OK now as for the blog, in-between exams I managed to make some technical changes here. First and foremost, I abandoned my old hosting service and moved everything to a new one, which is (yeah, I’m sure of it already) faster, more stable and has better support than the old one. The next thing is that I’ve updated both the blog and the forum software. You’ll probably won’t notice anything new thanks to the blog update, but I can’t say the same about the forum, it changed quite a bit (new layout and all). I hope you’ll like the new look and functionality.

So, is that all? Nope. There’s one more change that I’ve made, probably the most substantial of them all. As planned before, I’ve made a second blog for all my posts that aren’t directly related to audio (which is the main focus of this here blog). The address to the second blog is: wojtek.younghifi.com. Expect mostly personal stuff there, so if you’re interested in what’s going on in my life aside from all the audio and music stuff, then that’s the place to go. I’ll probably put up a link to it somewhere here on the homepage, but I haven’t decided where yet, but rest assured that it’ll be quite visible.

I know that there have been such non-audio related posts before here and for now on I’ll leave them here, but I’ll probably move them to the second blog in the future in order to keep the integrity intact.

I guess that’s all for now. Stay tuned for the continuation of the turntable posts series and expect some more posts about vinyl records. This time with hands-on photos!

UPDATE (4th April 2008):

I’ve brought down the other blog after all, so the above mentioned link has been made redundant. I’ll stick to posting non-audio stuff on this blog too.

Every turntable consists of a base, a motor, a platter with a spindle, signal cables, a tonearm and a cartridge with a needle. They can also be full of additional useful mechanisms and control functions. There are also different methods of operating a turntable. The components of a turntable also require maintenance and sometimes even replacement. The goal behind this guide series is to showcase and explain all the different aspects of owning, using and keeping our turntable (and at the same time our vinyl records) in best shape.

In this part I’ll focus on explaining all the different types of turntables and turntable drives…

1. Basic types of turntables

The type of the turntable is determined by the way in which it can be operated by the user.

a) Manual

In a manual turntable, all functions must be done manually by the user. In most cases, you will find only the most important switches on your manual turntable, that is the cue button/lever (you use it to put the arm/cartridge over or onto the record or the so called “armrest”) and the playing speed control. Most manual turntables operate as follows:

In order to start playing a record, you have to put the tonearm in cue, manually move the tonearm so that the needle is above the desired point on the record from which you’d like to start playing it and then lowering it onto the record by disengaging the cue. The turntable’s motor should engage in the moment the arm’s over the turntable platter.

If you wish to stop playing, you have to put the arm in cue again and move it back to the armrest and then disengage the cue. The motor will disengage the moment the arm leaves the space over the platter.

Also, when the record side that you’re playing comes to an end, you’ll have to manually stop it as described above. If not then the motor will keep running and the needle will stay on the record’s inner empty grooves.

Some older manual turntables also have start/stop buttons which are used to start or stop the turntable motor. Such turntables won’t automatically engage or disengage the motor depending on the arm’s position.

Most modern and expensive “audiophile” turntables are manual ones.

b) Semi-automatic

Semi-automatic turntables operate similarly to the manual ones, except for one difference. Such turntables have a built-in automatic mechanism that enables them to do one of the following tasks when the played record side comes to an end:

- disengage the motor,
- put the arm in cue over the end of the record, then disengage the motor,
- put the arm in cue, move it automatically back to the arm rest, disengage the cue and then disengage the motor.

You can find the first two automatic shutdown function variants mostly in older (60’s and prior) semi-automatic turntables. Most of the newer ones employ the last, full-cycle shutdown function, also known as the auto-return.

Some semi-automatic also have a stop button, which enables us to engage the auto-return function at any time while the record’s playing.

Most turntables that you may find will be semi-automatic.

c) Automatic

Automatic turntables work like semi-automatic ones with the auto-return function, but they can also automatically start playing the record.

On such turntables there’s always a start and stop button. The stop button works like the one we may find on a semi-automatic turntable. The start button on the other hand engages the automatic start mechanism, which works in such a way that it starts the motor, puts the tonearm in cue, moves it automatically over the beginning of the record and then disengages the cue, after which the record starts playing.

Early automatic turntables had the auto-start mechanism coupled with the playing speed control. It was done so, because back then 12” LPs were played only with the 33 rpm speed setting, while 7” singles had to be played under 45 rpm. Because the playing speed was directly in relation with the record’s size, the auto-start mechanism was set so that, depending on the set playing speed, it would move the tonearm onto the appropriate beginning of a single or LP.

Later, record companies began to publish so called “Maxi singles” (which had the size of an LP, but played under the 45 rpm speed), EPs (10” records) and 7” singles that played under 33 rpm.

It became obvious to turntable companies that coupling the auto-start mechanism with the speed control wouldn’t make much sense from now on, so they started to put record size controls next to the speed controls, with which you could set the size of the played record, so that the auto-start mechanism would know where the actual beginning of the record is.

On most automatic turntables, the start button can be also used to automatically stop playing and start playing the record side from the beginning.

Automatic turntables can also have an auto-repeat function. It works in such a way that after the auto-return mechanism kicks in, the auto-start function starts, so the record side can be played continuously. In such a case, even pushing the stop button or even trying to manually stop the record won’t help. You need to turn the repeat function off in order to shutdown the turntable. Some turntable brands like Technics have used more sophisticated auto-repeat mechanisms in some of their automatic turntables, in which you could define the number of repetitions (in most cases up to 5 or 6) or set it to a continuous playing loop.

2. Other turntable types

There are also several other, more exotic types of turntables. Those worth mentioning are:

a) Tangential/Linear turntables

Such turntables are automatic and in most cases controlled by a microprocessor. The tonearm in such a turntable is not placed under an angle like in regular turntables. It’s a straight arm with a moving base located in the rear of the turntable, which has it’s own separate motor. It works in such a way that the tonearm and it’s base moves across the record in a linear fashion, just like the record’s master disc has been cut in the manufacturing plant (some people say that they sound better just because of that).

Tangential turntables operate just like automatic turntables, except that you can’t manually move the tonearm. It is done by special buttons which control the position of the tonearm (you use them to move the arm left or right over the record).

b) Programmable turntables

These are very rare and expensive 80’s machines. They employed a special tonearm and cartridge which had a small laser on it. The laser was used by the turntable to see how many tracks are on the record’s side and where are the track gaps located.

Thanks to that, one could use such a turntable like a CD player, by selecting the track from which it should start playing or even program the order of tracks in which the record should be played.

c) Record changers

Those were turntables which worked similarly to a jukebox. They were special automatic units which had a special long spindle on which you could stack up to 4, 5 or 6 records. The turntable would then play them one at a time (only the sides that were pointed upwards, of course) and shut itself down.

Most record changers could also be used like normal, single-record turntables.

3. Turntable drive systems

There are 3 common types of turntable drive. All of them use some kind of speed regulating mechanism (in order to keep the playing speed as constant as possible) about which I’ll write in one of the next parts of this guide series.

a) Belt-Drive

The most basic turntable drive. It uses a low-speed motor with a pulley on it. A rubber belt goes around the motor pulley and the outer or inner rim of the lower portion of the platter. Thanks to that the motor’s torque is transferred to the platter.

The advantage of such a drive is that it’s quiet and the motor doesn’t have any acoustic impact on the turntable’s audio output signal.

The weakness main is that the rubber belt deteriorates over time or from heavy-duty use and needs to be replaced.

Most modern “audiophile” turntables are belt-driven.

b) Idler wheel-drive

This turntable drive system can be usually found in record changers. It uses a high-speed motor with a stepped pulley on it. A so called idler wheel moves on the inner rim of the platter and the motor pulley, thus putting the platter into motion.

c) Direct-drive

The most sophisticated type of drive, invented by Technics. It uses an electronically controlled motor, which sits directly under the platter and moves the spindle on which the platter resides.

The main advantage of such a drive system is that it rarely needs any maintenance and the doesn’t have any parts which you’d need to eventually replace over time. It also guarantees precise and stable platter rotation.

The biggest disadvantage of a using such a drive is that if poorly engineered, the motor can become a source of acoustic feedback on the turntable’s audio output signal.

In the 80’s, the market became flooded with cheap Japanese direct-drive models, which used poor components and were of poor design. Because of that, most people (even today) tagged the direct-drives as being always of lower quality than belt and idle wheel drives. That’s not entirely true, because a properly designed quality direct-drive (for example a Dual 701/721 or a top-of-the-line Technics, like the famed 1200/1210 series) can surpass in quality most other turntables.

Every DJ turntable uses a direct-drive.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the next installment of the “Turntable 101″ post series. I also plan to make a “Glossary” page in which you will find definitions of the most common technical terms used while talking about audio components.

Now let me explain a bit more. The main idea behind the forum is to have a place where people new to the whole audio biz and those who don’t have much experience, can ask questions about whatever problems they may have or simply state their thoughts and discuss them with others without any risk of getting laughed at from other, so called “elite” people. If you’re a frequent on any forum, I’m sure that you know what kind of people I’m talking about. I myself have been recently laughed at when I asked a novice-type question about speaker cables on a Polish audio-oriented forum. It took about 20 replies till I finally got the answer to my query and most of them where totally not on-topic. Later a fight started on that single thread of posts between the “all-knowing elitists” and people who felt that it was wrong to laugh at a potential newcomer and discourage him. I really must confess that if I would start my hobby by frequenting such a forum, I would surely be discouraged if people would be making fun of my lack of knowledge while I’d just be trying to learn something new from them. I guess that most people would.

That’s what got me thinking and this new forum is the result.

You can visit the forum by going directly to it’s address: http://forum.younghifi.com or by clicking on the “Forum” link, which is located above in the blog’s header and right on the blog’s sidebar under the “Pages” listing. I still got put a link on the forum that would bring you back to the blog though.

