High Fidelity in the late 1950s

I like the "vintage" HiFi sound for what it is - but it's a highly colored version of reality. I've had fine vintage speakers and vintage tube preamps and in my opinion they really don't stand up to high quality modern gear (I'm not talking low end home theater stuff or spitty, overly bright and obnoxious movie theater sound, I'm talking the good modern home audio stuff) in terms of performance.

Power amps can be an exception - the really good vintage ones I do think can hang in there with modern power amps if appropriately restored and paired with appropriate speakers - I'd put my Citation II up against any amp - but there are many vintage power amps that also have that "rose colored" sound, the majority in fact.

My honest opinion, and I say this as someone who loves the older gear for what it is and has spent a lot of time restoring and listening to it, is that there is a tendency to greatly over-romanticize the audio performance of vintage gear based on physical appearance and the elegant simplicity of the design.

 

+1

I used to buy only vintage tube amps and restore them up to snuff. In my book there are only a few that really hold up to the modern stuff. The good vintage stuff have one thing in common - good output iron - and the better amps like the Citation 2, Eico HF-60s, Grommes and some of the higher end Fisher gear are really good.

I've found most of the speakers to be pretty colored - and that is mostly due to the poor crossovers. For example the Altec 604 stock crossover is really not that good. However a Mastering Lab or UREI crossover takes care of many of the original problems.

 

And that's just the audience . . .

 

As to the wonderful Flanders & Swann, their entire output, including the "Bestiary" (not up to the live shows, to my ear) and some outtakes that didn't make it to the LP "original cast" albums and a couple of things released as singles, have been reissued in an omnibus CD box. It's "The Complete Flanders & Swann," EMI CDFSB 1 (CDS 7974642).

As to the real topic at hand, when I was growing up in the '60s, Dad had a KLH compact (KLH amp and FM tuner in one box with a Garrard 4-speed turntable fitted with Pickering cartridge; two bookshelf KLH speakers). He was very proud of it, to the extent that a quite casual music listener would be. Later, when I went to college and discovered that I knew everything, I pooh-poohed it because it wasn't a separate component system. Later still, when I discovered that in college I just *thought* I knew anything, I came to realized that the KLH was a classic and should have been cherished. Alas, by then it was long gone....

 

Oh, by the way, I have shifted my affections to a bit of a flashback: my main system now sports two KLH Model Six speakers in front and two KLH Model Twenty-Three speakers in back.

 

Well from the UK in separates you had your Quad pre-power amp combinations, the Leak TL10/25/50 power amps together with Varioslope pre-amps, the Troughline FM Tuner and the Garrard 301 turntable.
All of which are serviceable and sound mighty fine today partnered with suitable loudspeakers.

 

Turntables in the 50s

>>>>>That is a good point, and I think the answer is.....sometimes.

A really good Thorens TT from 1962 is a great TT in 2009. A Garrard Type A from 1961 (and thats what I used for 10 years) just isnt.

It also depends on what youre playing on it . There are many people that feel that if you are playing records from the 50s and 60s, and you want them to sound "right", play them on a vintage table with a vintage cart, on a vintage tube amp thats performing to its original specs.........and there is a lot of truth to that. After all, that exact equipment was what the music was intended to be played back on when it was recorded, and the engineers made moves on the console accordingly to take advantage of that.

No doubt at all, a really nice Rega TT with a MLX cart ( like mine) will extract more detail from the grooves and that triangle will be really loud now, but maybe, thats not the way it was intended to be heard. Its all subjective, of course.

Tell you what tho......I recently heard an RCA "Orthaphonic" console playing a mono album by The Lettermen. The sound, while it may not have been the last word in detail, was not to be believed, it was incredibly full, lush and painted a picture of time long, long ago. Who can say thats not perfection?

 

Not if you like jazz. NYC was THE place to be. And I'd like to throw Pittsburgh as another amazing town for jazz at that time. But, point taken. I would have loved to experience LA during that time as well.

