Audiophilia Thread

[BobFV1]

My father was an audiophile. He liked to listen to big band music and theater organ music on vinyl discs - so I grew up listening to that music too. I know the sound of vinyl scratching and popping - warped vinyl hitting the tone arm. I know what a cheap stylus and a good one sounds like, and I can pick out differences in speed on different types of turntables.

Dad always had a bunch of audio components. When I was real small, I remember my mom bought him this long cabinet, sort of Spanish style pressed wood (to go with all our Naugahyde furniture) which we called "The Credenza". Dad put all of his audiophile gear into The Credenza. The turntable was on top, along with a reel-to-reel tape deck. Inside was a tube pre-amp, a tube tuner, and a tube power amp. The bottom shelf of The Credenza was full of vinyl albums - Benny Goodman, Ray Noble, Glenn Miller and the US Army Air Force Band.

I remember so many things about those days. Dad would turn on the amp, pre-amp, and tuner and let the tubes "warm up" - and they literally warmed up. I would watch the cold metal filaments inside the tubes light up with a warm, orange glow. Every now and the one of the tubes wouldn't glow. If we were lucky, we could pull it out of the component and walk over to the Shell gas station next door. Inside they had a big cabinet full of new tubes in cardboard wrappers.

http://bobfv1.smugmug.com/photos/503506188_pgdzo-L.jpg

All the stuff was pretty easy to hook up - we used red and black cables with RCA connectors. Two speakers sat on the floor on either side of The Credenza. They were connected with regular old speaker wire to the power amp. The speakers actually were wooden enclosures, each of which had two drivers, a big diameter bass driver and a smaller diameter midrange. At some point we had a little tweeter which was jury rigged and sat on top of each enclosure. When the music played, you could see the paper in the cone of the bass driver going back and forth.

We used the turntable to play Dad's albums. We had some music recordings on the reel tapes, but mostly we made voice recordings. We would all sit around the living room and pass the microphone around doing a little "variety show", then wrap the tape up in it's box inside of an old brown shopping bag with twine around it, and we would send it off to my aunt and uncle's family. My Uncle was serving in the Navy in Okinawa, and this is how we kept up with our cousins - it was fun. Way before Email, and at a time when international phone calls to Okinawa, if you could make them, were prohibitively expensive.

[BobFV1]

When I got to high school, I developed an affinity for classical music, starting with the symphonies of Beethoven and the operas of Wagner, especially Der Ring Des Niebelungen. My mentor was one of my high school teachers. He remains my close friend to this day, and over the years we have remained close - he was even the best man at my first wedding. The teacher's name is JC.

JC had a little bit of scratch. He had a motorhome and would take a lot of the students at my high school on camping trips - this included his own kids. It was a lot of fun. He had a nice music system at home. It was a turntable, a Marantz receiver (tuner pre-amp, and amp all in one) and a set of Bose 901's. He bought an early generation Teac cassette deck and transcribed his entire classical music catalog from vinyl to cassette tape. He had a standard format 3X5 card he would type out to label the cassette tape boxes and he built a large rack for the back of the motorhome that must have held a hundred cassette tapes.

One day, early in high school, I went to the public library and checked out a recording of Beethoven's Symphony #7. I was mesmerized by the second movement, and I played it over and over on my dad's old tube system. When I started going on trips in the motorhome in high school, I listened to it on JC's cassette tapes in the portable audio system he had mounted in there. It was then that I began to appreciate all that you miss when you go from analog vinyl and tubes to, well, pretty much anything else. Of course with the cassettes you could actually play the music in a moving car, but the sound reproduction sufferred.

