I’ve never owned a reel to reel, but an uncle who’d built his own amp and speakers with Peerless drivers had one and I found it fascinating to watch him threading the tapes etc. His home made system sounded much better than our old ‘all in one’ radiogram thing which played 78s if you flipped a switch on the turntable arm. That was the age where you’d tape coins to the arm to stop it skipping on bass heavy tracks!
Geoff
That hat is great! I have a hat made from Schmidt Scenic cans and a bag made from Olympia cans. The visor is a nice touch. Mine doesn’t have that.
My first good one in the 80s was a Nakamichi CR1 tape deck ( I have a MR1 now), B&O turntable ( which I still have), Proton D540 integrated amp ( still have this too) and RS3000 Infinty speakers.
I also had DIY speakers from Radio Shack. I built satellite speakers with the 4” woofer and their soft dome tweeter. For the subwoofer, it was a 12” in a huuuuge box!
For some eye candy, this is one of my systems I have now.
What model amp ?
I have the TA-2A Nakamichi reciever that I am using as a preamp but alone puts out 50 wpc. Designed by Nelson Pass. The big amp on the bottom is the Nakamichi PA7. Also by Nelson Pass. 225 wpc into 8 ohms. 330 wpc into 4 ohms. It’s a great sounding amp. I prefer my Parasound amps from John Curl.
Ca. 1991, as a middle schooler, I bought my first system. It was a Sony mini-rack with double cassette deck, and separate 5 disk changer and turntable. The volume control was motorized, and moved when you raised the remote volume. Speakers were styled as 3-way, but no idea if that was cosmetic. In any event they were by far the weak link in the chain I was very proud of myself because I got the Circuit City saleswoman down from 499 to 469 and she added a pair of closed JVC headphones (the things one remembers!)
My first “good” stereo was probably KEF Q15s and a JL Audio 15W6 in a 20” x 20” x 10” closed box. That sub is still working, at my parents’ house. Eiectronics were a Marantz AV600 AVP, AudioControl Phase Coupled Activator Series 3 crossover (old school - you had to build a new resistor chip to change the crossover freq!) and bass processor, and Adcom GFA-2535. The disk player was that old Sony 5 disk changer. It was good enough that after I set it up one of my housemates complemented my on my singing voice after playing Barenaked Ladies “What A Good Boy” from their live “Rock Spectacle” CD. Within 2 years I upgraded to KEF RDM Twos (finally sold last month!) and an Adcom GFA 5800 for the sub.
Excuse me asking, but how does a 15” fit on a 20” x 10” face?
Typo - 20 x 20 x 10
Mine was a Sony STR-V2 that belonged to my parents, and also their Fried Model Q speakers that I replaced the drivers with Pioneer clear-poly woofers and phenolic ring tweeters. I was a freshman in high school. Before then, I had a few ‘improper’ stereo setups, including a Sony boombox with detachable speakers. The die was cast - I’ve pretty much always had a good stereo around, thanks to that system my parents had..
A little later, still in high school (early 2000’s), I built these MTMs with the Def Tech buyout drivers that PE had for a while:
That photo is from my college dorm room, a very long time ago, and those speakers continued to satisfy me for a while. I also built a 500W powered sub using an AE Speakers AV12 woofer and dual AE 15” PRs in 2005:
When it was time for my first ‘proper’ stereo system, I bought a used Marantz 1060 and a used B&O 3000 turntable plus a pair of new EV speakers. I think I paid a little over $100 for the EVs and they were worth every penny (sarcasm). The B&O table is long gone, but I still have the 1060 and use it from time to time. I recapped it a few years ago and it still sounds great.
Marantz made some beautiful amps and receivers, alas I could never afford them. The design and materials just oozed quality; there was a budget line called “Superscope by Marantz”, not as high quality but rather cheaper, n/a in Oz.
My step up from the Soundesign 8-track/amp was a Superscope A-235. I bought it with my detasseling money at funky a Radio Shack store downtown. It was a whopping 5W/ch!
I bought mine used. Otherwise, I couldn’t have afforded it at the time. The amp was only about 6 months old, but the original owner wanted more power so he traded it in for a larger Marantz amp at the store where he had purchased it and I happened to show up just a few hours afterwards. I got lucky!
You can never go wrong with a 1060! My roommate in college tortured one for years and it refused to die. I always wondered why more manufacturers didn’t include a Mid control.
I also wondered about that: maybe they wanted to sell people a graphic equaliser as well as the amp?
Geoff
Circa 1980, I’d just left school and been working on a local farm all summer, then started an apprenticeship and I was saving up. Me and a buddy drove into Liverpool (UK) to a well known shop called W H Brady. We were left semi-alone with a couple of amps and a speaker selection box, they must have thought that we looked responsible. We listened for an hour and I splurged for a Dual CS505 turntable, Onkyo A15 amp and Mission 700 speakers.
These speakers had a replaceable fuse and I can remember blowing a fuse at one particular party. One guy was well oiled and was trying to “fix” the fuse with beer can ring pull, I had to politely ask him to refrain while a searched for a proper replacement fuse. Good times.
I was a Mission speaker fanboy for 30+ years (700, 760 and finally 761) until I built (with inspiration from you guys and serious help from Jack P) my first floor standing curvy bamboo speakers that I took to the Grand Rapids Meniscus event in 2022. And you know the rest of the story - there’s no going back after that.
As a child of the 1980s, I grew up on stereo FM radio and radio cassettes. In the early 1990s SONY had emerged as the clear leaders in televisions, and had its own retail stores. I remember begging my parents for a stereo when most of my friends were getting their Playstation. This is what my parents could afford for the family living room- the MHC-W77AV, which came as a 5 channel ProLogic system with a centre speaker and rear speakers, for well over US $600 back in 1993 (over US $1,200 in 2023)
Here it is pictured without the centre and rear speakers:
The various presets EQs were junk, but what would I know? I was a kid!
Besides, it had not one, but 2, MOAR BASS!!! functions! The “DBFB” (Dynamic Bass Feed Back) and “Groove” button made it ROCK! Endless digi-tweaky fun.
It took me another 20 years to realize that the thing only had caps on the HF units- designing a proper crossovers wasn’t a priority fo them back then. Or maybe they were, but Sony had pinched every penny to minimize costs to maximize profits:
Awesome? Or a lobing mess?
Probably what gave it such special effects…
***
30 years later, Sony shows it finally knows how to match directivities when designing speakers.
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/speakers/home-theater-speakers/p/sscs5m2
Too little, too late-
Sony Electronics is junk-status these days, as they doubled down on their Playstation business; revenue from gaming- hardware, software, subscription and digital services is triple that of their music, or film business, both of which fetch more revenue that their professional / prosumer / consumer electronics business.
It’d be nice to see the measurements (or listen to) the TOTL Sony speaker one day:
