What a delight to see this thread popping up in the updated list.
I’m assuming that the speaker frames are cast alloy. I’ve cured rubbing coils and magnets on pressed steel framed units with a bit of gentle bending but that’s not an option on castings.
Must castigate Countryboy for using millimetres in his speaker measurements. We’re in a nostalgic imperial world on this thread and don’t want the bubble bursting.
Many years ago before the days of B&Q I visited a local DIY shop for some timber for a project. Told the guy I wanted some 2 x 1 timber. He said he didn’t have 2 x 1 as it had all gone metric. I asked him what was the closest and he said 50mm x 25mm. Told him yes, that was what I wanted and asked what lengths it came in. The answer? 6 foot or 8 foot.
Many years ago before the days of B&Q I visited a local DIY shop for some timber for a project. Told the guy I wanted some 2 x 1 timber. He said he didn’t have 2 x 1 as it had all gone metric. I asked him what was the closest and he said 50mm x 25mm. Told him yes, that was what I wanted and asked what lengths it came in. The answer? 6 foot or 8 foot."
That still is the case today at merchants it’s great, isn’t it?
Quite a bit of pressure on at the moment with these lovely speakers, Mrs B is not happy with their current location in the lounge Normally, I would have had the cables nicely hidden with the speakers set up in their final resting place by now but having to make do with them laid on the surface of the carpet (for testing purposes only ) whilst I work on this thorny issue! They, or I, may not survive this battle
Some great input from folk on this thread, thanks everyone for making it the interesting read that it is
With reference to an earlier post by RichardFX, I have a November 1979 WhatHiFi magazine featuring my AIWA mini component system and I came across this advert from Tannoy (amongst 200+ pages of adverts! articles! reviews etc,) regarding phasing of their speakers. Loving the brown suit of the guy in the pic
I lifted some floorboards to route ‘Monster cable’ to 4mm banana plugs set in to a panel in the floor. Polished wood floor, no carpet! Feeding the KEF Cadenza’s were home-brew mono power amps and pre-amp from a design in ‘Elektor’ magazine.
Then I got married------------
I still have the fat twisted flex cables under the floorboards from the “electronics corner” to the “speakers end”, installed in 1971 when the house was rewired the week after I bought it. They used to feed the window seat speakers in the bay, but the bay window went in 1980, and they now feed the Maxims hiding in the bookcase covering that end-wall, only because SWMBO didn’t want the big old 1950’s Quad electrostatics “cluttering up the room”.
When the house was rewired we took out lead covered cables with rubberised cloth insulation (!!!) for the lights as well as VIR (rubber the consistency of cheese) for the power sockets. The electricity meter crawled round with nothing plugged in and no switches on. Taking out the fuses merely slowed it down a bit with each fuse less. It only stopped with no fuses at all. Some of the walls above the light switches were warm from the leakage!
Takes me back to the first place I bought in 1977. Visible copper on both meter tails. Could also see where the plaster had been patched when the bedroom wall lights had been changed from gas to electrickery.
Can’t understand why the magazine title was censored. Can’t see that the missing letters mean anything rude. Even Google doesn’t find anything. I presume the title you are referring to is Elektor.
The website censored the well known expression for leaving the EU that begins with a B and ends with a T for some reason. Changed it to something completely different .
Here is the word it gives instead…“Brexit”
Ha ha!
Really enjoying my new Audio Technica AT5 LP 5 turntable (fitted with an Ortofon Super OM25 cartridge/stylus), playing through a NAD amplifier (40 years old) and Mission 78SE speakers. I have been buying loads of new vinyl which sounds much better than CDs even in a back to back comparison of the same recording.
I have never got around to hiding interconnects or speaker cable, the latter being no thicker than 2 core lighting cable in the 60’s, to the many metres, sorry, yards of fairly hefty Chord Epic Twin I have at present. Maybe it’s a good thing I never married!
amazing retro kit! I love old hifi’, the sound from them was so rich compared to the mp3 compressed sounds we have now. Proper amps, proper speakers and proper sound!
Aiwa was one of my favourite manufacturer back in the day, along with Pioneer, Akai, JVC, Sanyo and Sharp. Although the latter 3 seemed to focus more on midi hifi’s latterly.
Loving the hifi Barrie, and the cabinet you’ve made!
I have been into listening to music using good quality kit for many years and have had a lot of different kit. Had a full Naim system for years, then moved onto valve kit.
Some pics of my old kit
My current kit is different again, but I don’t have good pics to hand. The speakers are now huge (Heco Dreiklangs) and I have a choice of amps - solid state and valves, plus of course I still use a nice turntable.
I loved that turntable - a Palmer 2.5 with SME arm and Lyra Kleos cartridge. Sold when I moved house. But I do now have a really nice Project Xtension 10 which is super and gorgeous looking too. The old kit was Unison Research S9 integrated amp, Graaf phono stage, Naim CDX with CDS power supply, and Audio Physic Avanti IV speakers.
I shall post up some pics of my current kit at some point - but can’t yet as all under covers as having some work done in that room (bookcase built filling one wall/alcove, size and strength to house my vinyl collection)
I haven’t read from start of the thread, so apologies if I got it wrong … I thought all my kit was ‘retro’ given most of it is several decades old and has in some instances been ‘fettled’ … and not sure it qualifies as modern, but nevermind.
SOTA (State Of The Art) modern kit is all very well, but bear in mind the electronic part of the old kit had similar performance figures, and the limiting factor was almost never the amp (unless truly pants) but the speakers AND where they were positioned in the room AND the acoustic treatment of the room, with the combination of record surface and pick-up being the next worst contributor.
Most speakers introduce assorted distortions, non-linearities and phase errors, and while it might seem counter-intuitive, in the first order the smaller the speaker the more faithful the sound, simply because it approximates the ideal “point source”.
But there is a BIG SNAG, small speakers cannot produce lots of bass without introducing non-linearity (compression/expansion) distortion, and adding rushing noises from the reflex ports (if used). These are some of the reasons I stuck with the little old Maxims after trying many others, and the Maxims had a cunning design on the bass driver pole pieces to overcome the non-linearities of a sealed infinite baffle box. And they don’t have the lowest bass and they are not the loudest and they are by no means the most efficient, but the sound was/is amongst the cleanest (apart from my Quad electrostatics). The 18" Audiom 91 I built into the hifi cabinet (approx 5’ x 2’ x 1.5’) was loud, clear and undistorted even quarter of a mile away at the far end of the Rag procession in 1968, (ears overloaded if too close on axis up to about a hundred yards) and that was only using 30Watts (True RMS). The inefficient Maxim sound would have been lost thirty feet away.
In most domestic environments 30W True RMS per channel (~250W “IHF music power”) before any hint of clipping is more than enough for conventional stereo, IF the speakers are any good. Most people listen most of the time at about 0.1W to 2W on the many decent speakers.
Our most used sound system (but not the most “hifi”) is actually a cheap Logitech Z906 5.1 “1000W” (huh, really?) surround system fed via the TV, with Lucas-film THX calibration (whatever that might mean). That only has about 10W on each of the five surround speakers and about 100W on the sub. It is adequate, and produces an amazingly good realistic immersive environment to sit within, even from most of the ordinary ‘stereo’ TV, as well as from the DVDs and Blu-ray. It can almost shake the house. Speaker placement is absolutely everything here, and I experimented for several weeks with fine adjustments before settling on what we have now. The five are small enough and hidden enough with sub hidden in the fireplace behind the TV that SWMBO is happy too, and takes the realistic sound for granted, sometimes wondering why other people’s set-ups with much more expensive sound-bars sound so bad.
The Maxims are fed from a small home-made IC based amplifier I built thirty-odd years ago, and a visitor from work one day in the 1990s who turned out to be a fully-addicted early-adopter audiophile asked me what I listened to (he could not see any speakers or amplifier). After he listened to his choice from my vinyl and CDs he wondered why he had spent so much money on his Krell valve amp and ESL63 Quad speakers.
Ahh - lol … I think many of the shows I have been to over the years, if I called my kit SOTA or modern, I’d be laughed out.
I thought I would join the conversation purely 'cos someone commented that it was a good job he wasn’t married. So I posted as I have been into hifi ever since walking into The Sound Org in York and hearing a proper system, I have played with lots of kit, lots of very old kit, stuff that has been through many hands, done some valve rolling, tried various other little mods and even had a DIY phono stage (which I think I still have somewhere) - and happen to be a woman.