As for the technicalities, the forum runs on the new phpBB3 system (which is actually still in “beta” stage, as in “not-yet-final-version” state, but it’s already very stable) with the standard layout. The forum’s structure is still not-solid, as I’m thinking about new stuff and implementing new ideas on the go and of course I’m also open to any suggestions that might come from you. I still have to write and put up some forum rules there, but I hope that this feature will become useful and profitable in a number of ways to both you guys and me.

Now I still have some exams ahead of me and I hope that after I pass them I can get back to writing some new audio-related stuff here on my blog. So please stay tuned and do visit both the blog and the new forum from time to time.

I promised that I’ll write a few words about my new speakers so here it goes:

The JBL L-100T’s hooked up with the Sansui 9090DB sound great, especially if you’re into rock and other genres that feed on raw power and dynamics. But that doesn’t mean that they’re your straight and simple, off the block “ALL-BASS/NO-CLASS” heavy loudspeakers that techno music enthusiasts praise so much these days. The high and midrange are also top-notch, especially the titanium tweeter (that’s what the T stands for in the name). They also seem to have a lot of detail in them. I say that they “seem” to have it, because as for the sound resolution and detail, I can only estimate as of now, because my only source of sound is my computer’s soundcard (an old SoundBlaster Live! Platinum), connected with a not-so-expensive 10 meter long cable… and this really can’t qualify as a quality music source, at least not in my opinion. So I decided that until I get my hands on a decent CD player or turntable hooked up with the system, I’ll leave my review as it is now and come back to it later. I simply feel that my speaker-receiver combo gives as much as it can, but it still can’t spread out it’s wings, because of the source.

On a side note: Actually, some people (especially Hi-Fi newcomers) make the mistake of putting most of their money in the amplifier and speaker sections of their system and leave the rest of the money pile for the source-devices. It kinda should be the other way around, because even the greatest loudspeakers and amps will sound like crap if they’re fed with sound coming from a crappy source. So my word of advice is: the source device should be at least on par with the other components of your Hi-Fi system, quality wise.

Another advice: If you plan to use your SoundBlaster Live! or Audigy series soundcard as a music source and connect it to your amplifier, use the rear-speaker channel output, because it’s of higher quality than the front-speaker one. I know it sounds weird, but the signal really has much less noise in it. If I remember right, it all goes down to the cards having a separate DAC for the front and rear speaker outputs, and Creative (the makers of the SB cards) paired a higher quality one with the rear output. If you don’t believe me, try for yourself. The difference is quite perceivable and you don’t need any high class equipment to hear it.

As for the other part of this post’s title, I’ve got a slight spending dilemma on my hands. I can’t decide on what should I save up money for now. I’ve got 2 ideas: a CD player or photo camera. The CD player would go as the new main source of music in my system, as mentioned above. The photo camera would mostly be for the benefit of the blog, because I (and probably you too) seriously think that my website is really in need of some photos, especially my guide posts. I’ve often written that this lack of “visual attachments” really starts to limit me and the post content’s quality in general.

Luckily, one of my roommates also had a similar problem. He started thinking about either investing in a camera or in new speakers for his computer. You could say that I slightly “poked him” in the right direction, by saying that now he already has a pair of speakers, but he doesn’t have anything to take photos with, so he decided for the camera. He spent a few days on the net and reading photography magazines, while being on the hunt for a good camera that would be available within his budget. He settled on a Samsung (I don’t know the model) and ordered it from the net (ironically enough, the seller is located in my home town). My plan is that when he gets it, I’ll try it out and then if I’ll like it, I’ll buy the same model. I really don’t want to start learning loads of stuff about photography as I’ve learned about audio stuff through trial and error and internet researching methods. I simply want something not too costly ($200 max.) that will make good photos which I can share with other people (like you for example, my faithful readers).

That’s all for now. From the blog’s stats I see that there are more and more readers subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed, which is a good thing, as now I know that there are some folks out there who probably think that my site has some potential and is worthy of coming back to, which really is a high praise for me personally. As for the blog’s top content, my vinyl collecting guides take the top 4 places with almost no competition, so I guess that I’ll finally have to start thinking about a new guide series… Goodnight y’all .

This week I finally got a pair of loudspeakers for my receiver. I’ve also done some cable huntin’ in Warsaw. Thought it would be easy in such a big city. I never thought that I’d start to despise the city street planning afterwards…

Let’s start with the speakers. In my previous post, I mentioned that I bought them on an internet auction just after Christmas. Well, the seller told me last Tuesday that he’d send them on the next day with UPS. I thought that it was fairly possible that the package would be delivered before Sunday, but in order to know that for sure, I’d need the tracking number of the package (or to be precise: packages, cause the speakers are quite big and they wouldn’t fit in one single package). One quick e-mail to the seller and I have the number.

