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Nostalgia vs R&D

I've had people ask my advice on hi fi equipment and then add that all items must be black, all must be the same width, the TT must sit on top of this lot and the only place they are willing to put the speakers is one on top of the TV and the other on the floor....
They get advised to just get a bluetooth player or what have you...

:D
 
Interesting subject. When I first started going to live gigs I was astonished at the dynamics, particularly how drums sounded compared to how they sounded on my dad's 'hi-fi'. That's what started me looking for a better sound and by the time I was 20 I was buying my first Rega, Nait, Celestions etc. Wasn't long before I wanted more and eventually went Naim active with all Olive gear. Thing is when I go to gigs now I don't notice any improvement in sound compared to the 80s... some are better than others, but overall the sound is pretty much what I heard 40 years ago. Yet when I have been to recording studios, admittedly not often, the sound is definitely better now than back in the 80s, but not always as inviting. It's like digital gear has made the studio recorded sound more accurate, but my ears like a bit of inaccuracy. If I listen to the current range of Naim gear compared to the Olive I can hear the clarity, the extension etc. all of which are probably improved over the Olive, but I still prefer the Olive house sound. Maybe it's different for someone starting out now, they might want the more sterile sound of the modern equipment, but I think in my case my ears are always chasing that blend between clarity and warmth/colouration. I think older gear is probably less 'good' in real measurement terms, but we like it like that.
 
Just to be clear, I don't disagree entirely with Jezs view, it's just that some of us don't have a choice about where to position the music playback systems in our rooms. In my case I live in a rented flat so I can't move the radiator that would be directly behind one of the speakers if they were orientated in the ideal position or put in secondary glazing to stop my neck from freezing in the winter where I would be sat in the ideal listening position if I could move said radiator.
TS
 
Yeah I quite agree, old dog new tricks comes to mind. With a rigid belief system like that, it’s remarkable we actually left dimly lit hand painted caves 100,000 years ago.

Alternatively I may actually know what I’m doing! Please post a picture of your system and room so we can see exactly what self-imposed acoustic mess you are trying to tune-out digitally! Pictures of mine can be found all over this site. It is a very well behaved and natural sounding room that honestly doesn’t need a load of digital notch-filters to fix. Just a simple live-end, dead-end approach has it working to the extent it sounds great with proper full-range studio monitor class loudspeakers.
 
The 80’s was the golden era of hi-fi and many hi-fi gears were designed by trials and errors and the designers were relying on their ears more than their measurements.
I’m not saying today’s stuff isn’t good but many vintage equipment are more musical than what we are offered nowadays.
Spendor BC1 is one of these.

I'd say the 80s is when it all went wrong, when it became more about the brand and some pretentious false flat earth bollocks, where as before in the earlier decades it was just about sound engineering.
 
Excuse my ignorance but what is "room correction" I always took that to mean where to place your speakers etc, but is it software or a box you plug into your amp that carries out some sort of harmonic wizardry?
 
Just as when we debate musical eras and some make the point that it wasn't all Led Zep and Dylan but lots of Val Doonican and Engelbert back in the "golden age", a read of a few 70's hi fi mags shows how crap most of it was back then! For every Radford STA25 or Spendor BC1 quality item that has stood the test of time and shown true greatness there was a hundred nondescript 6 - 15WPC crap amplifiers and as many thin chipboard speakers with a full range unit with "whizzer cone" in the middle!

There can be no denying that overall, quality has gone way up and VFM has gone up even further in the non hi-end market.

Digital has of course been the biggest change in hi fi... well, ever, I guess in many ways...

A well regarded amp in 1972 such as a Leak Stereo 70, Rogers Ravensbourne, Cambridge Audio P50 etc would cost the equivalent in today's money of around £800+ and would be thrashed by a £150 Arcam/NAD/what have you. That's the biggest change IMHO... VFM

The biggest downside IMHO has been the "we've got a microprocessor and we're gonna use it", technology for the sake of it, or to make it shout out it's modernity on a dealers shelf.
Do we actually need an amplifier to have a touch screen display telling you about what volume it's set to, which input is selected etc and saying "welcome to the Acme MkII!" when it's switched on? The heart of the actual amplifier is probably not much different from one made in 1982... just miniaturised and cheapened further by SMD and by build techniques that allow construction to be automated as much as possible.

