

Certainly, from a build quality and aesthetic vantage, the economies of scale of a large entity are immediately apparent - nothing I've owned or indeed seen from other manufacturers in a similar price bracket comes close. Not even nearly...

But is it fur coat, no knickers? Maybe just a bit...
 
I think there's a certain hair shirt mentality going on. In the old days, we had balance and tone controls, and loudness buttons. Then suddenly there was this ascetic movement in hi-fi that I think the Japs (and maybe the Americans) just didn't understand. Somehow it was just better to have angle iron and rusty bolts instead of polished brushed aluminium.
 
Marketing is so incredibly powerful and you have to fight through the years to avoid being sucked in, it’s everywhere in life and often very subtle. I heard this wonderful phrase yesterday “housebarrassment”, wow, talk about preying on shame, fear, etc. and you can apply to this to cars, clothes, school choices, anything. I also heard a chap say on a conference call this morning that at his son’s school you get bullied if you don’t have an iPhone and Nike air shoes or whatever they are. Frightening.

I know Arkless is an engineer and I suspect other engineers would differ from his views, it’s not surprising the rest of us glaze at science, pseudoscience and supposition. Best to learn what we like, enjoy it, put the music first and not get sidetracked on forums, lots of laughs. They’re well meaning but often harmful places, I steer clear of coffee forums but whenever I see posts on other forums I’m dismayed at the poor and limited knowledge dished out as sage advice.

Anyway, this isn’t a rant, I love the gear I am lucky enough to use just as I enjoy reading that of others without having to want it. It’s like years of chasing the dragon’s tail dissipated into just treating it as tools to do a job. Which funnily enough was the first piece of advice I received in about 1983, from Howard Popeck I think it was.
 
While there's snobs and poseurs, there'll be snobbery and fashion led purchasing in every field, inc. HiFi.
Some people are just like that.
 
a lot of these people know each other personally. It's actually a fairly well connected community and you're not going to rubbish products made by people you consider friends.

Herein lies one of the key issues in the hi-fi industry not just in the UK but across the world. Friendship and advertising spend creates bias, which in turn sells products regardless of whether there is better to be had elsewhere. I cringe every year when I see the whathifi awards with the same brands featured time after time, knowing that so many are going to rush out to a dealer and buy a system based purely off that list only in a lot of cases to be sorely disappointed with the resultant performance. I certainly have no issue with supporting British brands and have a great deal of admiration and respect for some of them, but ultimately the way to outsell Far Eastern manufacturers is to build better products than they do.

One of the things that really bugs me in hi-fi is acceptance of faults in expensive products from small manufacturers. You see it a lot on forums. If you buy an expensive product from a boutique manufacturer, you should expect that product to perform to spec, to be produced with a degree of quality control and to be reliable for a reasonable period of time. This is so often not the case yet because the product was made by a small British manufacturer it is seen as normal, if not perfectly acceptable. People are happy to send their kit away, sometimes for months, for it to be repaired. Yet if the equipment was made in China or Japan, or by one of the larger manufactures, it's immediately deemed unacceptable, and they will "never buy a product from that brand again" etc. It baffles me.

Most of the equipment I use personally was built in Austria, Japan or China. My studio equipment is mostly from China, Japan or in one case 'assembled' in the US. I generally avoid the typical audiophile brands these days for the reasons above. They make some nice gear but if it can't match up to cheaper mass-produced equipment in build quality, quality of the design and engineering, fit and finish and reliability, I'm not interested.
 
I cringe every year when I see the whathifi awards...

As a source of information, What Hi-Fi is completely useless. When was the last time you saw them give anything less than four stars?

One of the things that really bugs me in hi-fi is acceptance of faults in expensive products from small manufacturers.

Lotus cars spring to mind. It's not a fault sir, it's a quirk. Just a part of the Lotus experience. Bugs me as well. Ok, designed cool products is fun and quality control is boring you you need to damn well do it.
 
There’s a big difference between fit & finish and build quality. The Japanese audio manufacturers were masters of brilliant fit & finish back in the Seventies and Eighties, they had gorgeous faceplates, fancy control knobs and cool VU meters, etc. The specialist audio products of that era look like 1950’s Soviet army surplus gear by comparison.

