http://www.v8buick.com/index.php?threads/offset-grinding.353759/#post-3024468 Got off-topic and drifted into home audio. Perhaps we can continue that here? The pinnacle of solid state electronics even when these were new cost five to eight (or more) times what these went for. Aragon represented what I thought was the sweet-spot of home audio products--stuff that could compete with the best in many aspects of performance, the amplifiers would drive any speaker made, yet had some value-engineering, lacked "frills" and sold for high but not insane prices while being Made In USA. by a series of producers that normally made medical and military electronics (i.e., they were skilled at building really reliable stuff without cutting corners.) The designers were often--but not always--contracted specialists who were outstanding in their particular fields. For example, the first series of amplifiers, and the first preamp, were designed by Dan D'Agostino who at that time was owner/operator of Krell; one of the companies selling ~$10,000 amplifiers during the late 1980s. His new company is selling amplifiers that cost over $100,000 now. http://www.krellonline.com/ https://dandagostino.com/ The size of "house speakers" is of no concern to the amplifier. The impedance of the speakers matters. It is entirely possible for "big" speakers to be easier to drive than "satellite jobs". Depends on the speaker engineering. My suggestion is to NOT buy a "home surround receiver". Buy a Preamp/Processor which does all the digital decoding, Dolby or DTS processing, and outputs a multi-channel signal that's amplified by several monophonic, stereo, or multi-channel power amp(s). If that's beyond your budget, a home-theater receiver that INCLUDES PREAMP OUTPUTS so that separate amplifiers can be connected later as money becomes available is in order. The center channel, and the "main" right and left speakers generally need the most/best amplification; while the side, rear, height speakers don't typically need huge power; and subwoofers usually (not always) have built-in power amps. So if you buy a receiver, plan to get 3 more channels of separate power amplifier later. Using external amplifers for the three main channels takes a big load off the receiver's power supply, and typically improves performance for the remaining channels. In general, receivers including home theater receivers exist in order to provide a low-cost product. (Lots of "stuff" in a single box, but with lots of corners cut to drop the price--most consumers don't know the difference or don't care.) Due to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules being relaxed a few years ago, there's a whole lot of crappy Asian product sold with supposedly high power...but when you look at the specs, you find that they're allowing TEN PERCENT DISTORTION; and/or they've shaved off the bottom octave of music where most the "deep" bass is. The "clean" power isn't even listed because it's very low. Any receiver that doesn't have a 20--20kHz FTC rating into 4-ohm impedance loads is, in my opinion, not a suitable product since never in the history of Home Audio have 4-ohm nominal impedance speakers been so popular, or such a high percentage of speakers sold. An FTC rating of 40--20kHz is a dead giveaway of poor bass performance. Some amplifiers "cheat" the FTC test procedure by having a back-panel switch that strangles the power supply into 4-ohm loads. Those, too, are not suitable. Anyone else interested in home audio? Toobs? Horns? Acoustic Suspension? Bassive Radiator? Vinyl? CD? Elcassette? Pono?
Very interested in home audio, to the point of having designed many amps, preamps, and speakers. Most recently I've been experimenting with transmission line speakers. I tend to like acoustic suspension type designs over bass reflex, but transmission lines can be the best of both worlds. I like vinyl quite a lot, but don't have the best table (Project Debut Carbon DC with an AT440). I've dabbled in tubes some, and can design with them. I'm an electronic tech by trade, so it's an everyday thing. I've built a bunch of stuff, but it seldom lives long before it's in the parts bin again. I agree with you about separates over a home theater receiver. I still haven't heard a class D (switching) amp that I like, and many have gone to that technology. The best bargains are often 20 years old (when they were still class AB output stages). There is a lot of snake oil in home audio, unfortunately. Even the specs are manipulated to make something look better than it is. I will say that distortion numbers are a tool, but often don't tell the whole story about how good or bad a component sounds. Tubes don't particularly measure well in absolute numbers, but tend to sound great, for example.
Ive had a 70ies era Merantz, a 90ies Kenwood . and variety of 2000 and up surround recievers. The Merantz sounded the best. The speakers were all from tbe 90ies. And early 2000s.