On Friday, I went to UPS’s homepage for operations in Poland, typed-in the number and the reaction here should be like: “Voila!”, but instead was more like “Umm …. m’kay … Who? What? Where?”. I never thought that such an esteemed courier and mail company such as UPS would have such a shitty tracking interface for their customers and I don’t mean the layout of the page. After typing in the tracking number I was presented with a small table which included these columns: date and time of given event, place, description of event. What about the content of this table ? I could only gather that my package was picked-up on Thursday, sent to some place vaguely coded “STA” (I know the seller lives near Szczecin, a city in the far north-western side of Poland and by looking at a map I couldn’t think of any place near there which could have a shortcut of “STA”). Then, after a few hours, my package was still in “STA”, but now the decription said that it was: “Loaded on LH “. Question is: what’s LH ? At this point I really didn’t know what was going on and started looking for help on the website. I mean, they should at least have some legend for their tracking system or something, right? Well, after looking through every FAQ and page marked with “help” or “support” or “customer”, it seems that they don’t. How the hell should an online tracking system be useful to a customer if you’d have to be at least a UPS employee to understand it? I really can’t comprehend the logic behind this feature. Anyway, on Saturday I checked again and there was a new event. This time, the loudspeakers arrived late at night in “WAW” (this time I guessed right that WAW stands for Warsaw, as the Polish name of the city is: Warszawa and people often tend to say “Wawa” as a popular shortcut from the full version) and were being “Loaded on HUB 05″. Again, I don’t know that exactly does “HUB 05″ mean, but at least I’m fairly confident that they arrived in my city. Then I started wondering when will the packages reach their final destination (i.e. my address). I decided to call the UPS hotline and after 4 tries (I only have a cellphone and it seems that the operator rejected the hotline number at first. Weird.), a woman with a nice voice answered. She told me that the delivery will be made on Tuesday. OK, no prob, seems only fare that the delivery guys have a day off on Monday, it being the 1st of January and all.

On Monday, it came to me that even if the speakers will arrive tomorrow, I don’t have any cables with which to connect them to the receiver! I’d also be needing some kind of music source and as my computer’s the only one here at Warsaw (for now), I’d also be needing an IC (InterConnect) cable to connect it too. I’m not from Warsaw, but I was aware that there are some audio-video stores around here, so I started googling for some which also provide a variety of cables. I’ve found one such store which was located on the same street as the subway exit, to which I commute daily in order to get to my college. I jotted down the address of the store and decided to go there on the next day, after classes.

On Tuesday, the courier called my cell while I had a break between classes. He wanted to set a time for the delivery to take place. I told him that I’ll be at home after 3 pm and he replied that if he wouldn’t make it by then, he’d arrive at about 6 pm. After classes, I made my way to the street on which the audio store was located. It was at Warynska Street 10. I see around the corner that I’m standing next to bulding no. 3 and that the next along the road is no. 4, so I go that way. By arriving at no. 9, the next structure was already under a new street name. Figuring that no. 10 would be on the other side of the street, I crossed it, but found no. 42. Went back to where I came from on this side and went further, till I found no. 11. Passing that building, I find that the next building is also under a different street name. “What gives?”, I thought to myself. Too bad that I forgot to take my trusty city map. I started asking passers-by about it, but they didn’t know also. I started to search around in-between the small alleys near no. 11, but to no avail. Fortunately, I found a kiosk and there, a young guy behind the counter told me that it was further down the road after the big street-crossing. Thanks to these directions I’ve finally managed to find the store. Went in, asked about speaker cables, bought 2.5 meters of a cable called “Monitor Atmos Air 309 Cu”. I’ve read about it in a magazine some time ago and it’s presumably a good OFC (Oxygen Free Copper) cable made by a German company called in-akustik and it also happened to be one of the cheapest in that particular shop (it has a price of about 9 bucks per meter). I’ve also asked about a 3.5” jack (also called a “small jack”; the small cable plug that you find in computer soundcards and portable music devices) to 2x RCA (also called “cinch” cables; the cable plugs that you find on audio components) IC, but unfortunately they didn’t have anything with a 3.5” jack…

Later that day, the UPS guy came (just after 3pm). He brought in 2 big packages and I was feeling like it was Christmas again. The unpacking of both packages took me almost an hour, because the loudspeakers were packed very securely (they were wrapped in 3 layers of packing foil and 2 layers of cardboard and that all was surrounded by loads of thick cotton). Thanks to that, no harm occured to them during delivery.

After unpacking (5 pm), I decided to go to the local mall in search of an IC. They didn’t have one, so I just bought some food supplies, which turned out not to be such a good idea at this particular time, because the lines to the cash registers were so long that I spent an hour standing in them. Near the exit, I’ve spotted a small electical appliances shop. They had the IC that I was looking for, but it was only 5 meters long and I needed at least 8 meters of cable in order to lay it around my room (the computer and receiver stand next to opposite walls). When I got home, I googled around once again and I’ve found a cable store in Warsaw that had such interconnects in stock.

