Senior Audiophiles - Audiophile since the 60-70's?

at age 56 and gone through analog to digital it has been a true roller coaster ride. i now own all linn ,not to sponsor, the 70's for me was the best in music , believe that today's manufactuers have aviously gotten better, i remember the old advent speakers and phase linear amps,etc. they should sounded great those days..it's still about the music and recording has upscaled and that is good. certainly interested to where computer programming is going in the future in streaming and will manf. get involved to bring computer disk together with audio , real audio sound. thanks for listening....the 70's in music and old hafler,vandersteen,linn tables,are true legends.

1. Audio Enthusiast since my first decent system purchased in about 1975.

2. That's a tuff one. Probably the seventies for the vast vinyl offered including audiophile 'Heavy Vinyl' recordings. The nineties for tremendous advances in all areas of analog and digital equipment.

3. Too many expensive components out there that are not worth the additional cost above those products that are at the point of diminishing returns.

4. Not a chance!

I first developed an interest in hifi when in high school during the late 1960's. My first system included a Harmon Kardon integrated tube amplifier. Purchased Large Advents in 1975 and Micro-acoustic tweeter arrays for them shortly thereafter (anybody remember those?). However, what I considered my first audiophile system was bought in 1980 (RGR Preamp, Sanyo Mosfet amp (later BRB) and DCM Time Windows. Bought a Kenwood KD-500 TT with Grace tonearm shortly thereafter. One regret I have is that I did not keep that particular system longer. I do not have a favorite decade for the equipment as it has steadily improved. I do miss the days when there were more hi-fi shops around such as Audio Guild (the ultimate hi fi salon if there ever was one) and Eardrum but there was no internet in those days. I think the late 60's to late 70's was the best time for rock music and also enjoyed the development of new age and smooth jazz in the 80's. Have also enjoyed classical music since the early 80's. I do not think there is as much good, new music today but that is only my own opinion.

Brian,
Of course my third wife is the best! Although she doesn't have the same appreciation I have for audio systems, she does enjoy lots of different types of music. Most importantly, she appreciates my perspectives on life and my sense of humor - we laugh together.

I think the more senior group of audiophiles (not that we are old by any stretch of the imagination) have combined our life experiences and our audio experiences (just understanding audio and experiencing the music coming out 30 years ago) to gain a perspective that cannot be understood by the younger audiophiles. There have been alot of developments in audio over the last 30-40 years, not all necessary successful. But overall, audio is much better and, of course, most of us have more money than we had in our earlier days to spend on our hobbies. Anyway, I look forward to the further evolution of new concepts, new horizons, new technologies, that will continue to take us closer to audio nirvana. Not every new development will be a step forward. Hopefully, via these forums we can continue to share our experiences - maybe save each other from taking some unnecessary and expensive paths.

In that light, it appears to me that there is much promise in the single driver field. It appears to be a subculture right now but it appears that it may be possible to build very accurate and musical speakers at a fraction of the cost of some of the current designs. At the same time, that might bring back some of earlier experiences many of us had in the 60's and 70's of building speakers on very tight budgets.

Anyway, we move on and must look for the good...... Hopefully, the music will blossom again....

Jim

I may have memories that predate any of the prior responses. Although I am 60 years old, I became interested in audio at about the age of 10. My father was an attorney who represented a number of the pioneers in the audio industry, when it was in its infancy. I still have a recollection of a system which he built in the mid 1950's with a Radio Craftsman tuner/preamp and amplifer, a Garrard changer with a Pickering cartridge, a Pentron tape recorder and an Electro-Voice 12TRX triaxial speaker in a Carlson cabinet. (Now, how many of you remember this stuff?)

My first taste of the "high end" came in the late 1950's, when I helped my father build, from kits, the Harman-Kardon Citation I, II and III. He had a system that was state of the art in its day. As a source, he had a Garrard 301 turntable with a Shure/SME arm-cartridge combination (what a beauty!) and a pair of AR-3a speakers. To that he added a Sony 777 open-reel recorder, which was way ahead of its time (back in the days when Sony was referred to as "Sony-Superscope").

My own first system was built in the mid 1960's, with a H-K tube receiver (which I built from a kit), a Garrard changer and a pair of Fisher speakers. I got stuck in "mid-fi" during the 1970's (I read Stereo Review back then and believed what I read), and had Sony receivers, direct-drive turntables and JBL speakers.

I was first exposed to the "high end" in the early 1980's, when I graduated to a Tandberg 3012 amp and 3011 tuner, with B&W DM14 (and later DM2000) speakers. I was one of the first to jump on the "digital" bandwagon, with one of the original Magnavox CD players. I remember paying $25 for CD's--in 1983 dollars! I talked myself into thinking they sounded great. They didn't--they were thin and screechy.

I have steadily upgraded over the past 20 years to the point where I feel I have nowhere farther to go. I'm currently running a Mark Levinson 380S preamp, a pair of Mark Levinson 33H amplifiers, a Sony SCD-1 for digital and SACD, and a Michell Orbe, SME IV.VI, Spectral Reference and VTL phono preamp for records. Speakers are B&W Signature 800's.

In terms of quality of sound, today's equipment is without question the best there has ever been. In terms of quality of source material, I have to go back to the early days of stereo, from the late 1950's to the late 1960's, with the RCA Shaded Dogs, Mercury Living Presence, Decca/London ffss, and Everest LP's. These were often definitive recordings, as music, and the engineering was superb. (Have you ever heard an original 1S/1S copy of Pines of Rome? I have one! You would never believe that this record was pressed in 1960.) It continues to amaze me how the great engineers of the day, such as Lewis Layton, Robert Fine, Kenneth Wilkinson and Bert Whyte, could have captured such amazing recordings at a time when the reproduction equipment couldn't possibly reproduce what the recorders were actually recording on tape. The advent of 32 and 64 track recorders, effects processing, Pro Tools and the like, were the worst things that ever happened to the making of recordings. It allowed everyone to become sloppy. One of the great things about SACD today is the fact that, because the number of channels available to the recording engineer is limited, the engineers are forced to rediscover what Layton, Fine, Wilkinson, Whyte, etc. figured out over 40 years ago, and the results speak for themselves. Also, SACD allows today's engineers to go back to these great 30-40 year old recordings, play them back on top-notch analog recorders (such as Ampex ATR-102's and Studer A80's), without intermediate processing, and capture the full glory of the original master tapes on a state of the art medium.

So, we really are in a golden age of audio. We have the best equipment today, and the ability to reproduce both the latest in recording technology (SACD) and the great LP's from the 1960's.