But then open up the Japanese gear and yikes, not so good. The quality of the PCBs, the components on those boards, the transformers and power supply capacitors, the internal wiring, etc. looked like what you’d see in a clock radio (OK, a slight exaggeration). Then open up the specialist gear and see glassfibre PCBs, toroidal transformers, metal film resistors, quality wiring, etc. So I think there was some justification back then for people looking down on the mass-market stuff...
 
But then open up the Japanese gear and yikes, not so good. The quality of the PCBs, the components on those boards, the transformers and power supply capacitors, the internal wiring, etc. looked like what you’d see in a clock radio (OK, a slight exaggeration). Then open up the specialist gear and see glassfibre PCBs, toroidal transformers, metal film resistors, quality wiring, etc. So I think there was some justification back then for people looking down on the mass-market stuff...

I’m not buying this. Yes, they are busy as they are feature-rich, and yes many of the true classics predate the widespread use of glass-fibre boards, but the quality is very good IMO. The quality of many ‘70s Japanese electrolytic capacitors is as good as it gets too. I’ve watched countless YouTube videos of folk recapping top-end mid-70s Japanese kit, measuring the pulled caps and still finding most of them in spec. I recently had my ‘76 Sony TC-204SC cassette deck serviced by df_genius here and he sent me the bag of old caps he had replaced, most Nippon Chemicon brand. Now I can’t test under a voltage load for leakage as I don’t have the kit to do so, but all but a couple of really tiny ones were still within 10% of their printed spec according to my Fluke meter. My 1972 Sony ST-5150 tuner is untouched and still works perfectly, as does my mid-70s Akai 4000DB (I replaced the belts and pinch-roller and re-lubed it, but did no electronic work).

My view is a lot of people have been misled about capacitor life due to a) Naim style kit being left on 24/7 and not having huge headroom in the capacitor voltage specification, and b) the late-90s to early-2000s ‘capacitor plague’ where a load of really awful Chinese made crap with the wrong formulation ended up in computers, TVs, MDACs etc etc and just leaked or exploded after just a few years. Good quality Japanese or European-made capacitors used sensibly within their ratings and not left powered up should last for decades, even over half a century IMO. I’ve really de-programmed myself from the audiophile group-think on this.

I’m not saying everything is good, some caps in some products are notoriously/known bad e.g. the electrolytics used by Sinclair in the old Spectrum etc, RIFA X filter caps etc, these are just shite and should always be replaced before use! This vintage computer community proves the point to a large degree; Sinclairs and Amigas (the latter being surface mount) always need work, the BBC B needs the Rifa X cap and one other in the switching PSU doing, a similar age Electron or IBM XT will almost certainly be fine as-is. Good quality caps used sensibly have a long life. I could rant on about vintage synths and guitar amps too. Not everything needs ripping out at all.
 
There’s a big difference between fit & finish and build quality. The Japanese audio manufacturers were masters of brilliant fit & finish back in the Seventies and Eighties, they had gorgeous faceplates, fancy control knobs and cool VU meters, etc. The specialist audio products of that era look like 1950’s Soviet army surplus gear by comparison.

But then open up the Japanese gear and yikes, not so good. The quality of the PCBs, the components on those boards, the transformers and power supply capacitors, the internal wiring, etc. looked like what you’d see in a clock radio (OK, a slight exaggeration). Then open up the specialist gear and see glassfibre PCBs, toroidal transformers, metal film resistors, quality wiring, etc. So I think there was some justification back then for people looking down on the mass-market stuff...

Spot on!! "Shop appeal", manufacturers go for it. the Japanese are masters at it and Joe Public falls for it year after year.. make it LOOK well made on the outside and to many punters it IS well made. As you say the utter mess inside many 70's and 80's Jap amps is such a contrast to all the effort put into the external appearance.

A more recent issue is people with SFA knowledge of electronics judging the innards of an amp by how neat and symmetrical it looks when not only do the electrons not give a damn but it is also often a bad thing in that wires are extended and boards placed in less than optimum places to help give the neat look when it only increases crosstalk and sometimes places things which need to be cool next to heatsinks etc...

VU meters and solid metal controls are only taking money away from the spend on transformers, smoothing caps etc...
 
There’s a big difference between fit & finish and build quality. The Japanese audio manufacturers were masters of brilliant fit & finish back in the Seventies and Eighties, they had gorgeous faceplates, fancy control knobs and cool VU meters, etc. The specialist audio products of that era look like 1950’s Soviet army surplus gear by comparison.