On Wednesday, I decided to go to the shop, which I found on the net the day before. Classes end at half past 3 pm at that day, so it was already getting dark. Went to the subway, comuted to a station nearest to the shop’s street and started searching for it, this time with the city map. It was a long trek, took me over an hour to get to the street. It was pretty far of the subway line and I didn’t want to take the risk of taking a bus (I don’t trust buses very much, especially ones that drive through bus lines that I don’t know). The shop’s address was Korotynska Street 23, room 41. I found myself near building no. 16, so I continued walking along the road. I finally came to no. 22, but the next one was no. 24. “What happened to 23?”, I thought. I looked on the other side of the street, but there was a big park there. Just when I wanted to go and search in-between the apartment buildings, a man passed me. I quickly asked him if he knew where no. 23 was. He replied that it was on the other side and the other end of Korotynska Street. I thanked him for the directions, but boy was I mad. Can’t they just tag the house numbers in a more logical order here in Warsaw? Why do they make the street address numbering scheme look like a jigsaw puzzle? Anyway, after a long walk I found building 23. It was a 2 story high barrack-like steel building (looked like it was built back in the socialistic days). I asked a guy who had a TV repair shop located in the building where could I find the cable store. He directed me to a staircase around the corner. Went there and upon entrance, the janitor asked me what was I looking for. She directed me to room 41. I was very happy while finally reaching my destination and just before 5 pm (the store closes at that time). The store consisted of 3 rooms, the one with the exit door being the main sales room with some packed cables hanging around the walls, a neat-dressed guy behind a desk and a computer and some filing cabinets behind him. The 2 other rooms were on the left and right of the main room and there were tons of cardboard boxes in them, presumably packed with audio-video cables. They had the cable I was looking for (10 meters long), but it cost $15 and I didn’t have such an amount of cash by me. Unfortunately, they didn’t take cards, so I asked where’s the nearest ATM. They pointed me to a gas station, near a street crossing halfway of Korotynska Street. Luckily, they also said that they’d be working over-time that day, so the store will be open for another hour. I went back to the crossing, found the gas station, but no ATM was there. I noticed there was a bank on the other side of the road. That was probably what the cable salesman ment. I found that there were 3 banks against each other, taking up the ground floor of a building and one of them was the bank in which I had my personal account. Turned out that the ATM there was broken, so I went to one of the other banks to use one of their ATMs. Took out $20, payed about $2 commision in the process for withdrawing money from a competitor’s machine and off I went back to the shop. Went in, payed the man and off I went. Mission completed! It was already 6 pm and I was really exhausted from all that walking around, so I decided to take a bus the the subway station. I arrived at my district at 7 pm, was extremely hungry, because last time I ate was over 10 hours before so instead of going home and making some dinner-supper combination, I went to a local pizza parlor. When I got home, I unpacked the newly acquired cable, layed it around the room and connected to the receiver. Next, I took my swiss army knife, cut the speaker cable in half and cut off the cable isolation on both ends. While hooking up the first speaker, 2 things occured. One was that the cable was a bit too short. The other was that it was too thick and I couldn’t fit it in the receiver’s speaker cable terminals. Tough luck. It became even tougher later, because I suffered from a terrible and sudden tooth-acke during the night.

Thursday, “another day, another cable”, I said to myself. Thanks to the tooth-acke, I fell asleep at 6 am, only to wake up at 10 to get to classes. Went back to the audio store on Warynska St. after classes. Bought 4 meters of the slightly cheaper Monitor Atmos Air 195 Cu cable (it’s got a smaller diameter). Comuted back home, ate some dumplings for dinner (Polish “pierogi” are the best), went to the dentist, came back at 6 pm and fell quickly asleep.

Friday, woke up at 8 am, made my bed and immediatelly started to get it on with the speaker cable. Again, cut the cable in half and cut of the isolation on the ends. I’ve cut my fingers 3 times in the process, but this finally worked and I got my speakers hooked-up. YAY!

I didn’t have enough time to thoroughly listen to my new speaker-receiver combination, so I still can’t tell you my first impressions in detail… One thing for sure is that now the gates to buying a turntable and CD player are open, so I may start collecting CDs and vinyl records again here in Warsaw!

Phew, this turned out to be a big post. At least now you know how demanding and tiresome this hobby can be. I never thought that I’d have such a hard time with such a trivial thing as cables here in the capitol of Poland … or maybe it’s just that I’m new here. Wonder if anybody will even read this post to the end…

It’s an article from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, titled “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Here’s a short review:

It’s author, Joe Gross, makes a very elaborate study on modern record loudness levels and tries to answer the question as to how and why does today’s popular music can be exhausting to us, the listeners.

Joe touches the subject on both sides: from the music enthusiast’s and from the sound engineer’s (a.k.a. “the expert’s”) point of view.

Read on for some interesting excerpts from the mentioned article…

“(…) there are millions of copies of CDs being released that are physically exhausting listeners, most of whom probably don’t know why their ears and brains are feeling worn out.”

“For the past 10 or so years, artists and record companies have been increasing the overall loudness of pop and rock albums, using ever increasing degrees of compression during mastering, altering the properties of the music being recorded. Quiet sounds and loud sounds are now squashed together, decreasing the recording’s dynamic range, raising the average loudness as much as possible.”

“The idea is that louder recordings automatically sound better on low-quality reproduction systems, but this isn’t really true in practice. MP3 players such as iPods have their own compressors and limiters, further reducing the dynamic range of recordings, as do computers. A CD doesn’t have to be mastered loud; the iPod can make it as loud as everything else it plays.”

