Post a picture of your childhood stereo

Audio nirvana.

 

When I was 16 (in 1966) I bought my first system, the Harman Kardon SC 440 compact music
system. Simply incredible sound with 10" woofers...I was the envy of all of my friends.
This was a real audio system, not some cheapo plastic discount store bargain. The
speakers were huge and HEAVY. I loved it, and it lasted for decades. And with the
classy dust cover, it looked great. Here's the original 1966 ad...mine was the top one.

And here it is with the dust cover...

 

$399 in 1966 = $1,268.82 in 2019.

 

More like my mother's, which I used as a child. These photos are not actually ares but came up on duckduckgo. Sae model.

 

Yeah, I shouldn't use my phone to post.

ares-->ours
sae--same

 

Fake tweeters, BTW. The graphic above the EQ sliders is just a strip showing the position of the slider.

 

RCA, 1950s

 

This is a picture of it that I found on the web.



Bought at Sears in 1984 when I was 14 years old. The turntable looked very cheap, and I played a lot of records on it, some probably 50 times or more. I still have those records, and when I play them today on my decent turntable, they sound just fine, so the cartridge must not have been too bad. If anyone knows what brand of cartridge Sears used in those players, I'd love to learn what it was. The cassette player made great quality tapes (or so I felt at the time), and I used to record albums my sister and friends had so I could expand my music collection. It also had an auxiliary input that I used to connect a Walkman, and eventually, a Fisher CD player. Overall, I liked the unit, it served me well for about 4 years for my admittedly simple audio needs at the time.

The volume control on this was terrible. It was labeled 0 through 10 on a little slider, and if you brought the slider up to 1, you'd have the decibel level of a jet engine, so I had to have it set about 1/4 of the way to 1 to have the sound at an acceptable level. I don't think Sears had any quality control people who would have paid attention to something like this, as why would you have a scale of 0 to 10 when you could only realistically turn it up halfway to 1? In any case, I had been cleaning the front of the unit one day while the stereo was turned off, and the volume slider got carelessly left at 5. The next time I turned it on, BOOM! I blew out the left speaker's woofer and midrange. We didn't have the money to take it back and buy a new speaker for about a year, so I heard a lot of treble unless I jacked up the bass on the unit's little 5-bar graphic equalizer.

At the time it happened, I had been listening a lot to The Who's Quadrophenia and Live At Leeds cassettes, and once I blew the left speaker out, I couldn't hear most of John Entwistle's bass anymore. Realizing this, I swapped the left and right speakers, and the mix seemed much better when the working woofer was on the left. Seems for that album and for most other Who albums, Entwistle's bass is mostly left channel while Pete Townshend's guitar is mostly right channel, which became quite clear to me when I had two tweeters but just one woofer in my "stereo"

 

We had a console in the dining room, but this was the same one I had in my room. I found the pic online. I think it was 12 watts per channel. The 8 track had fast forward. I thought I was the man and yes I danced just like that.

 

Did it come with Thruster speakers?

 

Not mine, but this was my first system except the LED was a beautiful orange instead. I drove it with some old Jamo speakers.



I really loved that system and especially the CD-player.

 

My mother had something similar from before I was born. Hers was inside a tabletop wood case with a lift up lid and an AM radio.

She told me she'd stick me in my high chair nearby to watch the records play because it kept me quiet. But when they stopped playing, I'd howl my head off until she flipped them over or put on another stack.

On that radio, I first heard Elvis's Don't be Cruel in 1956 and that was a cosmic experience. I was 3 years old.

Not long ago I bought a non working RCA stand alone changer a 9JY from 1949. It has the red spindle top and is the same changer that was in my mother's record player.

I'm trying to tinker it back into shape because I'd love to watch one in action again.

 

Yes it did. They had a 8 inch woofer, and a 8 inch passive, 2 and a half inch cone tweeter. I replaced the cones with radio shack horns . Also had a BSR turntable.


Yes

 

Best be quick to flip those records!

 

After a Fisher-Price record player and a Magnavox boom box, I got a Yorx very similar to this (but not as fancy) in like 7th grade or something:


It is not missed.

 

And here was my turntable. It was a Bsr.