Vintage audio pricing
- Thread starter Tony L
- Start date
rhgbristol
pfm Member
I remember my neighbour buying a brand new LP12, Ittock and Asak in 1981, from Radford Hifi in Bristol.
Even to this day i remember seeing the invoice
LP12 £340
Ittock £ 253
Asak £ 207
I was still on Garrard SP25 like most were at that time, and it wasn’t until 1986 when i bought my first new LP12 - also from Radford hifi.
The LP12 by then was £445 and the only arm i could afford was the Basic plus at £115
Even to this day i remember seeing the invoice
LP12 £340
Ittock £ 253
Asak £ 207
I was still on Garrard SP25 like most were at that time, and it wasn’t until 1986 when i bought my first new LP12 - also from Radford hifi.
The LP12 by then was £445 and the only arm i could afford was the Basic plus at £115
Joe
pfm Member
I used to live in Hull where Comet started and I remember buying my first piece of "hi-fi" ..an SP25 from them for half the price that anyone else was selling them for. ( I also bought my first real camera , an Olympus OM1 , from them also ridiculously discounted. The 'shop' was a warehouse on an industrial estate .. just inside the front doors was a wooden counter and behind was racks and racks of Dexion shelving stuffed with ...stuff. You had to ask for what you wanted ( you knew from the ad's in the papers ) and men in brown warehouse coats went off to fetch the item for you. Sealed boxes. You didn't get to open them up and think about it.. buy it or bugger off. Happy days , in a way.
I bought my first LP12 from a shop in Scarborough that sold mainly washing machines and TV's. It would have been around 1980 and cost about £250. Ivor was happy for anyone to sell his product back then. I bought my second LP12 in 1987 second hand for £350... it came complete with an Ittok and asaka fitted. I dread to think what Ivor would like my to pay him now to replace that deck.
Martyn Miles
pfm Member
In 1975, a pair of Rogers LS3/5as were £114.40 a pair.
A pair of them can go for over £2,000 these days...
A pair of them can go for over £2,000 these days...
Stunsworth
pfm Member
In 1974 a pint of beer where I lived was 15p.
Martyn Miles
pfm Member
I hope it was a nice pint...
Martian Sunrise
pfm Member
1976 by Richard Howard, on FlickrHere’s my 1976 set up (the Sony is now gone)
3600 in today’s money
Why? This was the technology of it's day, is it any different to Currys selling you an iPhone X or a huge 4k TV?
Lee T
pfm Member
Shocking, had no idea these were cheap speakers.
ToTo Man
the band not the dog
I'll pick out a few bits of kit that I currently own:
Practical Hi-Fi December 1976.
Pioneer SX-1250 - £758 RRP in 1976 (£5,547 in today's money)
Yamaha CR-1000 - £449 RRP in 1976 (£3,290 in today's money)
Celestion Ditton 66 - £375 RRP in 1976 (£2,748 in today's money)
Fortunately I bought these units used over a decade ago just before the vintage hifi market really took off so got them at prices I could afford.
I notice two prices are listed in the magazine, the RRP and a discounted price. In practise which price were the majority of punters likely to be paying?
Tony L
Administrator
This is long before the fixed-price cartel thing of the ‘80s BADA dealers (IIRC the by appointment dem and home installation thing meant they could sell as a service and not be accused of price-fixing, but I may be misremembering). I remember most of the big stores, e.g. Laskeys, Comet etc, offered huge discounts on most stuff. No one ever paid RRP! As ever plenty of bargains in grabbing end of line stuff too. I remember hi-fi shops being everywhere, even smallish towns had something. A whole different world, sadly.
PS Rather envious of your SX1250! Is it as good as it looks?
ToTo Man
the band not the dog
Yet more affirmation of my growing up in the wrong era (I'd love to have grown up during the 60s and 70s).
Lee T
pfm Member
Makes you wonder how these will now compare with speakers around today at these prices.
As an example, the Celestion of yesteryear versus these, be an interesting test.
https://www.hifix.co.uk/kef-ls50-wi...MIp4P3_4qj2wIVJbXtCh0-NAA6EAQYAiABEgLjyvD_BwE
Tony L
Administrator
I remember the ‘70s well as despite being a kid I was already a geeky audiophile, I just didn’t have any money to buy anything until I came into a few hundred quid via a will when I was 15 (hence my first Quad/JR149 system being rather better than most peoples starting off point!). I remember drooling at shop window displays, picking up brochures, buying magazines etc long before I had any actual spending power.
Ditton 66s would easily cost £6-10k in today’s speaker market, the nearest equivalent would be something like the reissued Tannoy Arden which is £6.5k (and seems cheap at that price given what that money typically buys these days). A whole different thing to the active Kef mini-monitors. I bet the Kefs are great, but they stand zero chance attaining of the scale and ease of a really big speaker. Physics still applies!
The big Celestions were actually the speakers that got me into hi-fi in the first place, a friend’s dad had a pair and I’d never heard anything remotely like them. A huge effortless full-range sound (much as I take for granted these days from my Lockwoods!). I was hooked from the first few seconds of the Moody Blues album he played (A Question Of Balance).
claire.foxx
-⃝⃤
Unlike yesterday’s classics today’s future classics will not be as easily repairable. Yes blown ICs can be replaced with compatible products if they exist (and copies of them implemented in DIY discrete giant breakouts) but even (especially?) things like FPGAs have a finite lifespan. BGA removal tools for a lot of these things are right out of most people’s budgets and then there is the thorny subject of just one company providing the world’s stocks of, say, optical interfaces or esoteric logic...
There will be absolutely no “tomorrows classics” from the era 2000-2020 or beyond sold as functioning units in 70 or so years time. Mind you, in 70 years time, home 3D printing and copying out of copyright processors will be trivial... but getting them in the box will be a merde. Devialet Phantom is a case in point.
Martyn Miles
pfm Member
Looking at an inflation calculator, £114 in 1975 is £901 today.
The nearest equivalent to the Rogers would, perhaps, be the Stirling
Broadcast LS3/5a V2. These are priced at £1,398 a pair.
ToTo Man
the band not the dog
It is, but I'm sure it won't be functioning 100% to spec as it still has all of its original internals, which is the reason why don't quite trust it enough to be my daily driver (I am the over-cautious type though!). Difficulty is finding a local competent tech willing to give it a complete overhaul (not many would have the patience required to disassemble to gain access to the plethora of PCBs). There was a chap in the USA called EchoWars on the AudioKarma forum who knew these units so well he could recap them in his sleep, I wonder if he's still at it over a decade later?!
My CR-2020 is a stunner too, it doesn't have quite the visual impact of the SX-1250's massive PS caps and toroidal tranny but I love it just as much.
A pic of my SX-1250 from 2008:
James
Lord of the Erg\o/s
Some of the old school (discrete circuitry) but modern kit made by Accuphase, Audio Research and Pass might still make classic status in a generation or two.