“(…) It is entirely possible that anyone younger than 18 reading this has no idea what we’re talking about. They may not bother to buy CDs anymore, such is the availability of MP3s single downloads. To them, popular music has always been hyper-compressed, square-wave stuff, able to punch through background noise with a single snare drum hit, clipping all over the place.

The article’s very long, but very well written and although it mentions things like: dynamics compression, sound clipping and RMS, you don’t need to be very familiar to all the technical knowledge beforehand, because the author explains it all rather nicely so that every reader can understand.

So, after saying that, click here to go and read the whole article.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

The people who tried to experiment a little with the console say that the CD transports may not be worth much, but it turns out that Sony put a pretty high-class DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) in the launch-edition (the very first model) of the old Playstation…

Some people also say that if you properly modify the console, it can beat some of the very high-end cd players. I know it’s pretty hard to believe for most audio maniacs, but check out Mick Feuerbacher’s website for articles, in which he describes the most imporant repairs and modifications in order to take the old Playstation to the next level and use all of it’s hidden HiFi potential.

Also, check out Michael Methel’s website (the text’s in German, but he put up a lot of pictures). Michael, a DIY audiophile from Germany, did probably one of the most extreme modifications of the old Playstation console. To name a few:
he made a very professional looking body, took out all the unnecessary parts (he only left those which are needed for audio playback capability), turned the console’s power supply unit into an external one and he even replaced the Sony’s output stage with tubes !

After reading through those websites and the original forum thread that hooked me up with the topic over at Steve Hoffman’s Music Forums, I’m starting to believe that it’s not a joke and right now I’m also really tempted to fetch an old Playstation and see if it really is true. It can’t hurt, because they’re pretty cheap nowadays and you only need the unit and one controller in order to use the console’s CD player functions. It’s an even more tempting proposition for all those who are into DIY.

On a sidenote: I’m also considering learning something about electronics. DIY skills really are useful, especially in the audio hobbyist’s world.

Another aspect of difference between “yesterday’s” and today’s audio systems (especially amplifiers and tuners) is the magnitude of features available for the former one, even in the medium price range. To name a few: midrange tone control, at least two inputs/outputs for tape recorders, amplituners had high quality tuner sections (not like today’s home cinema amplituners – the whole section is reduced to the size of a couple of computer chips), 4 speaker hook-up capabilities were a standard (and for some brands, a 6 speaker capability was the most common option), built-in phono preamps (well that’s not so unique, because vinyl was the most popular music medium back then, but nowadays a built-in quality preamp is pretty rare), subsonic and high filters, tone control turnover settings, etc. You may argue if one needs all of those features, but I guess that in this department it’s better to have more than less right ? (Well, except for so called audio minimalists, to whom it’s the other way around).

The technical specs for older gear were also very extravagant. Especially the power ratings (in contrary to today’s common practices) were in most cases underrated, despite still being considerably higher in comparison to today’ standards. That’s why integrated amplifiers and amplituners had been rated for example at 60 watts (RMS) for 8ohm impedance, while in reality they could pump out even 100 watts. That’s why most people, while comparing old and new audio gear and saying that “they are equal in power, because the rating’s the same (or similar)” are countered by the fact that in case of the vintage gear, we’re talking about the so called “old wattage”, meaning more or less that although it’s similar, in reality the older one is more powerful.

Another thing I accidently omitted by the DIY factors is that today people simply throw away their modern equipment if it’s broken. Back in the good old days, almost everything was fixable, even by a local technician (if presented the service manual or schematic) and if you had some talent, you could do it yourself DIY style. Try to do some DIY tweaking for instance on today’s mass-market gear full of microchips and digital gizmos.

Last, but not least I should also mention that one of the goals of audio companies back in the 70’s was not only to make the best gear quality-wise, but also the prettiest. Design was a major factor back then and most vintage audio equipment (especially those from the 70’s) are simply gorgeous pieces of engineering genius (check out Audiokarma.org’s photo galleries and also some vintage ads @ classicaudio.com’s gallery).

For the finishing touch, as an appendix to my ramblings about vintage gear having superior build quality, I’d like you to check-out this sincere and honest Marantz ad from 1974 and decide for yourself when was audio equipment better made (click on the thumbnail to see it fullsize):

That’s all for today. I guess that I have finally covered the most notable aspects of owning old audio gear (and if not then look out for another supplemential or a more serious “Vintage HiFi – part 2″ post).One thing about the site: Google AdSense has returned ! I decided to put a small banner, consisting of 2 ad’s, at the bottom of each single post page (just between the end of the post and the comments box). I guess that this solution won’t be as cumbersome as my former idea of putting the ad’s on the blog’s sidebar. Why do I bother with ads anyway ? Well, I guess that everybody knows that domains and especially quality web hosting ain’t free so I thought that such small ads could support me a little bit in maintaining the blog from the financial side, but know that I’m a realist and so I’m not hoping that it could cover all of the costs.