 

Thanks so much, everyone, for your informative and fun posts. I imagine there was good stuff in the late 50s, the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and today. You just have to buy quality, if you can afford it.

I was just rewarded for the halfway decent purchase I made in 1991. I got a pair of Infinity speakers back then for something like $900. They were floor models, and so they were marked down quite a bit. I don't know what the original list price was. Anyway, the foam around the woofers wore out, but they were good enough otherwise that for $70 the Magnetic Tape and Stereo Center place I mentioned in the first post was able to completely fix them up. They sound great again. And much less than the $700 I was looking at for a good used pair of Paradigms.

On that Flanders and Swann song, there's one part that cracks me up whenever I hear it:

"Try to bring that down through your pre-amp rumble filter to your woofer, what'll you get? Flutter on your bottom!"


The way he hoarsely shouts "FLUTTER ON YOUR BOTTOM!" as if it's an obscenity is just hilarious to me.

That album by the way, At the Drop of a Hat, was recorded in two versions--mono and stereo. Literally they recorded the mono album one night, and the stereo take is of a different performance. Same songs, but somehow the mono night was a "funnier" night, if that makes sense. And so, the mono version is what I prefer--even for this song about high fidelity!

 

Amen. Vinyl needed competition. Digital software and equipment improved the HiFi scene.

 

Hi Benjamin,

I've done business with Charlie and Marlene at Magnetic Tape Recorder Service from time to time myself. You are right, great people and very knowledgeable. The place to go for servicing tape decks.

Mike

 

The area of the former WTC was Hi Fi Central in NYC. I do remember going with my Dad there in the early 60s to get some tubes and other doodads. Tons of Hi Fi stores. The 30" subwoofer in one store window still resonates in my head.

45th Street was also an area with many, many electronics stores selling all kinds of stuff from stereos to military surplus. Harvey's started on this block and I do remember their original store. I remember spending many hours buying all kinds of electronics going from store to store. I built my first 'light box' from items I bought there in the late 60s. Sadly as of a year ago there was only 1 store left - S&S Electronics.

 

That was the old Radio Row. By the time I was old enough to go to NYC it was long gone. My dad hated that town, we never went there, and so I went there as soon as I was on my own and had enough money to take a road trip, but that was well into the disco era.

 

Although the DTN Williamson amp was what really kicked off the hi-fi development craze here as well as there, there never was a production British amplifier in the same league with the Marantz and McIntosh. The closest was probably the Kerr McCosh (the Jim Kerr of Wayne Kerr, not of Simple Minds!). The Quad II/22 were quite remarkable stylewise but not really performance wise. Where the British really did well were speakers: the superb Tannoy Dual Concentrics and some Wharfedales, Quad ESL, and of course some very fine output "valves" (although the Germans with various Siemens and Telefunken pieces like the EL 156 had masterpieces too, no one outside Germany knew of them and no commercial hi-fi used them).

 

Good point. Nobody remembers the really bad gear that most people had 40 or 50 years ago. Cheap digital killed off most of that bad stuff, especially those cheap, nasty record changers that sat atop consoles or all in ones.

 

I was born in 1946 so I grew up with tubes and TTs. It is a sound that I love, but its a pain in the *** to do and too expensive.

My father got into hi-fi around 1952. He didn't have a lot of money, but he had some good stuff:

> Fisher mono AM receiver (I'm guessing 30w).

> ceiling mounted (new back then) 10" Jensen speaker (single driver)

> Garrard TT/changer

In 1969, I was in the Army and stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. The Air Force had a PX about 10 miles away that specialised in hi-fi at prices you could not get in the States. I bought a 50wpc Sansui receiver, a pair of unfinished AR2 speakers and a Technics TT. I shipped it all to my Dad so he could update his old system. When I got home, I found that my Dad had traded in the Technics TT for something much better (can't recall what). The 1969 system was a huge improvemnt over the 1952 system.

