Velo Mule

thinktubes "I've been listening through tubes all my life with the occasional SS power amp thrown in. So what is your reaction to the vintage "sand" equipment?"

There are two schools of thought on amplifiers with one school liking the softer, mellower sound of tubes, the other thought that music should be as original sounding as if you are sitting in the studio.

While I always thought that the amplifier should not color the music, I had a revelation, when I bought a 1961 Ford Falcon 25 years ago. It had a 5 tube AM radio in it. We turned the dial to WHLI, a local station that played music from the mostly the 50's. It sounded absolutely great. When I listened to the same station on solid state equipment, it wasn't the same.

I realized that the music of this time was made to sound good on the radios and record players of the time. This meant tube amplifiers. As far as more modern music, personally, I'll take solid state stuff.

I also have a pair of tube amps that probably came out of a Stereo console, that someday I might try out someday if I get another house with more room.

IsleRide

Actually the radio and speaker in the Falcon just happened to sound better than the other radio and not necessarily because of tubes or the type of music.

Solid state components were introduced at a time when the speakers that most consumers were listening to were, for the most part, dark and wooly. The new "drier" sound was able to cut through that fog.
From that time on almost all mainstream audio equipment employed solid state technology. Cooler running, never having to change a tube, promised increased reliability and efficiency to produce more power are its strong points. However, many high end manufacturers continued to produce tube equipment. Some offered both.

The reason why tubes have remained popular is that their distortion (distortion exists in all playback equipment) is "euphonic" and occurs in even order harmonics as it does in live music.
Transistors are basically an on or off switch and when distortion is reached, (sometimes at higher decibel levels) it can be harsher.
This is not to say that tubes are better. It comes down to how successful the audio engineering design was in either technology.

thinktubes 

Had to scratch an itch. Found an old Kyocera CD player from 1988 for cheap. A fairly high-end piece BITD, it didn't read discs (why it was cheap). I'm pretty much an analogue guy, but I'm handy, do I figured "how hard could it be to fix?".

Turns out, pretty hard. For starters, the door wouldn't open. That was an easy fix - new belt. The disc reading issue was more complex. It turns out the lasers in CDs have a finite life span. I don't remember reading this in the sales brochure when CDs were being hyped as a great technological advance.

So basically, the player had a dead laser unit. To make matters worse, the part, made by Sony, has not been made in over a decade. A true classic and vintage problem. Surprisingly, knockoff lasers are available from China for $30. Could find much info on the quality of these, but took a chance. I popped in the new assembly. After a couple of hours with an oscilloscope making micro alignment adjustments, success! This thing sounds great! Time to dig out all the old CDs. Quite a learning experience...

Build like a tank - complete with wood panel siding!



The old, dead laser unit.

steelbikeguy

My first CD player, a Technics, had the laser die too. A shame, if only because it had a prism and light on the CD tray so you could watch the CD spin when it played.. must have been an effort to make the transition from vinyl to disc easier. It was pretty slick!

I'm amazed that a suitable laser assembly was available! That does suggest that manufacturers had arrived at a pretty standard laser assembly, which is encouraging. They also probably got a bit better at getting all the bugs and failure modes out of it.
Also good to know that there is info on the alignment process.
So much of this stuff was never intended to last 10 years, so it is good to know that some things can be repaired and useful again! Congrats!

Steve in Peoria
(need to fix up a couple of my old stereo receivers, including a fully analog Pioneer that I bought in the late 70's)

rekmeyata

I'm not sure I would have spent the money restoring that old machine, back in those days things were still in their infant stage in the world of CD's and CD players, and the DAC inside those units, even the best ones back then are not as good as the ones even in low end models found today. But if you had fun doing the restore then that's what counts, I wouldn't have the technical know how to try to do what you did to that CD player.

Road Fan

great stuff as always, redxj!

Road Fan

I have an AR TT with a super light Signet tone arm N and the matching cartridge, and a Apt Holman preamp which needs the controls cleaned.

anybody know who works on the old Tomlinson Holman stuff?

philbob57

Not me, but I can suggest you join the forum at stereophile.com. There are a number of craftspeople who restore vintage audio equipment, and the Holman preamp sounds good. When my hearing was decent, I liked Naim's olive stuff best, but nowadays, I think I'd miss some of the frequencies in an AM radio broadcast.

I still have decades of Stereophile mags and an almost complete run of Listener.

IsleRide

I found a guy on ebay who restores the original Advent 300 receivers. It has a phono section designed by Holman. The work was thorough and my 300 that I purchased new in '78 is now the mainstay of my "second system". Don't remember his name ( it was 3=4 years ago) but maybe a search will turn him up. He's in Florida.