PS: You don’t know this, but for the past 2 days I’ve had several takes on a new post … Why didn’t I complete a single one in that time ? Answer: probably the so called “writer’s block” and also out of lack of ideas. I’ve come up with several things to write about during lectures at my college and later at home (also doing some other stuff), but I simply forgot most of them at the time I sat down at my computer. I’ve tried to put things together by writing a few sentences, but then everything collapsed and I had to take on another topic, but to no avail. I guess that my memory got an “idea overload” of some sort. That’s why since yesterday I’m carrying a small notepad and a pen by my side, simply in order to note everything related to audio that I could write about on the blog, so that I won’t forget anything again. So simple, yet so smart and useful :)

Vintage video ain’t exactly my region of interest (well maybe except LD’s, but as far as I know people don’t put the “vintage” tag on this technology yet), so I’ll mostly stick to the vintage audio part of old HiFi…

So, when does vintage audio start ? Now that’s simple, since Edison’s phonograph, I guess (although some people call that age more like “prehistoric audio” then vintage), but to be frank, audio products prior to the 50’s can’t quite be compared to today’s inventions in the terms of sound quality, so it’s accepted that when someone speaks of vintage audio era, he means the 50’s and later years. When does it end ? Well, today we can say that audio gear before the 90’s is vintage now, but some folks only acknowledge pre-80’s equipment as vintage. Why do they think like that ? That’s because at the beginning of the 80’s the, so called “digital era” began and so audio companies started putting computer chips in their equipment to make it more compact, more futuristic and (presumably) more “efficient”. Also, since the 80’s marketing started to be a serious issue, economy wasn’t always as good as it should be and so the companies started to get a bit on the cheapo-cheapo side and throwing mass-produced gear on the audio market. Since the 80’s, the build quality was just not the same as before. Today, for the most part, things haven’t changed much since the 80’s on the mass-market range of audio products.

For example: today, when we say “mass-market product”, would you say from the start that it’s of the highest quality ? No. Because today’s mass-market products aren’t made to be like that. Companies want you buy their product now and then buy another one after 5 years. In vintage audio days, it was the other way around. The sentence “built like a tank” probably comes from those days.

To quote Rick Stout, a known vintage audio enthusiast from stereomanuals.com:

“We don’t need no stinkin’ robot-assembled, computer-controlled black plastic throw away stuff pretending to be audio gear.”

OK, now you ask: “So what’s so special about vintage audio ? It’s over 20 years old so it’s worse than today’s products, right?” Answer: WRONG! No question.

Back “in the old days”, audio companies like Pioneer, Sansui (which, on a side note, has pretty much disappeared from the audio market since the 80’s and now tries to make a comeback with a series of tube amplifiers), Marantz had a pretty simple scheme for introducing their products. They thought something similar to: “let’s bet on quality, quality and once more quality engineering” and also “our products MUST be the best on the market”. The firms had their customers mostly in higher esteem than today (Hell, some of them even enclosed (next to the user’s manual) a service manual or schematic to their products, so that Do-It-Yourself style talented people could do things themselves or just could take their precious equipment to every consumer electronics service and the techs there should be able to take care of the problem while having the service manual at hand and not ordering it from the manufacturer for example). The market competition was more fierce. Accountants didn’t have that much to say at the production stage. That’s why the companies catalog price ranges were from “affordable for the Average Joe” to “buy this or a new car” and this was not just for show. Most products (especially those from the higher catalog shelves) were worth every penny.

That’s why many vintage audio enthusiasts are guys who bought these babies back when they still sold new and still use and cherish them till today (after a bit of servicing of course). It’s just like owning a youngtimer car. Some of those enthusiasts remember those great pieces of engineering from their child days and always have dreamt of them, but no amount of time spent on delivering newspapers or yard mowing would be enough in order to obtain them. That’s why that particular group hunts for vintage gear on yard/garage sales, newspaper and internet ads and also eBay’s very popular in this domain.

We also need to add a sly monetary factor here. If you know the general differences (which I kinda described above) between vintage and new audio gear, what would you choose while deciding on buying something: buy a new one and spend 400 bucks OR buy a vintage one (which cost ia fortune in it’s heyday) and spend, let’s say half of that price and get a machine which outclasses the new one ?

The choice is pretty obvious, but it needs to be said that in most cases you can’t get vintage equipment as so called “old-new stock” (although I’ve seen such auctions on eBay), meaning that someone had it lying around for all these years unused in an unopened box, instead vintage pieces are simply put “used goods” and so they are prone to be needing service or even extential repairs in order to have them work like a charm again (the “youngtimer car comparison” works here too).

One other factor is that back in the 70’s (and prior) everything was still hand-built and these processes didn’t happen using cheap labor from Taiwan or Africa (not even the product’s components were made there), but the proud words “Made in Japan/Germany/U.S.A.” (or “Designed in U.S.A., Produced in Japan” on Marantz’s works) shone at the backs of mass-market audio products (I know that today many brands still say that their products are from Japan, but they surely can’t guarantee that every component has been made there).

