If you find that car please count me in
Are you sure?
The only audio system I miss from the old days is the Nakamichi and Studer Revox cassette decks, and the reel-to-reel 15 IPS decks. There is nothing in today's world like that in the analog domain. As an audio system designer and user, I miss those today. Everything else is so much better today. The hifi we used to hear then was so pathetic in quality compared to what we get today. I remember my dad's HMV Star record player which would dig grooves into our precious records, its tracking force was so high. Ten years later, in 1982, the Sonodyne speakers made of particle board: vibrating like drums, only tolerable at low volumes. 3-way speakers with drivers all fitted on one enclosure, so that the woofer's rear wave impacted the midrange and vice versa. Floppy poly cone drivers, which cannot resolve 2% of the detail today's hard cones can. Cone tweeters -- will anyone here today prefer cone tweeters instead of even cheap $10 dome tweeters? Sonodyne amp, with 0.4% THD. We didn't know all this then. Today, that equipment would be really poor quality.
I don't mean to offend vintage audio lovers. Vintage audio, like vintage cars, is a totally
bona fide hobby. But my vintage audio friends today work with vintage
movie theatre equipment, not home audio of 50 years ago. Home audio in those days was usually crap. In terms of quality, give me the 21st century audio tech any day. A trivial PCB, the Modulus-86, costs $60. Add $50 of components and you have a power amp which gives you reliable
triple-zero distortion to rival the Halcro DM38 amp. You can sit in your home in a remote corner of the world, order the parts, and literally build a "straight wire with gain" amp with this PCB for $100/channel. For signal processing, buy a NanoDigi for some $200. Do FIR DSP on it, where phase is separate from amplitude -- it almost feels like defying the laws of physics, the kind of things you can do with FIR. Thanks to FIR DSP, for the first time in the history of humankind, we are able to hear what two-channel audio really sounds like, I mean
really, because we can now do near-perfect room correction. And we can do all this for pocket change costs, sitting and tinkering in our living rooms.
Would we really want to live, in the audio universe, without laptops, software, and the Internet? The speaker simulation, circuit simulation we can do on our cheap laptops today were not possible even in the largest govt and defence labs 50 years ago on their mainframes. This directly impacts our ability to design top quality audio systems rapidly. People like me can design better speakers today than all but the top dozen or so speaker designers of 50 years ago. This is not because we are any smarter. It is because we have incredibly powerful software which runs on our laptops, and we have the Internet to learn from.
You want to live without HD audio, which captures the quality of 15 IPS analog studio master tapes and with less noise and distortion than was possible
at any price 50 years ago?
Yes, people today don't listen to music much. But
I do.
You do. Yes, we are a minority. So what? The elite in
every civilisation have been a minority. And the older generations of
every era have said that the youngsters are not serious, they don't care, they are going to the dogs. Do you remember how our parents used to say that rock music was horrible and evil? Their parents used to tell
them that classical music was the only music worth listening to.
So when you hop on that time travel car to go back in time, please don't bother reserving a seat for me. I'm extremely grateful that I live in this era, where modern tech like the Internet have given me online friends like all of you. I want to live my life looking towards the future. It only gets better.