One day JC decided to buy a new system - this was a long process which involved weeks of visits to stereo shops listening to different equipment and components. In the end, JC ended up buying a state of the art, foo-foo Revox Tuner, integrated amp, and cassette deck. It was very slick stuff, light gray finish with aluminum trim, sort of this vintage:

http://i.audioscope.net/revoxb750mk2.jpg

He hooked that gear up to his Bose 901's. I was in awe of the 901's - they were state of the art back in the 70's. JC had them mounted high in a large room, on special mounts which put them about a foot from the wall so the rear-facing direct drivers had room to move air around.

http://bobfv1.smugmug.com/photos/503506219_w6EX2-L.jpg

I remember that system because it was cool and arcane. It sounded okay, but that early transistor stuff just did not sound as good as the tube stuff it replaced. Particularly at high volume you would get clipping and distortion - it was always a game to turn it up loud enough to impress but not so loud that it would distort or, God forbid, cause a circuit or a channel to trip or blow.

What I remember more was the process of shopping for gear in those days. It was all purchased through stereo shops, not mail order, and you had to go to a ot of shops to see all the brands that were available. In California back in those days the shops that were popular were Pacific Stereo, some others that I can't remember, and a lot of small local and regional shops. Salesmen worked on commission and the more you bought, the more they could do for you, but after a while it was easy to figure out that there was about 33 percent built in to their retail prices, and you could carve about 2/3 of that out if you bought enough and bargained hard enough.

Since tubes were all but gone by the early to mid 70's, the best way to avoid distortion was to buy as much power as possible. The more power, the louder you could play before the distortion became noticeable. Think 60 watts continuous, RMS per channel - that was an ass-kicking system in those days. It was also considered more "audiophillic" to run an integrated amp (pre-amp and power amp) with a separate tuner.

By the late 70's I was in college and the audio landscape was changing again. I was off at school buying my first dorm room system, and by that time we had new technologies like "Quadrophonic". Cassette decks were standard equipment, and turntables were still ubiquitous. I had some good systems in college . . . to be continued.

[Deans BMW]

Bob, what a fantastic trip down memory lane, you knocked some rust particles from the dim recesses of my feeble brain.

In hi school I created a system out of the Kits that radio Shack (I think) sold. Think a soldering gun, correction, a soldering iron, and seemingly millions of resistiors, capicitors and tons of all kind of goodies, I would spend hours building a tuner/amplifier.

When I went away to college in the fall of, are you ready for this, 1961 I remember building a system that you could put the speakers in the windows of my dorm room on the 6th floor and damn near hear the William Tell Overture thru out the entire Texas Tech Campus. I seem to remember a killer Hi Zoot Macintosh Amp/pre Amp with huge tubes playing thru some monstress Klipshorn spealers, A reel to reel tape set up, a turn table with a Shure cartridge and diamond needle. In the next year or so I moved to an off campus garage apartment across the street from a Pentacostal Holy Roller Church. It was amazing watching them go to church, within a 5 or 10 minute span all the congregation, some 50 to 100 cars would show up and would vacate in the same time frame when services were over.

As you can imagine....a light bulb would go off in my feeble sotted brain....

No doubt you can guess the rest....

Klipsh mega speakers in the window, ice cold bootleg Coors Beer at the ready and Fight of the Bumblebee at full blast during the 5 to 10 minute arrival and departure.

The cops showed up the second Sunday.

That was the year that I road a 50cc Mobeylette Mo Ped all the 550 miles back to Houston as an adventure, took about 30 hours...

Those were definitely some intresting times.

[jamming]

Bob, I still have a set of 901's in use and yes, they are from my high school days.

I remember those days and Dave made mention of it and I am one. I think tube guitar amps sound the best.

[BobFV1]

I seem to remember a killer Hi Zoot Macintosh Amp/pre Amp with huge tubes playing thru some monstress Klipshorn spealers, A reel to reel tape set up, a turn table with a Shure cartridge and diamond needle. Dean-O - that sure was a state of the art system for the day! I will get to the part about speakers in the dorm window in college - as a preview, loud would get you laid (as I recall) :icon_redface:


Bob, I still have a set of 901's in use and yes, they are from my high school days.Roger - with nine drivers, I think it is just about impossible to blow those things up in normal use! It was also pretty much impossible to cleanly and adequately power them with the equipment available back in the day. And they had a great sound to them, but it just wasn't, IMHO, an accurate reproduction of the music, as they claimed it was.