Now let’s get out of the 60’s and 70’s era and move back to the 80’s. Compact discs were introduced back in 1979 in their prototype stage and were brought to the market in the early 80’s. The first CD players were very very expensive (as the new and “revolutionary” medium), but although they could be called as simply “next-get” prototypes, their built quality was very high. That’s why many people also praise vintage CD players, because they were better made back in the beginning of CD. They are also popular as cheap, but good audio-tuning bases for DIY enthusiasts. Some of the vintage CD players gained legendary status (as many other vintage audio products) and although the technology used is a bit outdated, it’s still pretty expensive and hard to buy even a used one (again, think of legendary youngtimer cars, like the original 1st generation Porsche 911).

If you still have doubts about the sound quality coming out of vintage machines then please take into account that we’re talking analog vs. digital here. Today’s amplifiers have analog output (I wonder when and if that will change ? We’d probably need digital hearing if the output were also digital), the interior mostly ain’t “all analog”. There’s always one or two or dozens of microchips lying around in there. Although microchips aren’t always a bad thing in audio equipment. They can be superb while implemented properly in, let’s say, tape recorders mechanisms for example. Nakamichi was well know for it’s computer-controlled tape recorders. But if we’re talking digital in the audio signal path (any digital filters or digital sound processors) then that ain’t a good thing.
I don’t want to get into details just now, cause regarding the “analog vs. digital” topic, I’ve got a future post brewin’ so please stay tuned.

Whew, seems like I’ve written a lot of historical/economical type of smarty mumbo-jumbo today. Wonder if you’ll find it interesting.

That’s all about vintage audio in a nutshell, for now. You never know if there won’t be a part 2 or 3 of this post in the future, cause this topic’s pretty vast. Maybe a vintage audio shopping guide? (if that’s even possible :D).

In the next few days I’ll try to add some vintage audio related links on the blog’s Links page (you know where to find it, don’t you?).

To sum things up, I guess that I don’t need to tell you which kind of audio gear I prefer buying? ;)

So now you ask: so where are the music medium’s made better than elsewhere ? From my experience, things look kinda like this today (order from best to worst sound quality):

1. Japan
2. USA, Canada
3. UK, France
4. Germany, Italy, Holland ,Spain, Sweden, India

At this moment if a, similar to this one: “This guy’s a complete loon”, thought crosses your mind then I advise you to somehow obtain 2 copies of the same CD, LP or other music medium (except mp3’s and similar compressed audio files of course :) ), which differ by their manufacturing origin (according to the graded list above, like an American and a French one for instance) and decide yourself if what I say is right or wrong. Hoping that you’ll playback the medium on something better then your average Joe’s “scout-league” audio system (i.e. something for over $50), I can assure you that you’ll notice the differences right from the start.

I only listed western countries (except Japan and India), because I simply haven’t ever heard, for example: a CD from China, a LP from Cuba (although I’ve heard opinions that they were cut quite well) or a cassette from Egypt. I could guess and estimate, but then it wouldn’t justify the “from my experience” sentence.

If I wouldn’t have to compose the above list from today’s perspective, I’d also add Russia, Hungary, Poland and almost all other old “east block” countries and I’d file them under the number 5. Back in the socialistic days, the manufacturers made very cheapo-cheapo quality LP’s in comparison to other countries. Lay low the fact that it was supposedly hard even to get a hold of a Polish LP in Poland! My parents often told me that group excursions to Hungary for the sake of obtaining LPs (they didn’t have such problems as in Poland in this matter) weren’t uncommon.

I must also say that this list doesn’t concern us if we’re talking about a so called “audiophile” HiFi release, for example: albums recorded and released by specialised audiophile labels, like for example: Cambridge Acoustic Recording, Opus3 Records, John Marks Records and many others.

So now a second question comes a’ hurlin’ at us. It’s fairly easy to understand why the list’s order is like that and not the other way around if we take LP’s or cassettes. But why is it also true, for example: for digital mediums like CD’s ? That I can’t tell you in a straight answer, cause in this subject I can only speculate. The first thing that bugs our theory is the sole fact that we’re talkin’ digital here! On a German or Indian or Canadian made CD should be the same binary string of 0’s and 1’s, cause the album sources are mostly mastered in the same place right ? In theory most probably yes, but in practice it ain’t so. Maybe the quality of digital mediums simply depends very much on the quality of the equipment used in the manufacturing process ? If it were true then another sentece ended with a big question mark comes straight from the pits of manufacturing hell, for example: Why do the Italians (supposedly) make worse quality records than the French ? This whole thing is simply a big mind boggler …

And what about the differences between 1st and later editions of records ? Original master vs. remaster ? Digital vs. analog ? Those are stories for another time, but I can assure you that I’ll be posting about these topics cause they’re also quite controversial and not always so obvious.

If you have any other thoughts on this and other peculiar audio topics, then please do leave a comment.

PS: On a sidenote, I recently changed the layout of the blog to something “less default” (here I’d like to sincerely thank Sadish Bala for making this great theme, which BTW is freely available from his website, among other themes for the Wordpress blog system).
I also removed the Google AdSense ads for now, cause I still haven’t decided on where and under what disguise to put them on the blog’s pages (any help here would be much appreciated).