The problem here is that it is rendered 10x more difficult to repair and often in fact beyond economical repair, plus when a manufacturer stops supporting a unit after a few years specialised items custom made for that unit like say the touch screen become completely unobtainable and the amp ends up in land fill...

I guess the 80's (including a few years each side) could be called a golden age in that hi fi "came of age" and gear with genuinely great sound became available at prices the average audiophile could afford whilst still being traditional enough to be readily serviced (CD players excepted!) for decades afterwards.
 
‘Digital crap...” oh dear, old dog new tricks comes to mind. No, fix it with the nostalgia valves, transformers, cables and a rock bouncing around a plastic gutter instead. With a rigid belief system like that, it’s remarkable we actually left dimly lit hand painted caves 100,000 years ago.
Contrarianism has always been a big part of hifi. Meanwhile the rest of the world enjoys the tunes.
 
Excuse my ignorance but what is "room correction" I always took that to mean where to place your speakers etc, but is it software or a box you plug into your amp that carries out some sort of harmonic wizardry?

It basically a room measurement (frequency sweeps etc played through the speakers and measured from the listening seat) followed by digitally imposing an EQ curve to flatten or dilute any obvious artefacts. It is actually nothing new at all, it has been around in the studio sphere for a very long time, but it is still highly desirable to get the room as right as possible as huge EQ notches never sound good. Another issue is you are obviously making the system output less flat to compensate for one chosen location in the room, which can make things sound very odd off axis. As stated I’m not a fan, but I’m in the minority with a dedicated listening room and no domestic constraints so can get things pretty much right without it. FWIW I liken it to recording engineers who can’t be arsed to learn what mics sound good where and then attempt to fix everything with extreme EQ & plug-ins in ProTools or whatever. From a hi-fi perspective better to pick a good room and understand how to furnish it for best acoustic results, and then pick a system that works well in that space. I can understand it if folk have gross booms, honks etc, but even so I’d prefer to try and address the actual cause rather than the symptoms.
 
I guess the 80's (including a few years each side) could be called a golden age in that hi fi "came of age" and gear with genuinely great sound became available at prices the average audiophile could afford whilst still being traditional enough to be readily serviced (CD players excepted!) for decades afterwards.
And - inevitably - in 2060 this forum will be full of nostalgic postings about how great and analog the good old bluetooth codecs sounded - when things were kind of real and true compared with whatever crap they will have in 2060.
 
And - inevitably - in 2060 this forum will be full of nostalgic postings about how great and analog the good old bluetooth codecs sounded - when things were kind of real and true compared with whatever crap they will have in 2060.

The difference is the last bargain-bucket Chinese-made surface-mount capacitor and LCD display will likely have failed long before then so no one will have a reference point to be nostalgic about!

PS Regarding the term ‘nostalgia’; much the kit many of us recognise as being at the top of the pile isn’t necessarily from our own generation. Almost all of my kit is way older than I would have been able to buy new as I only obtained any real spending power in the mid-late 80s or so, but none of that era is currently represented in my system. My kit is pretty much exclusively 1950s to ‘70s with added modern digital source components, as for me that is when the real innovation that shaped the audio industry was taking place. I’d still take a bog-standard Garrard 301, 3012, SPU, Quad 22/II and ESLs over 95% of what is available today, and that is 1957 technology, so way before I was even born!
 
The room does make a big difference. I do most of my listening on my study system - it's a pretty small room but has my highest end system (although it's fairly entry level by the standards of this site) in it - LP12, Krell, Wilson Bensch, SimAudio etc. and it does sound good. The system in my bedroom (which is maybe twice the size) is fairly prosaic by comparison (RP2, Primare, PMC, Simaudio, Cambridge Audio) but is in some respects better - and that's mostly room related.

In the past I've moved my study system into the living room and there was a substantial improvement in sound quality - all down to the bigger/better room.
 