Update: "ohm bob" in Palm Harbor, FL

thinktubes 

Well, at least you didn't tell me my old bike isn't as good as the new ones...

rekmeyata

Well that's different, bikes are mechanical with no electronics unless you have electronic shifting, but back in the 80's bikes and their components were virtually indestructible, which is why a lot of that old componentry lasts 100,000 plus miles, not so much these days. But electronics like I said the CD stuff was still in it's baby form, and the DAC back then, like in you machine, though the best for it's time could not handle playing music as well as they do today. Lets word it like this, it would be similar to you buying an old computer from 1988, a 386 SX running on DOS 4.0, and you replace the broken 80 megabyte hard drive with another HD, then try to use it in todays world. While that example is extreme because the player you got you can play CD's with it but the music quality, speed of the processor, the quality of the processor chip, and the anti skip technology have all leaped frogged to another realm, plus the older machine can only play CD's, it can't play MP3, AAC and WMA like todays machines. Add on top of that older electronics do not age nearly as well as mechanical stuff like found on a bicycle, capacitors can go bad, motors can fail or be in the process of failing, all of which could effect the quality of the sound. So yes, CD players have changed over the years just as computers did, but if you can't hear the difference then it really doesn't matter.

I have a 25 year old stereo I still use as my primary stereo, but I can't Bluetooth anything to it, no surround sound capability (which I don't care about just as you may not care about how your CD player plays music), I can't hook up a digital audio cable from the DVD player to the stereo I have to use RCA cables to transfer the sound (which again, like you, I'm sacrificing some dynamics of movie sound because I can't use a optical digital audio cable) I had to add in a subwoofer recently because music, and movies, have changed with a lot more sub sounds going on that my speakers can't handle that low of frequency. I too had to take my stereo down and get all the knobs and switches cleaned. Was it worth it? I think so, they don't make all transistorized systems anymore, just microchip systems and tube systems, so my system will last years longer than a microchip system, the tube stuff is fringe stuff but I threw it in there for free because that is a longer story.

But at the end of the day you are the one that listens to that CD player, if you like it then you're good to go.

ofajen

A fair amount of older electronics still in use here, I suppose.

I still have my old turntable and receiver set up in our family room. We listened to Pink Floyd’s “Animals” on it just last weekend.

The turntable is a Philips turntable and wasn’t high end at the time. I think it’s a GA-427. It’s a belt drive and has a relatively new belt. So it’s working fine.

The receiver is an H/K 330B. My dad got me both of those back in 1975.

I pulled the cover and sprayed out the receiver a couple of years ago to get the pots and switches working nicely again.

I’m playing thru NHT SuperZeroes that I got maybe ten years ago. It’s the original Ken Kantor design. Works pretty well, sounds very clean, though of course not much low end.

In my studio, the monitors are running off of one of my Hafler DH-200 amps. I built a pair of them from kits back in the early 80s and they are still running great and still meet the rather demanding original spec.

In the 2000s, I went back to open reel studio machines after a dalliance with some digital audio tape machines.

I had a number of 3M machines from the 60s and 70s: an M-23, an M-56 and a couple of M-79s. They’ve since been sold to 3M-o-philes who either run studios or music conservatories.

The last one to go was the oldest, the M-23 from the mid to late 60s, which I had restored to full glory. Simply a phenomenal machine, but they were all better suited to places with dedicated machine rooms.

These days, I still do a bit of recording on my little Otari machines from the late 80s. Not quite the huge sound of the 3Ms, but they take up less space and the transports are so quiet it’s easy to track in the same room.

Otto

rekmeyata

I have an old Rotel RP1000 turntable, but it's not really electronic, there is no electronics in it that I know of, the motor is a 4-pole, synchronous drive motor that somehow keeps perfect timing. The plater is belt driven so absorb any minute vibration from the motor which according to factory specs claims less than 0.2% WRMS from wow and flutter. I use a Empire cartridge, can't recall the model, but it was a new old stock I found at a vintage stereo shop that was one of the most highly rated for rock cartridges ever made, and the guy sold it to me for cheap and it does sound noticeably better than my other carts I've tried. The Rotel RP1000 was nothing more than a mid level turntable back in the day but today I've seen prices as low as $125 to as much as $600. I also found that removing the rubber stock platter mat with a acrylic mat from Hudson HI Fi store seemed to make the sound a bit warmer and richer vs the rubber mat. And I also put some isolation pads under the feet of the turntable, I did that a long time ago but can't recall which ones I got and they don't say on the pads, they were cheap and thinner then others I've seen so not sure how good they work.