Well, I need to move on to college.

[BobFV1]

Well, I got up to the University of California at age 17, in 1975. The state of California was good enough to give me a full ride under the California State Scholarship program, and they were foolish enough to not seek accountability for the funds.

So there I was at age 17, with a check for several thousand dollars made out to me, and my first bank account at the Bank of America. I deposited the check and then I went to the various offices on campus to pay my tuition, fees, housing, etc. When I was done with all of those payments there was about a thousand dollars or so left over - about enough to cover my miscellaneous expenses, as intended, or about enough to last through a single trip to the stereo shop.

So, I went off to the stereo shop. Lots of students bought components and systems there, and in the dorm, louder was better. Those with the loudest, biggest speakers and the least distortion were the winners. It was a real status symbol to supply the sound system for a party at one of the Commons buildings or rec centers - even though that meant lugging the stuff back and forth and almost certainly damaging it in the process, not to mention having beer spilled in it and probably overloading the circuits, blowing out compression drivers in the speakers, and other nasty and expensive problems.

At the stereo shop I looked for the most I could get with what I had. There were already some killer systems in my dorm - mostly musicians who had converted studio gear which wasn't pretty but would really put out the decibels.

I remember that first system. It about cleaned out the rest of my bank account for that first quarter of school. I went with a BIC (British Industries Corporation) 940 belt-drive turntable with Sh diaure M91ED diamond cartridge and some fancy gimbal bearing articulation for the tone arm. It looked very cool and it had a big plastic dust cover that I liked . I would have preferred the BIC 960 or the top of the line 980 but I couldn't afford them, BIC was a pretty boutique brand all on it's own, and I just needed to get the analog signal from the vinyl into the amplifier.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q227/shacky1973/IMGP0701.jpg

I initially went with a Nikko NA-790 integrated (pre and power) amp - take a look here at an interesting write-up - this was the one I had:

http://www.vintageaudio.com.au/Amps/Nikko/Nikko%20NA%20790%20Integrated%20Amp.htm

It was a great sounding amp with excellent power delivery and low distortion, but I quickly traded it in for a Kenwood reciever because I decided I wanted an FM tuner and that a reciever was the way to go.

Rounding out the system were a great sounding set of speakers for the day - the BIC Venturi Formula 2's. These were the biggest enclosures I could comfortably fit in my dorm room. The build was excellent. They had heavy solid wood enclosures, I believe it was a 10 inch wooder with a frint port, and separate midrange and high frequency compression drivers making them "3-way" speakers. They had these very slick, foam acoustically transparent grills. I loved the speakers. They sounded great as long as there was a fair amount of power going through them and they were being played fairly loud.

http://www.oaktreeent.com/web_photos/Stereo_Speakers/BIC_Venturi_Formula-4_Stereo_Speakers_web.jpg

This is the very Kenwood reciever that I replaced the Nikko integrated amp with. Not as much power as I would have liked, but nice looks and clean delivery of what power there was:

http://bobfv1.smugmug.com/photos/488855398_H7CC3-M.jpg

That system rocked pretty well. Not the loudest on campus bit very respectable. People enjoyed listening to it and I could turn the speakers out the window and blast the quad pretty darn well - always on a sunny day and always accompanied by plenty of beer.

To be continued . . .

[Deans BMW]

Bob, what a great story also your memory is amazing, I am really enjoying this thread.

Sorry for the continous hijack.

Your story has reminded me of something else.

We would use someones pick up truck, remember this was in the Texas Panhandle, and take all of my equipment to Buffalo Lake outside of Lubbock for a serious party, a generator, a heavy duty long extension cord and a trash can to make, if I can remember, Purple passion. All I can remember is several bottles of Everclear and who in the hell knows what else, totally horrible but deadly.

The music would echo off the canyon walls for miles around, its a wonder that we lived thru all that.

Dave knows Buffalo lake well.