Hi-Fi STEREO - AUDIO/VIDEO Gearheads, Anyone?

i was thrust into Hi-Fi and A/V in my very-late-teens/very-early-Adulthood when i inherited my Parent's old 1970's Component Stereo System around 1999/2000.

i pretty much discovered right on the spot that i REALLY DUG this kind of stuff, and, thanks to early-EBAY and the Internet in general
i hungrily learned all i could about the Japanese CE Giants and what they were capable of during their Heydays
in the '70s, 80's, 90's, and much of the 2000's.

i came to find that, though ALL the JPN firms did in fact Field FABULOUS Gear at several peak periods through their histories,
PIONEER's offerings were the ones that personally appealed over the others,
so PIONEER was the brand i chose to spend the next twenty years building a select system of favored components around...


- The Hi-Fi System i Started With, Two Decades Ago -

STEREO RECEIVER - NIKKO 5055



COMPACT DISC PLAYER - TECHNICS SL-MC3





STEREO TURNTABLE - BSR 200BAX



CASSETTE DECK - PIONEER CT-980W



GRAPHIC EQUALIZER - RADIO SHACK REALISTIC 31-2000





SPEAKER SYSTEM - JENSEN JP-1200




- The Hi-Fi System i Own Today -





STEREO/MULTI-CHANNEL RECEIVER - PIONEER ELITE VSX-47TX













COMPACT DISC PLAYER - PIONEER ELITE PD-91









STEREO TURNTABLE - PIONEER PL-112D













CASSETTE DECK - PIONEER CT-S800







GRAPHIC EQUALIZER - PIONEER GR-777








SPEAKER SYSTEM - POLK R10

Yep, love vintage hi-fi equipment and found this Kenwood amplifier and tuner at a local pawn shop. The turntable I bought new. Have a wide range of vinyl but love collecting DJ mixes from the 1980s such as Disconet and DMC (Disco Mix Club), as well as DJ bootleg mixes.

I was i to this sort of stuff a couple decades ago, but aside from keeping all my LPs, drum kit and piano, I’ve lost touch with a lot of music and don’t have a turntable or receiver any longer. The digital age has seriously ruined music. Listening to Sirius/XM radio is really distracting as most of the music has been diminished and washed out/compressed in order to “stream” so very little of the original music is left — it doesn’t even sound the same. When I was heavily into playing music (in a band) I had the good fortune of having a friend who knew a member of Bauhaus, so I got to see first-hand how an album was recorded.

I really should get a new turntable, now that LPs have made a comeback, but it’s fairly low on my list of priorities.

Stryker2012 wrote:  I really should get a new turntable, now that LPs have made a comeback...

This has me wondering: the end product can be no better than the original master. How are master tracks recorded and combined now? Is everything digital? I'm sure it is. How much compression is applied to the original source tracks during processing? Are LPs still pressed from high-quality masters, or are they using masters produced from highly compressed digital sources?

Decades ago, I suspected the MP3 format would mean the end of quality recording. Consumers were more interested in the quantity of music they could store on their devices rather than in the quality. People listen to music through crummy little headphones or even crummier little mobile phone speakers and seem quite content with it; and indeed, do not recognize the difference between a good quality recording and a highly compressed digital file.

This leads me to another tangent, something I was thinking about recently: the end of the "mix tape" and even the "custom digital playlist." Some friends were listening to music a while back, and I asked if it was a playlist they had put together. Nope, it was an Amazon streaming service. They began praising the merits of Amazon Prime and unlimited free streaming and all the different "channels" that were available and how it played great stuff that they really liked. I realized that AI has taken over yet another creative process that many people used to take quite seriously: the curation of personal music collections. Maybe the new way is better now, I don't know – it's definitely cheaper, you don't have to buy entire albums or CDs to get one song; but the AI algorithms can use what we listen to to "suggest" similar music and to create playlists based on our preferences. It's an advanced, and somewhat nefarious, form of Amazon suggesting similar items when we shop online, or the old Netflix suggesting movies we might like. I say "nefarious" because the AI is teaching us what to like. The days of individuals carefully selecting songs to record to a mix tape or burn to a mix CD or even to compile in to a custom digital playlist are gone, replaced by robots who do all that for us.

When I think too deeply about things like this, my concern becomes that initially the robots, to use a simple term for the AI algorithms, augment our musical choices with things we might like; but over time, couldn't the robots begin influencing our preferences by gradually infiltrating our streaming channel with what it wants us to like? Or what it is paid to promote? Ultimately, given enough time, the AI 'bots can completely homogenize our culture by teaching us what to like... and eventually, what to think.

TASUKE: That sixty CD changer pegs the needle on the Cool-O-Meter! That's the kinda toys the Big Boys played with in the days before iPods and, now, streaming!

The difference for me is that when I listen to music through a digital device either mp3s from laptop or through streaming, it quickly becomes a background noise and i get easily get distracted into doing other things. When I listen to vinyl, and put on a record, I sit in my comfy chair and really listen and enjoy being away from the world for a while.

I guess my nickname obliges me to chime in.
My audio setup is more like modern entry-level studio equipment rather than hi-fi: external "soundcard", active monitors and headphones rigged up to the desktop.

And a bunch of FLAC files on a NAS (I consider streaming services unreliable: if I can't play something without internet during power outage while batteries last, then I don't have it).
Technically I have playlists of these files too, though it's not my modus operandi these days - I just listen to entire albums or more often individual tracks, one by one.

[quote="davidd"]

Stryker2012 wrote:TASUKE: That sixty CD changer pegs the needle on the Cool-O-Meter! That's the kinda toys the Big Boys played with in the days before iPods and, now, streaming!

while that was indeed my very first component CD Player, it does not even approach the class of my current player,
the 1988 PIONEER ELITE PD-91 shown in the first post above.

it may only load and play one disc at a time... but it does so with a degree of sound quality and mechanical precision
that few other CD players made over the decades can match or exceed...