The problem with stuff like isolation feet is that you can go from $20 to $400 and probably more, but how much of that is snake oil? I know that a person in no way can hear the difference between $1.40 a foot speaker wire to $2,000 a foot speaker wire, but the marketing geniuses come up with all sorts of scientific mumbo jumbo that gets people excited, and I seriously doubt someone can hear the difference between $20 or $40 isolation vs $400 ones. But isolation feet can also work for CD players as well. I think overall Vibrapod is probably the best for the price, I don't have those. There have actually been several tests done by different people who did blind test for audiophiles who volunteered to listen to cheap to expensive speaker wire and most of them were fooled and picked the cheaper stuff! One guy went as far as to offer a $100,000 reward to anyone who can correctly identify the sound coming from $2,000 a foot wires vs $1.49 a foot wire consistently out of 10 tests, this bet has been around for years and no one has won it.

The only open reel to reel tape mac5300hine I ever had was a small cheap 3" tape RCA job when I was a kid, the sound quality wasn't very good but I was young kid so I was excited. By the time I got old enough to buy my own equipment reel to reels were history and cassettes were all the rage so I bought a Sony TC K2A from Pacific Stereo. I still have a cassette player in my system, a Harmon Kardon DC5300 that records very close to CD level, problem is, as it is with tapes, the sound quality of the tape degrades over time. But I do have a couple of bricks of unused Maxwell XLII-S tape that I'm thinking of recording some of my vinyl onto then listen to it on tape to save the vinyl records from wear.

thinktubes 

Winter = switchover to the audio hobby

Picked up this Naim NAC 42.5 preamp over a decade ago, but never power it up. Very British, very weird. For starters, it gets its power from a companion power amp, which I don’t have. I’m going to connect an external power supply and see what’s up. Another layer of weirdness - all the connectors are DIN or BNC. Supposedly was a high-end piece in the early 1980s.

The Golden Boy 

I've had trouble with two components in my setup. I thought I'd isolated the problem with the right hand channel to the Sansui... but I couldn't find it, I had it in to 2 techs that couldn't find/fix it. Finally isolated it to the RCA in to the AUX input. The computer is now going into a tape input jack.

2nd problem is a buzz in the CD player... I can't seem to un-eff that. Yet.

The Golden Boy 

I didn't realize how long it's been since I'd updated this, and that I didn't respond to someone 4 years ago...

So it's pretty much the same, different CD player and disconnected he EQ, hung up the old rug so the wall doesn't look so bare.

Yamaha KX-W602 dual cassette deck;
Soundcraftsmen RP2215-R EQ- Right now it's out of the loop- it's there because it looks cool and it makes that side of the stack the right height.
Sony C701 ES CD Changer.

Sansui 9090DB
Pioneer SX-838

Technics SL-M2 turntable
Marantz 2325



Revolver on the stereo by Dave The Golden Boy, on Flickr


All my receivers have had the bulbs changed out to LEDs. It really does only make sense to use LEDs- they draw less power and put off way less heat than incandescent bulbs- both are good for your receiver in the long and short run. They have "warm" LEDs that pretty much look like incandescent bulbs- and I REALLY don't like the look of those bright blue and green LEDs that some people use. So as long as it looks good and it's better for the receiver- I approved it- I think they turned out great.


The 2238 turned out great and it ended up going to a friend who is a true music lover and one of the most badass drummers I've ever known- he uses it every single day. He also posts quite often on the "Now Playing" group on FB so I see it from time to time.

Aardwolf

This forum is evil - you just made me get my old turntable out from the back of a cupboard

Wharfedale Linton 4 speed deck (16/33/45/78) - needs cleaning
NAD 3130 amplifier - last used 3 years back

Not used the deck in many years, but I still have my collection of 70s vinyl, hmmmmm.

Velo Mule

Good timing @The Golden Boy . The bulbs in my Marantz receiver had been out and the meters were hung up. So, had to make a decision on whether to go with the original incandescent bulbs or with more modern LED's. Here it is on the bench with the new lamps installed.




This receiver doesn't have the style or engineering of your blue dial receivers. This receiver has been working just about everyday since we got it used almost two decades ago.

After a good clean up, including cleaning the potentiometers and switches, new warm white LED lamps from StereoLamps.com, adjusting the meters and putting fresh thermal paste on the transistors, it is ready to go again. I did a visual inspection on all the electrolytic capacitors and all appeared good, amazingly enough. I have read that capacitors that get used everyday tend to last longer than those that are used infrequently. There were no issues with the sound beforehand anyway.

It is back in service again. My wife is particularly happy since she did not like the "black box" AV receiver that we had temporarily in place.

The Golden Boy 

Cool receiver!!! I'm a sucker for VU meters!