Holy crap. You're so far ahead of me that it hurts. I've fixed bad solder--re-flowed solder joints; and I've replaced some capacitors, resistors, and inductors that failed or were upgraded. I've fixed open or corroded circuit-board traces by soldering-in a bypass wire. And that's "it" for my electronics skill. Refresh my memory. Roy Allison was big into transmission line speakers; and was quite the speaker engineer--right? Irving Fried and his partners in England were big into Transmission Lines. I've never heard a transmission line speaker, I don't really know how they work, and when I do an internet search for Allison and Transmission Line, I get a bunch of hits for automatic transmission cooler plumbing. But a search of Irving "Bud" Fried and Transmission Lines digs up gold. My main speakers are a variation of bass-reflex (Bassive Radiator). I don't hear anything wrong with them once I rebuilt the crossovers; but I know that all ported and passive-radiator designs screw with the phase as they transition to the tuned frequency and below. Phase in inaudible. Or it isn't. But maybe it is. Or not. A guy I knew gave me a pair of Acoustic Research (AR) 93Q speakers, medium-to-small jobs with acoustic suspension instead of ports or passives; and a very simple crossover compared to my main speakers. They do have nice bass after I glued new surrounds to the drivers, and I had to fix the tweeters. Got started on rebuilding the crossovers and then got distracted. They sound "good" but not yet "great". I think they have potential; but ancient electrolytic capacitors are holding them back. Rotted surround, failed tweeter as found under the grille "sock". Failed glue bond on tweeter. Tweeter "should" have ferrofluid in the voice-coil gap for cooling; but it's gone now. I just glued the thing back together and it works fine. Does not seem to overheat, but I don't play "loud". Fresh foam surround getting glued to the original driver cone. Glass "saucer" was conveniently the right size to hold things together as the glue dried. I've had a Technics SL-23 turntable since forever. Bought it from a brother of a friend decades ago when he upgraded to a direct-drive JVC. This was the pre-CD days, when it was vinyl or cassette. I never liked the process of playing vinyl; but it's what I did to improve the sound in preference to prerecorded cassettes. Any album I bought, I immediately cleaned, assured the speed on the 'table was "perfect" and then copied the vinyl to high-quality cassette for playback; saving my "vinyl" from wear. As things have happened in the last year, I've acquired three more 'tables. A guy who was leaving town needed my help and my pickup truck to move; he paid me with a pair of 'tables, and a Pioneer TX-608 tuner. One table (Sanyo TP-728) was unusable until I fixed the main bearing and bought a new belt. I guess the bearing seized, then tore-up the original belt. Works good now. The other (Pioneer PL-200) seems good as-is, complete with original box and packing. The real "score" was picking up my friend's brother's JVC QL-A7 direct-drive with all accessories--Zerostat, Discwasher pad, three or four cartridges, and eighty albums. This was the turntable he upgraded to when he sold me the Technics all those years ago. The JVC needs some lovin' though; it tends to run slow until it's warmed-up for half-an-hour and that's just not right. I'm told new capacitors will fix that. Haven't ordered them yet. So here I am, a not-really-vinyl guy with four vintage Japanese mid-level or higher semiautomatics. If the JVC turns out good, the other three will find other homes. Of course, none of these forty-year-old mid-line Japanese turntables compare to a Pro-Ject. I'd have said "20+ years old". "Good stuff" was made all along, but the prime years for bargains are late-70s to early-mid '90s in the mass-market; and 1990s for high-end. The downside in all of this is electrolytic capacitors. They've got a typical service life of twenty-something years; and they can fail catastrophically or a tiny bit each day, so slowly you never hear the difference...until you scrap 'em and put in fresh. "Recapping" a speaker crossover is child's play. Recapping a power amp or receiver or whatever can be a weeks-long project. Where possible--and practical--scrapping electrolytic capacitors in favor of film caps not only improves the service life, but often "sounds better". Film caps of course cost more and are physically larger; so sometimes there's just no option to use film caps. Agreed. There's a famous quote from decades ago: Test instruments can't replace ears, but the ears have to be connected to a trained, experienced, and ordered mind. And those don't grow on trees. A person has to be able to define "good"--and know that that does not mean "Pleasant". Measurement equipment helps to assure that the definition of "good" is kept honest. There's quite a following for Marantz; but the opinions vary on when they went "downhill". For some, it was when they went transistor. For others, it was when Saul Marantz "sold out". Still others are fine up to about 1990 or so. I've only spent time with one, that was forty years ago, and it was a bottom-of-the-line transistor receiver. What can I say? It worked fine; and got me into trouble. That's a story for another day. Sometime after I'm dead. They can tell it at my funeral. Nobody puts the "fun" in "funeral" like my family.
You guys are making me want to dig my old stereo equipment out of the basement and get it working again. I know I have an old 80's Yamaha receiver, Micro Seki manual turntable, Akai cassette deck, large Advent speakers and a BSR subwoofer down there somewhere. Plus, four or five hundred albums...
I’ve been dabbling in home audio for years but you guys make me question weather I know anything at all. My preferred brands have been 80’s and 90’s klipsch, Denon, Yamaha, crewin Vega for the most part. I’ve tried to score an old Marantz, but not found the right deal. I’ll bet I have 10 receivers sitting around trying to find a good combo. No biggie but I’ll try to use this thread to educate myself. KID
If it sounds good to you, it's good. Just keep an open mind when listening. There is always something better out there, and once you've heard it, it's hard to be satisfied with what you have. Kind of like horsepower, lol.
