It took two years to finally get fed up with the quality of sound produced by my MP3 player. And to add insult to injury (a retrospective evaluation, I should add), for some strange reason my first attempt at improving the situation was the absurd notion that wireless headphones will be the perfect solution, and that in turn was followed by the just as brilliant move to plug a hard disc media player into the home theatre. To improve the quality of the sound?! Eish, how stupid could I be? Sanity only manifested itself with the more logical realisation that ripping Cd's to a loss-less format rather than the abomination of lifeless mp3's would have been a more sensible step towards achieving digital Nirvana. Whatever further factors played a role here is unclear, but all this started me thinking – upgrade the Philips home theatre with a "better" one, or invest in a state of the art component setup? And come to think of it, what on earth was rated top dog in 2009?
Déjà vu. Thirty years earlier I was in an equally unhappy state of mind (and ear). My set of one speaker could only have started life as a wooden fruit box (boasting an unbranded driver and covered in fashionable reject curtain), so I'll not elaborate on specifications or performance. Both turntable and valve amp I ripped out of a 1960's Philips radiogram, which in turn became a drinks cabinet for the original owner. The turntable was decidedly more respectable than the speaker, and the amp with all its bare innards and glowing valves, as could be expected, became an interesting conversation piece. Yeah, not fashionable at the time, but considering the current popularity of valve amps, I think I could possibly claim farsightedness rather than poverty! Come to think of it, I lived in constant fear that a glass of rum may spill over and make everything that glow die crackling in a cloud of smoke, but fortunately the worst incident was a burnt lip collected after falling against the amp.
I was barely out of varsity and earning peanuts, searching for something better on which to play my small collection of heavy Seventies rock, spending my lunch hours in a hi-fi shop in Cape Town’s Loop Street (or it could have been Long or Bree?), drooling over an AU amp, an XA turntable and a pair of AR3a’s. I can’t remember the shop’s name, but I do remember Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover” and Peter Grieg’s “In The Hall Of The Mountain King”. What I experienced those early summer days of 1975 was the perfect and absolutely accurate representation of live music - an audio image that was imprinted on my brain for eternity. I there and then decided that if I couldn’t afford hi-fi sound at least matching that level of excellence, I may just as well forget it. And sadly there was no way I could then afford a set of AR speakers, let alone the rest of what was required, so I waved farewell and walked away from hi-fi.
Since then my world of music centered on whatever technology was in place for automobile audio at the time – 4 track cassette tapes were played extensively, then came CD’s, and finally digital files on a Creative Zen which plugged into the car radio or the home theater – the convenience trip of a gadget man. Right through this period spanning 3 decades, I “stood my ground” and never invested in hi-fi; my wife did buy a couple of combo stereo sets, but out of principle I refused to play my music on these. Four years ago I bought a fairly basic home theater set, and that’s when the uneasiness set in. This faint hint at a better sound was enough to start a growing unhappiness with what was being heard or missed.
Obviously the reality of the 21st Century came down hard and merciless on whatever hopes I may have had about modern technology making hi-fi more accessible to the wider populace. Not to mention the ridiculous new technologies and industries of hogwash that sprang up since my first exploratory steps in 1975. If the 2009 scene required that I spend $20,000 on cables or $300,000 on a set of speakers, then I was no better off than I was in 1975. If this truly was the only road to heaven, I would once again be turning my back on this part of the audio world. But hail the gods; towards the end of that one week of searching for answers, I discovered the amazing world of vintage audio.
Equipment dating from the Fifties right through to the Eighties were alive and kicking butt. I stepped into a world ranging from discussion groups debating the merits of the various era’s, to restoration projects turning pieces of $1 junk into $1000 works of art, proper olde world boffins offering ancient expertise at reclaiming forgotten pieces from their dusty corners in the garage, right down to vintage-dedicated shops selling anything from used to new-in-box factory original parts. And part of this sub-culture was my much revered brand of Acoustic Research. So, seeing that there was a bigger movement out there, did this mean that these people did not agree with the modern perception and definition of high fidelity, or was it just pure nostalgia, or was everyone simply rebelling against the high prices of modern components?
I had just walked through the gates of paradise...
Déjà vu. Thirty years earlier I was in an equally unhappy state of mind (and ear). My set of one speaker could only have started life as a wooden fruit box (boasting an unbranded driver and covered in fashionable reject curtain), so I'll not elaborate on specifications or performance. Both turntable and valve amp I ripped out of a 1960's Philips radiogram, which in turn became a drinks cabinet for the original owner. The turntable was decidedly more respectable than the speaker, and the amp with all its bare innards and glowing valves, as could be expected, became an interesting conversation piece. Yeah, not fashionable at the time, but considering the current popularity of valve amps, I think I could possibly claim farsightedness rather than poverty! Come to think of it, I lived in constant fear that a glass of rum may spill over and make everything that glow die crackling in a cloud of smoke, but fortunately the worst incident was a burnt lip collected after falling against the amp.
I was barely out of varsity and earning peanuts, searching for something better on which to play my small collection of heavy Seventies rock, spending my lunch hours in a hi-fi shop in Cape Town’s Loop Street (or it could have been Long or Bree?), drooling over an AU amp, an XA turntable and a pair of AR3a’s. I can’t remember the shop’s name, but I do remember Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover” and Peter Grieg’s “In The Hall Of The Mountain King”. What I experienced those early summer days of 1975 was the perfect and absolutely accurate representation of live music - an audio image that was imprinted on my brain for eternity. I there and then decided that if I couldn’t afford hi-fi sound at least matching that level of excellence, I may just as well forget it. And sadly there was no way I could then afford a set of AR speakers, let alone the rest of what was required, so I waved farewell and walked away from hi-fi.
Since then my world of music centered on whatever technology was in place for automobile audio at the time – 4 track cassette tapes were played extensively, then came CD’s, and finally digital files on a Creative Zen which plugged into the car radio or the home theater – the convenience trip of a gadget man. Right through this period spanning 3 decades, I “stood my ground” and never invested in hi-fi; my wife did buy a couple of combo stereo sets, but out of principle I refused to play my music on these. Four years ago I bought a fairly basic home theater set, and that’s when the uneasiness set in. This faint hint at a better sound was enough to start a growing unhappiness with what was being heard or missed.
Obviously the reality of the 21st Century came down hard and merciless on whatever hopes I may have had about modern technology making hi-fi more accessible to the wider populace. Not to mention the ridiculous new technologies and industries of hogwash that sprang up since my first exploratory steps in 1975. If the 2009 scene required that I spend $20,000 on cables or $300,000 on a set of speakers, then I was no better off than I was in 1975. If this truly was the only road to heaven, I would once again be turning my back on this part of the audio world. But hail the gods; towards the end of that one week of searching for answers, I discovered the amazing world of vintage audio.
Equipment dating from the Fifties right through to the Eighties were alive and kicking butt. I stepped into a world ranging from discussion groups debating the merits of the various era’s, to restoration projects turning pieces of $1 junk into $1000 works of art, proper olde world boffins offering ancient expertise at reclaiming forgotten pieces from their dusty corners in the garage, right down to vintage-dedicated shops selling anything from used to new-in-box factory original parts. And part of this sub-culture was my much revered brand of Acoustic Research. So, seeing that there was a bigger movement out there, did this mean that these people did not agree with the modern perception and definition of high fidelity, or was it just pure nostalgia, or was everyone simply rebelling against the high prices of modern components?
I had just walked through the gates of paradise...