I was 4 years old, listening to a record on headphones connected to this rig. Leaned too far back, and caught the 1/4 inch input jack on the headphones right in my fucking eyeball.
That one appears to have a CD player, which most certainly wasn't included in the one I grew up with.
I am that old, we just were never that rich.
My dad did splurge on a CD player that came in a self-contained one-off unit that also had a dual deck tape player pretty early on in 1989. He bought it off a encyclopaedia seller and it came with a huge collection of classical music CDs and a bunch of books. Pretty decent purchase, in the end, given the financing. None of my friends had an easy way to copy CDs to tape for years after that, so even that was ahead of the curve.
I dumped the CDs from that collection that haven't died to disc rot last year, too.
Holy shit, that exact Sony EQ is right beside me! It's an SEH-310, made in Japan, 1981. I'm old enough to remember racks like that, was far too poor for stack of Sony gear. My shit has always been a random mess of cobbled together gear.
The coolest thing ever was when those old receivers had a motorized volume knob that would move when you used the remote. I'm a simple man, but that always made me happy.
Honestly, aging capacitors and cracked motor drive belts aside, a complete hi-fi is a thing of beauty. And it's supposed to be, hence the showy front and glass case to keep the dust off.
I'm no audiophile, but with refurbished power supplies, updated noise reduction* & EQ, and modern speaker technology, that setup would be an old media blasting beast.
* - for the uninitiated, or if you're old enough to smell OP's photo, the way tape-hiss intrudes on music is just hot garbage by today's standards. So, having a way to mitigate it would be strongly advised.
Not to mention that the advent of touchscreens on literally everything makes accessibility a lot harder for a lot of people.
My dad had a set-up like this because my mom and him used to be DJs. I was forbidden to touch it but, in the 90s, when we had cassette players and CD players as part of a separate cabinet, those were hard to mess up.
So, as a compromise, my dad showed me how to power up all of the amps and receivers to get the cassette or CD player working. At the time we had a massive subwoofer next to our CRT TV and, when the subwoofer magnet messed with the TV coloring, my dad blamed it on our Sega Genesis instead of the sub.
Good times.
Yes, I am that old. Yes, I miss physical buttons to play and rewind, along with a decent wheel to adjust volume without fixed steps.
I also miss when placing the speakers separate of each other was the normal and expected behavior. The idea of Stereo.
But above all, I miss dynamic range. And that's not because of the gear, but of the recordings.
I grew up with vacuum tube TV, (we got one channel, maybe a second if the weather was right), and reel to reel tape players.
I still remember the TV not working and my Father pulling it away from the wall and removing the back to look for the burnt out tube. Then since this generally happened on a Friday evening, (no Saturday cartoons), we had to wait until Monday to drive into town and go to the drug store to test and search for a replacement tube.
When I got to be a teen, I remember listening to the local am rock radio station and waiting for hours for the latest hit to come on so we could record it on a portable cassette recorder. Both my sisters spent many evenings doing that. We were sailing the high seas of piracy before it even existed.
Ahhh, those were the days. I'm so glad we don't need to do that shit anymore.
Pfft. I had one of these.
We never really had one; didn’t have that kind of money I’d guess nor do I think my parents really would have had the interest even if it was in the budget
You call that old? It's got one of those fancy, new-fangled CD players! Not old at all.
The audio equivalent of having a homelab
I'm slightly younger so all of that would have been black plastic instead of brushed steel.
I just finished donating my Marantz with "digital tubes" to an archival library
Separate Tuner, Cassette Deck, Amplifier, CD player, Equalizer, and Turntable?
I am old enough and if that system were in good shape I would set it up in my living room right now. Would probably leave the cassette deck and CD player in storage though.
Does anyone know what that stack would have cost new? I bet it would sound amazing though.
And I took this personally.
Yeah, we both might be a similar age.
My best friend had this (1980s) and he also had something I've never seen before or since: an 8-track recorder. We would make mix tapes on the thing and take them to parties - where we were extremely, extremely unpopular because our 8-track mix tapes had shit like Laurie Anderson and Ultravox and Jon and Vangelis songs on them. Also the tapes played back at 125% speed so everybody sounded a bit like the Chipmunks.
Personally, I find the current vinyl craze kind of amusing. I spent the first ten years of my listening life with LPs and the moment I got my first CD player that was the end of that shit forever. The clicks and pops and the physical PITA of taking records out of their sleeves and setting the stylus down somewhere to hear a particular song and then cleaning the record and putting it back was just so incredibly annoying. The only good thing about LPs was (is) the cover art; as a huge Yes fan growing up I should perhaps appreciate that more, but it wasn't enough to offset the negatives.
Buttons are an reminder of the luxury of space we used to have.
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