The proposition at the thread’s heart is a problem for me. I don’t listen to either R&D or nostalgia. I listen to music and my only question is whether or not I’m enjoying it. My biggest concern for the future of the hifi industry is why the systems that are produced nowadays aren’t better to listen to than they were 30 years ago, whatever their technical performance is.

A good example would be a good friend of mine who is a respected Dolby engineer who’s heard everything that he latest high end digital systems have to offer, yet still chooses valves, vintage Tannoys and a 1210 as a system.
 
The proposition at the thread’s heart is a problem for me. I don’t listen to either R&D or nostalgia. I listen to music and my only question is whether or not I’m enjoying it.

Very good point. I really don't give a shit about whether my kit is old or new (or how it's engineered) as long as it sounds good to me and is reasonably reliable. The system I'm listing to now has components in it ranging from the early 70's up to very modern but the important thing is that it I like the way it sounds.
 
The proposition at the thread’s heart is a problem for me. I don’t listen to either R&D or nostalgia. I listen to music and my only question is whether or not I’m enjoying it. My biggest concern for the future of the hifi industry is why the systems that are produced nowadays aren’t better to listen to than they were 30 years ago, whatever their technical performance is.

A good example would be a good friend of mine who is a respected Dolby engineer who’s heard everything that he latest high end digital systems have to offer, yet still chooses valves, vintage Tannoys and a 1210 as a system.

But the vast majority of listeners find their Iphones and truly wireless noise canceling earbuds better to listen to and far more enjoyable than the systems we used to own. Your friend is just a singular exception.
 
But the vast majority of listeners find their Iphones and truly wireless noise canceling earbuds better to listen to and far more enjoyable than the systems we used to own. Your friend is just a singular exception.

I guess it all depends on the ‘we’ you refer to. Sure, a lot of people have only ever accessed music via Dansettes, ghetto blasters, car stereos, TV speakers, sound-bars etc, and yes, even a £60 pair of headphones playing a compressed MP3 will beat that level of reproduction. The ‘we’ here on a high-end audio forum are obviously describing the exact opposite end of the market; ESLs, giant Tannoy monitors, BBC monitors, huge horn systems etc. I’ve never had any interest in the mundane, I first heard a great system (Thorens, Quad, Ditton 66) way back as a school-kid and by my early 20s I’d visited several recording studios. I've had a very clear point of reference as long as I can remember. FWIW I do like a good headphone system and when setting up a system will often use my HD-600s as a comparison point. I also like my iPhone (Apple Lossless) and Sennheiser Momentums as a listen on public transport rig, though I obviously haven’t had need to use that since humans became toxic way back in February.
 
But the vast majority of listeners find their Iphones and truly wireless noise canceling earbuds better to listen to and far more enjoyable than the systems we used to own. Your friend is just a singular exception.

My kids listen to exactly that type of system. They don’t think it’s better though (at all) just that the obsession to make a system sound like that is weird. They simply don’t care because budget Audio is now “good enough”. It’s always been thus - most people in the 80s bought their music centre/midi system from Dixon’s or Curry’s and were perfectly happy in the just the same way that for every camera buff there’s a million people with a mobile phone.

I’m not dissing new gear by the way. Two of the best systems I’ve heard are the Beolab 90 and Steinway Model D - both as digital and room-corrected (and expensive) as you can get. I’m just making the point that I don’t feel hifi has advanced as much as it should have over the last 20 years. Room correction is great but if I had to start again now and could only buy new gear, I’d probably buy a brand new Sugden A21 and a pair of Shahinians on the end of a Bluesound Node 2.
 
Virtually all my kit is old.
Probably the oldest component is the AR XA turntable.
It cost me £25.00 about 15 years ago and I spent about the same on a belt and mat.
The maintenance was done by me.
With a Denon MC cartridge it sounds superb.

I never thought I’d buy new, but the Stirling V3s arrived brand new in early January.
They were driven by a Quad amplifier initially, but I thought I’d ask Doug Stirling what amp. he
recommended.
‘A Marantz PM6004’, he told me.
Never thought I’d buy a new amplifier, but I must say the Stirlings have ‘come to life’ with the
Marantz.

I feel I can get musical satisfaction with both old and new components, if I choose carefully.
Mind you, my Spendor BC1s will never leave my main system.
 


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