The thing is about stereo gear- I had high power Kenwood and Yamaha integrated amps. That's what sounded best to me at the time. When I got my surround unit, as far as I remember- it sounded great- it was kinda pricey and I was pretty proud of it. When someone gifted me the Pioneer- it sounded LEAGUES better than the surround unit. Whether it would have sounded as good to my ears when I was 25... I don't know. Maybe I just prefer a warmer sound these days. Or maybe the sound offered by surround units is just more voiced towards movies.

Pompiere

This Marantz 2238 was in the meeting room at my volunteer fire station for many years, until they were getting rid of stuff to do some remodeling. I brought it home and cleaned the potentiometers and blew the dust out. The caps all look good. I have had it for at least ten years. It now lives inside a cabinet in my workshop where it has plenty of air circulation but it is protected from the shop dust. I also have a 2238B that I picked up from Goodwill. It came with a decent set of Realistic speakers for under $25.


Marantz 2238 receiver

markk900

We've got a Marantz 2220B sitting in the basement currently unused, but Aardwolf our main amp is a NAD 3020A that has been in constant use since we bought it new in 1983. It plays into my Genesis I speakers I bought in 1977, which have also seen constant use since that time (had to re-foam them once so far - lost the cool green surrounds but they still rock).

Aardwolf

I've done some research and apparently a "Wharfdale Linton turntable" is a rebadged BSR (McDonald) MP60 from 1971.
If anybody can point me at a (PDF) maintenance manual that would be nice, but youtube has some videos.

Update:
There's a free PDF manual for a BSR C141 here: https://elektrotanya.com/bsr_c141r1_.../download.html
It looks to be a very similar mechanism.
That site also has the service manuals for NAD 3130 and NAD 3020

79pmooney

Not a whole lot ot add here. My system is a mix of parts from 1970 to around 15 years ago. Sounds so good in my living room I have no incentive to change anything. Front and rear speakers. The 53 yo Advents in the rear corners for the wonderful low bass. 1990 bookshelf JBLs that sounmd just like the Advents; better, cleaner tweeters and less bass, being a big set smaller sit on plant stands a couple of feet from the room front corners.

1970 AR turntable. Beautiful wood base. Everything done by hand. Rarely used now but ready to go anytime.
1971 large Advents (plastic cabinets clad recently with beautiful wood by a friend. The original walnut put the weight over the old UPS limit.)
circa 1983 Sony cassette deck. To record my blues LPs. I was afraid that was music I would never see gain. CDs came along and the old blues was back! And better! My tapes have served as A+ entertainment for long drives many times. (And I need to set my Prius up with a cassette deck!)
circa 1989 Onkyo tuner. Gift from my mom. Quality workhorse.
1990 JBL bookshelfs, now with the same veneer as the Advents
circa 2010 Marantz 50 watt amp and Marantz CD player. Excellent, clean sound.

Best part of all of this is that I have my two new but old sound tube guitar amps up front by the speakers. Sitting on the bamboo floor put in by the same friend who veneered the speakers. Ceiling is high, matching the peaked roof. I can play my 1959 Willie Dixon CD and blow my harp through an Astatic mic and the little 12W tube amp and the music in that room sounds wonderful! (Amps - a Lil' Dawg 12W, 12" Weber custom and Victoria 40W, (3) 10" reverb early '60s sound with an ART Tube MP preamp (so I can be present in the living room while I am driving the tube).

That big amp wasn't planned. Apple Music, a local store that was around for like 40 years was going out of business as the owner retired. Sale started Saturday. I couldn't make it 'till Monday. That was the only tube amp left. Borrowed a mic and played though it in the big, almost empty showroom. Wow! Not really the blues, but what a sound! And it was at a price that was never going to be seen again! And now I had an amp with the power and speakers to play with the guitar folk feedback free! (All those exclamation marks are justified.)

Velo Mule

I have a NAD 7020 that is a heartbreak for me. I bought it on the strength of the good reviews and how beloved the 3020 is. This is the same amplifier with a tuner built into it. The problem is that I bought it cheap because it wasn't sounding good. The sound was muddled and the potentiometers were all dirty/noisy. I figured I could fix it. It turns out that this may be beyond my skill level. Now it is in my attic with more audio equipment that has been deemed not suitable for married life including a Marchand active cross-over, amplifiers tuners and diy speakers that sound great, but only when they are playing. Perhaps someday I will get a room to do with what I want. Hopefully, that will come when I am still able to do what I want.

thinktubes 

Hooked the Naim up to a lab power supply and created an array of jumpers to get power in and signal out. Swapped out the BNC phono inputs for standard RCA. Doesn’t sound half bad. The Sony power amp is an unknown and the phono cart is new, so a couple of wildcards in the mix.

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