Mike

Mike

 

Is a lot of vintage gear voiced to mate well (synergy) with other vintage pieces?

I love vintage gear (partly because of cost) and my system consists of mostly vintage, but I found a modern tube preamp made a nice upgrade over what I had tried going the vintage route. Although I would love to try a refreshed C20 preamp in my system.

 

Interesting what the type of receiver it was, because the first regular FM stereo broadcasting and the first commercial FM stereo receiver (not using an AM and an FM Radio) in USA were reported in 1961:

“After several years of experimental stereo broadcasts, and six competing systems, the Federal Communications Commission announced stereophonic FM technical standards in April 1961, and licensed regular stereophonic FM radio broadcasting to begin in the United States on June 1, 1961.[34] WEFM in the Chicago area and WGFM in Schenectady, New York reported as the first stereo stations.[35]
...
HH Scott Model 350 Circa 1961 — The 1st FM Multiplex Stereo Tuner sold in the USA"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereophonic_sound
(In general, A very good article on stereo, I think.)

“Apr. 24, 1961 : Broadcasting reports the FCC approves stereo multiplex standards
June 1, 1961 : FM stereo broadcasting is authorized to begin; on this date the FCC received its first notifications of such regular operation, from WEFM Chicago and WGFM Schenectady.”
http://transmitters.tripod.com/stereo.htm

“Pictured is the 1961 Model 350, the very first FM Stereo Multiplex Tuner sold in the USA. Some HH Scott units were sold as kits.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HH_Scott

You are quite right, I think. But depending greatly on the “world” of the customer, the fact usually “forgotten” in discussions…

But it is a pity that the world had to wait ten years (from 1948 to 1958) for the presentation of the first commercially realized stereo vinyl gramophone record industrial release, not experimental.

In some ways, yes, in some ways, no, I think.

Well, I think, in the late 1950s, on the STUDIO side, everything was already there. Excellent studios with excellent equipment (condenser studio mikes; 76,2 and 38,1 cm/sec tape recorders with 30-16000 Hz FR and 60 dB S/N ratio; consoles etc). Big FM radio broadcasting centres with studios and equipment to the same standards. Gramophone records plants to the same standards (except STEREO, to be introduced in 1958).

But on the consumer side, the situation was very different, depending as you wrote, on money to spend, and skills and know-how how to find, to choose and to "tune" really excellent equipment. And depending on the “world” in question! The "first", the "second" and the "third" worlds… Even in the “colonial world” one could often afford things non-existent in the so-called “communist” countries, and even there, the situation in China, North Corea, on the well-known “Cuba after 1959” was disastrous; in the USSR worse than in some East-European countries etc etc…

But in the world where hi-fi equipment possession was simply the question of money, rare were those who wished to study books on hi-fi, to search with zeal after the best really linear hi-fi models (and not simply to follow publicity slogans) and to spend a whole lot of money for all this...

30-15000 Hz excellent S/N ratio tape recorders, expensive pre-recorded hi-fi tapes, HQ linear-output phono cartridges, very low rumble and wow TTs, and really HQ linear-output loudspeaker systems, the best FM tuners... Although all this existed on the market and almost all - in “mail catalogues” in the “first” world…

 

Fedot: You make a great point here. I'm pretty sure he said 1958. But now that you mention it, I don't think he said anything about stereo. I think I put that in all on my own, assuming--incorrectly, I think--that a nice set like that would be stereo. And looking at the controls, it didn't say anything about stereo that I recall. I knew that in 1957 Nat King Cole and some other people were often recording in stereo, and I thought that the sets were out there. Although maybe the receiver was mono and the record player stereo?? I don't know.

Your post has a lot of good stuff in it. I think your points are right on target....

 

Like this stuff? Just saw this yesterday, looks interesting...

http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff81/slaterspeed2/Img_9564mod-1.jpg

More pics here:

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=35317