So the deal with ported speakers... A well-designed pair can sound really good. I don't mean to bash them. It's just that they have inferior transient response, in my experience. They also can tend toward ringing and a"one-note" sound. Acoustic suspension, being sealed, only has the driver resonance to cope with. They tend to sound warm and punchy, but of course not as extended. This can actually be corrected with enough amplifier power and EQ. Search for "Linkwitz Transform" for more information. Now, transmission line systems are somewhat unique. They technically are a ported box. They start with a cross-sectional area greater than the surface area of the driver itself, and taper down at a specific ratio, and at a specific length for the passage to the open end (like a tapered maze). The higher taper ratios tend to be tighter sounding. This tunes them to 1/4 wavelength and reinforces the bass so that they cut off an octave to an octave and a half below driver resonance. They are typically stuffed to reduce resonances and smooth the frequency response. They have a sound that is extremely tight (especially when stuffed heavily) and almost non-resonant (no peaks or dips in the response). They sound very lean, and are not for everyone. Most people would prefer a closed or ported box, I would say. But when they're right, there's just something special about the sound. You can also tailor them to your room by changing the stuffing density. Martin King recently (in the last 20 years) was the first to mathematically quantify the design procedure for transmission lines. His work is extremely technical, but interesting. I've only scratched the surface of understanding it conceptually. My knowledge is mostly practical and experimental.
Schurkey, You seem very knowledgeable! Awesome speaker restoration project you have going. My previous turntable was a $15 Rotel. It sounded really good, but the speed stability was just bad. That's where the Project really excels- speed stability. It really has a solid sounding bass because of that. I totally agree with your comments about listening. I've run into a lot of people that think they know good sound, but the real ones are few and far between. I don't mean to sound elitist; just that some people seem to ignore things that are blatantly bad when others hear them. I don't think everyone has experience with what live music really sounds like, and that is the real standard. Most people have never heard a system with really low distortion and flat frequency response through the midrange, so they don't really understand what they are missing. Once you've heard it, it's like there is a veil lifted off of the speakers. My first experience was many years ago with electrostatic speakers... totally changed my perspective. Marantz... My experience is that in the early 80's, their engineering was the same as everything else that was mass-market. You will find Sanken output modules in the receivers from that era, so they really are Marantz in name only from that point on. They did revamp the brand in the last 20 years, and I believe it's better quality than it used to be, but to me the real Marantz died in the mid 70's. I don't think there is anything really magical about the 70's era transistor stuff. It was all capacitor coupled and discrete (no packaged op amps), so it tended to sound warm. I think it sounded pretty good- the faults were not things that made it hard to listen to, just lacked clarity. It's a warm, smooth sound that appeals to a lot of people, but it's far from true hifi. Capacitors... I tend to agree about the electrolytics. They are probably the most unreliable electronic component there is. There isn't too many days that I don't replace at least one at work. Unfortunately, if you need more than about 20 uF (microfarads) you are forced to use them. There is a way to more closely approximate a perfect capacitor, and that is bypassing the electrolytics with film caps (solder them in parallel with the electrolytics). It will definitely improve the midrange and treble of any capacitor coupled circuit.
I have a fairly high end system (Counterpoint amps and pre-amp, JSE Infinite Slope speakers, etc) which has been down many years. It seems these companies, while ahead of their time, no longer exist and finding someone capable of servicing the amps (tube) and speakers (dry rotted speakers with intricate crossovers) is a challenge. Any suggestions?
I know the turntable needs a new belt and the cones need re-foaming in the Advents & subwoofer. The receiver worked great the last time I used it about 20 years ago...
I'm not familiar with those components. What are the model numbers? I'll see if I can find any information.
While not “home audio” in the sense of receiver, tower speakers, equalizer, etc. I inherited a GE C445G console stereo w/ Porta-Fi. It’s circa 1960s (not sure on exact year) and includes quite the collection of supporting documents. It was my grandparents which they bought second hand in the late 60s. No idea when it last worked, I remember it working when I was a kid (early 90s) but can’t remember it working before my grandmothers passing in 2011. It’s a project I will eventually get to, but as of now it’s a nice piece of history to have in my living room.
I love those old consoles. I started to buy them up on Craigslist, but found they take up too much room.
They do indeed take up some room. I am good with the one lol. It'll be a chore to find a shop that can restore it to its usable state. Unfortunately I don't have the Porta-Fi speakers with the unit, so i will need to keep an eye out on Ebay or some antique radio forums.