But then open up the Japanese gear and yikes, not so good. The quality of the PCBs, the components on those boards, the transformers and power supply capacitors, the internal wiring, etc. looked like what you’d see in a clock radio (OK, a slight exaggeration). Then open up the specialist gear and see glassfibre PCBs, toroidal transformers, metal film resistors, quality wiring, etc. So I think there was some justification back then for people looking down on the mass-market stuff...

When I first got into hifi (80s) there was an enormous amount of hifi made, much very similar from many Japanese brands and the utilitarian look and feel of much of the British stuff was a direct reaction to that and very refreshing for it. The first shop I ever worked in sold Technics, Sony, Denon, Marantz (before they were jointly owned, when Denon was still Nippon Columbia) and Kenwood alongside Quad, Linn, Arcam and B&O. The lower end Tech and Sony stuff was godawful, bland and uninteresting to listen to by and large, with the odd exception. Certainly Denon, Marantz and Arcam and NAD showed them a clean pair of heels. Once you got further up the range, things did get more interesting, especially with Sony ES kit, to be fair but the look was very much more is more. My experience of listening to other brands from Japan, was largely similar. I remember being totally baffled by the Pioneer A300/400 and heard them many times just sounding terrible.

I think it's very easy to forget the volume of stuff that Japanese brands made at the time and how pedestrian much of it was, despite the undoubted excellence of some of it. In a shop such as the one I mention earlier, between those 5 Japanese companies we must have had 25 amps alone between £99 and £200. Add in NAD and Arcam and you can probably add another 5 in that price bracket let alone the rest of their range. Then you had the same situation with CD players and tape decks. Trying to pick a way though that as a customer and put a genuinely good system together was difficult, given the power of the mags at the time and the influence that the marketing departments of these companies had. For all people rail against what they see as Linn's dubious tactics of the day, they could never incentivise salesmen like the big boys constantly did. They didn't have the money!

The biggest thing the Japanese did have going for them though, was reliability, whatever the build looked like internally. Hundreds of those affordable products from any of those companies would be sold and we simply wouldn't see them again and there's still a fair few out there working, nearly 40 years later. Compare that with any of the comparably priced British products and the reliability is worlds apart. If only Technics had made those wonderfully reliable £179 amps sound even half as good as a Creek, though.
 
Not had much in the way of Yamaha over the years. I picked up one of their higher end cassette decks back in the early 80’s that was a lovely bit of kit. Lusted after the CT7000 tuner and the NS1000m speakers and eventually got the speakers ten or so years back. They stuck around for a number of years but moved them on due to lack of use really.
Only recent item was an AS501 amp which I never really got on with. Nothing wrong with it just never gelled with it.

As Tony mentioned their musical instruments are very well made, in fact I was watching some YouTube videos on their pianos last night. The reviewers were very impressed. Likewise their drum kits look excellent but never tried any.

Finally their motorcycles. They didn’t have quite the reputation Honda did in the 70’s but there were some good models. I remember my cousin buying a new RD400, felt nuts at the time.

I eventually bought a Yamaha Thunderace in 2000 which was superb. Last of the machines before they went super light with the R1. Current range look excellent and one may well be on my list as a replacement for my 1250FA.

Yamaha’s manufacturing history has been very impressive when you consider the range of products both acoustic to electronic over the years.
 
I guess the issue is ‘Which’ is a long established consumer review magazine and will have a Trade Mark in that class, though why What Hi-Fi didn’t just pick another name entirely is beyond me.
 
Yamaha’s manufacturing history has been very impressive when you consider the range of products both acoustic to electronic over the years.
Yamaha hifi first grabbed my pubescent short and curlies way back in the late 70s when I remember being awed by their mighty C-1/B-1 and C2/B-2 FET amplifiers and the venerable NS-1000s. In fact, my first hifi was a Yamaha combo based around the CR-420 receiver.

Fast forward a few years into my motorcycling years, my last three bikes were Yamahas. First came the FZ750 with its innovative 5-valve head. It culminated with an FZR1000, which had a pearl of an engine and perfect blend of rideability and handling.

I have a Yamaha acoustic guitar, a lovely vintage T-1 tuner, and a pair of NS-1000Ms. It's a shame they haven't quite got the amps (class-A) to compete head on with Luxman and Accuphase. I think they have the capability, but perhaps not the market demand.
 


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