I dated guys who didn’t ‘get’ the hifi thing, but never been an issue, aside from having to tell one not to move my speakers (he moved them back to the wall as he thought they looked better there, after I had spent weeks getting them perfectly positioned).
With the speaker solution - it is all a compromise. Small driver units can give fast response and crisp bass, but for really full sound, it is hard to get passed the need for size. Some speakers use quite complex methods to give a domestically acceptable narrow front, but still have sufficient driver to recreate a full sound. The APs I used to run had a very narrow front, but were much larger at the back which was curved and they had side bass drivers to fill in and make up for the lack of a very large unit. Then of course there is the complex isobaric solution. I have moved more to the higher sensitivity speakers now, with large drivers - I know many wouldn’t live with them as there is no way to hide them, but I am lucky enough to have 2 front rooms so one gets the TV and the other has the hi-fi.
Like you though, the ‘big system’ isn’t the one used most as the little ‘all-in-one’ speaker/amp unit I have hooked up to the TV, has bluetooth connection to stream and is very decent and convenient.
Rewind to Monday if you will. My budget is very modest indeed insomuch as I have so many things that demand my attention So, I’m always trawling through for sale ads etc for bargains in the hifi department, on various Online selling places. My latest acquisition is certainly retro and music related, I purchased this, it’s a HITACHI STD 7785 music centre, straight out of the 70’s!
OK, it’s not everyone’s cuppa as they say, but I wanted to try one out. £140 exchanged hands and off I scurried home to inspect it. Came with a pair of not contemporary HITACHI bookshelf speakers, handbooks, a spare original headshell and DM cartridge which needs a new stylus. I bought it knowing that the cassette drive didn’t work, so set to this morning to have a look.
Lifting the platter off revealed two screws in nylon bushes, holding the main turntable in position, unscrewed them and lifted the complete turntable base out. I think this turntable was available as a stand alone, it’s HITACHI’s UNITORQUE direct drive, two speed with pitch control, strobe etc. The model is HITACHI TP-1000. Three electrical connectors to unplug and it was free!
Working on the principle that it screwed together so it must be able to be unscrewed, I continued. Taking the turntable off revealed two plastic “stands” screwed from underneath plus four more screws (two on either side), this allowed me to remove the complete upper casing, revealing the main chassis in all its glory, and access to the cassette mech.
Top left of the last pic shows the large flywheel and motor with, guess what? a perfectly serviceable main belt. All that had happened, probably due to over eager use of the various cassette drive controls, the belt had run off the flywheel. Now I’m not 100% sure but this deck is a ‘power assisted’ one and I don’t think anything works without the flywheel spinning? All the keys were solid and would not depress. I reseated the belt carefully and tested it, everything now works perfectly a great result! Well happy with my handiwork! Next post (as these get quite lengthy) is another great result.
Right, onwards and upwards! As this is an “all in one” system, no PHONO inputs for auxiliaries. I did a bit of research and there is a 5 DIN socket labelled TAPE on the rear. Wasn’t sure if input, output or whatever. Read conflicting things on AV forums regarding needing to activate record feature on the cassette deck so the system could play via the 5 DIN plug etc. I now have the tape deck fully functioning, so in anticipation of that, I bought a 5 DIN to 3.5mm female Jack socket. Some of these are MIDI so gave a different wiring convention I believe? A leap of faith and bought one that had no mention of MIDI in the description. Having got the system all back together, I plugged the adapter in, linked it via a jack/jack cable to my phone. It only worked! RECORD function button on its own doesn’t start recording (need to press PLAY) so, by just pressing RECORD I have the L/R record level VU meters swinging away, brilliant! It also works without the RECORD button engaged but no VU display.
Spurred on, I plugged my Bluetooth receiver in to the adapter and now I can play Spotify through this 1970’s system, really pleased (again) I’ll have to be careful, don’t want to have too much fun
Last of pics for now, a very nice fine tuning drawer for the 6 presets on the tuner. Very sensitive and functions perfectly.
Just gently press and it opens, gently press again and it clicks back in, very tactile. All the control knobs are nice aluminium, not plastic, the other buttons and thumb wheels are but still have a nice feel. All illumination works perfectly too, al in all, a very nice, excellent condition system. The tinted Perspex lid is great too, covering the whole unit, no cracks, hinges hold the lid up nicely, just a few very light swirl marks which TBH, are barely noticeable.
