mini hifi systems like sony, philips etc

amit11

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Hi Friends,

Today i just read a thread about class D amplifier, and it triggered a question again in me which i always had in my mind but never found any answer. (though i did not attempt to find aswell)

it is related to mini hifi systems like sony, philips etc, sometimes we call them as deck aswell. I remember long back i had listened (very short times however) to couple of systems like sony , philips at my friends / neighbors house. It looked attractive no doubt but i never got attracted to the music coming out of it. All those friends/neighbors used to increase the volume trying to impress. At that time i did not know anything about "hifi" and neither had this word in my dictionary. I did not have any grand amount of money to buy such decks which were costing rs. 15K to 25k at that time. i had a very small system from BPL which was rs. 3k only and ofcourse it did not output such grand and loud music as that as of those decks, but somehow i found that bpl more natural and satisfying. I used to question myself whether i was wrong because my music system was smaller and less expensive.

I am not saying all those decks were not great, but yes many of them did not good sound. They might be having boom-boom but not good tone and tonal balance.. somehow did not sound just right. And while listening to them our eyes used to turn to either the left speaker or the right speaker and never in middle. Probably people including me did not know the phantom center concept at that time, or, the sound was not coherent and phantom center was difficult for such systems. My doubt is why those music systems were so famous during those times but when we look back i find (and i think many of us) that they were not great. was it because they had class-D amplification, speakers were not great?

regards,
amit.
 
Those systems were popular during a time when very few could afford creating a matched system for the lack of separate components available and lack of knowledge, even if we keep the money part aside. A full fledged system that could play the tape or even CDs for that matter, a one stop solution for all your needs made sense. I guess even the quality reproduced wasn't top priority as most of us had CRT TVs with inbuilt speakers and small radios as our reference. Technology has come a long way since. We can also blame the tapes and CDs we created with material written a million times. I remember having 1 CD, which I used for almost a year by re-writing stuff on it. So many things we are aware of now that we never even considered in those days. I am sure a lot of those systems were incredibly bad, but we didn't help them either. :)
 
That’s not a fair comparison and I don’t think they had class D amps anyway.
I had dabbled with repairing a few Sony and Aiwa systems and IIRC, they used to have AB output stage with matched transistors.

The circuit boards were certainly built to cost and the power supplies were measly compared to a decent integrated amp.
The drivers (speaker) weren’t anything to write home about.
However the pre-amp and amp on them was certainly truer to form than the bluetooth boomboxes that have replaced them.
If you must draw a comparison, it would be against these boomboxes rather than separates

Properly setup , those 1200W pmpo (more like 60W rms at 0.5% THD I guess) systems would sound far better than their current successors
 
Both @chander and @superczar have made pertinent points above. Those systems were (and still are to a lesser extent) serving a segment. Before the advent of personal media consumption, these were the staple in almost every middle class home in the 90s. Just as the smaller two-in-ones were in the 80s and the radios before that.

Like you @amit11, I too enjoyed the sound of my small two-in-one - a Sanyo gifted by my uncle. We didn’t use its radio much as the older Murphy valve radio still ruled our household, but our first foray into recordings - through cassettes was on this small lovely gadget that was ultra-portable. It also served me in my years at the hostel before I followed the personal audio bandwagon with an AIWA Walkman. I still fondly remember the sound of the Sanyo. But I seriously doubt I’d listen to it much today when I am exposed to better quality sound.

A bit later, in the late 90s, after I got married and rented a house, we bought one of those big boxes (didn’t even know they were called minis - no way it looked small - we just called it hifi) made by Sony. It had some obscene wattage mentioned which I didn’t understand or bother. It had separable speakers (5 in fact) which could be arranged to get a nice effect and the sound was big. Yeah, that was the idea of these systems - to have big sound! If I have to rate quality based on my memory. I’d, like you, say the compact Sanyo 2-in-1 had more intimate, melodious sound while the Sony mini’s sound was more fascinating and boisterous.

But all these players and the cassettes (hundreds of them) got junked (sadly in retrospect) with the arrival of personal computer at home at the turn of the century. There was hardly any music we played as we were so enamoured by what the Internet could bring to us. Also online gaming caught on. Till the mid 00s when I got back to music with the Worldspace Satellite radio which I hooked to locally made active 2.0 largish desktop speakers. I’d still rate that content and sound as one of the most enjoyable listening experiences. Worldspace got me back to music. The satellite radio quality was better than terrestrial radio and their programming is even today unmatched by most internet radio stations.

Alas, Worldspace folded up as digital file based music took over. A period of listening to music through computers and Bose Soundlink followed, till I got into configuring a home stereo system using components.

Your post made me relive the journey. As for the quality, I enjoyed those systems in their respective eras. Even today some households buy minis (just a year ago I helped my cousin select a Yamaha mini she is very happy with). But we keep moving on and the past provides valuable reference points for the present and future.

Other FMs would be more knowledgable on the technicalities (class D or A/B). But to me, they were milestones in my audio journey I fondly remember.
 
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I can't say anything about technicalities as I don't have knowledge on it. But in 90's those Philips and Sony made all in one rigs were seen in most of the middle class families. I think, it is not fair to compare those with the modern day equipments. Those days separate rigs were unavailable here in our country and even if some one wanted to build his system comprising separates , he had to spend fabulous amount of money to source those from abroad. That was why most of us were contented with those all in one rigs. Actually we couldn't think about separate speakers, amplifier in past though now we can have those easily. But those were not bad also and many of us started their audiophile journey with those. Therefore like many other I also remember them fondly.
Regards
 
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