[wspohn]

I'd be quicker to knock the sub CD quality sound of the popular (but convenient) Spotify.

I agree with that. I have an audiophile friend that was listening to Spotify (the convenience lures them) and was telling me that the sound quality was pretty good.

We played the same selections from Spotify and from my Flac files, through the same DA converter and the difference was clear on a blind A/B test. He switched to Tidal Premium as a result - higher bit rate better sound.

 

[syjos]

Ah, multichannel.

I got into quad in the early 70's. Listening to psychedelic songs with 4 channel was "mind blowing" Those early quad was not an attempt at ambience reproduction. Its purpose was to create an artificial surround experience with swirling, ping pong, echos and other elements that the artists and producers were experimenting with. The sound was not realistic but was a wow moment.

Classic and orchestral music was recorded with multiple microphones and the effect was pleasant. Most of the sound coming out of the rear speakers was audiance noise.

In the late 70's, Bob Carver came out with "Sonic Holography". It created an ambiance, not surround, that expanded the music beyond the confines of the room. When listening to certain music, the sound appeared to emanate from outside the room because the sound stage became so wide.

Simple explanation how it works;

Ring a bell on a stage. You are sitting in the center of the room. Your ear picks up the ring with both ears. Your brain calculates the time difference between ears and determines the bells location.

Record the bell with one microphone and play it back with one speaker. Brain picks up sound and calculates same as before.

Record the ring with two microphones in stereo, one on each side of bell at a distance. Play back the stereo recording with two speakers placed apart. Now each ear hears both speakers. But the ears are now receiving 4 signals. Left ear picks up sound from left speaker and right speaker. Right ear picks up sound from right speaker and left. Brain can not compute!

The four signals confuse the brain and the sound field becomes confused and muddied. It becomes tough to pinpoint the sound source.

With Sonic Holography the two extra signals created by stereo is eliminated electronically. Voices and instruments were very clear and could be located precisely on the sound stage. One song in particular stand out. On Dark Side of The Moon, Time, there is a section where bells are ringing. Alan Parsons recorded that part with the multiple bells arranged in a line, left to right. Listen to the recording of the bells ringing and depending on the distance between speakers, the bells will ping pong back and forth between speakers. The location of the ringing bell will not be focused.

Play back the same section with Holography turned on and the location of each bell are crystal clear. Additionally, some of the bells and echoes can be heard emanating from outside of the speaker pair. The Holography also allows locating the sound field not just side to side but also front to back. On the above example Time, some of the bells appeared to be closer to me and some further away.

I used that for years until, like Bill mentioned, Yamaha came out with the DSP

 

[chickenwire]

Looks like I started something? lol!

Way cool to read everyone's takes on the past and the present. My rebuild on my CV's still makes me grin now that I have them "right". No, they're not the "best ever" but they were the best I could afford at the time and the still boom pretty good. I played some Brothers Johnson on them this afternoon and realized that one of the cab's is failing on one side . . .

Still buy all of my music on CD for the true lossless format - will rip to FLAC but that doesn't gain you that much disc space. Then again, hard drives are cheap now....

As for the vinyl v digital discussion I get both sides. As a techno-analytical a-hole the precision and clarity of digital, true lossless, was amazing to me when I first heard it. The dynamic range is definitely better than vinyl, but that can be detrimental to some.

It's like I heard someone talk about high definition porn. Some things are better without that much clarification.

I would like to say that the "digital revolution" killed my DJ career - I didn't consider replacing all of my vinyl with CD's at the time as viable. Truthfully I was at the point where it was time to do what was best for the family. That meant moving away and concentrating on my career and "providing". Very grateful that I did that because now I can rip up these tunes, play around in the garage with a cool car from time to time and talk about all this tish!!!

 

[wspohn]

The ripping isn't so much to save space - hard drives are so cheap (I keep stuff on twin 4tb drives). It is to be able to use a program that organizes the music and let's you actually find it when you want it. When I moved, I gave the movers explicit instructions to start filling boxes from one point and how to label them. That lasted until I was out of the room - they decided it would be faster to just grab LPs form an area where no one else was working. I still haven't managed to get everything back into order again.

I've found, BTW, that with well recorded material in vinyl, the sense of space, the ambience is better than with digital. Example - Neil Young (unusually) owned and controlled his own catalogue and delayed releasing some material for decades after it was recorded. He issued a live album recorded at Massey Hall in Toronto in 1971, all acoustic instruments - guitar and piano played by Neil, the only performer, and the vinyl better serves up the sense of space in the hall than the digital does.

 

[syjos]

Quote. Looks like I started something? lol! Quote

Chickenwire,

You did start something. Entertaining and fun.

I hope we didn't hijack your thread regarding speaker repair. I could start another thread and move all my blathering there, if I knew how.

I was a rock & roller and listened to amplified instruments through amplified speakers. Cerwin-Vega speakers rocked. I actually sold that brand when I opened an audio-video store in 1983.

Part of our business was building custom speakers. Boston Acoustics was a popular speaker brand. Unfortunately they used foam surrounds which deteriorated quickly. We got into replacing the drivers. A few Boston's used an odd size woofer. Rereconing was the only option for those. We had spacers to center the magnet before gluing the surround.

 

[chickenwire]

No worries! Like some of the best threads, it's fun to see the twists that occur!

 

[easyryderca]

I had a Rockcola 445 juke box for years since the 70s along with 1500 45s from the 60s & early 70s. I finally sold it to a man that came a long way to buy it that had the love of music. . It was hard letting it go as it gave me many happy hours of enjoyment. The hardware changes as time moves on but the songs play in my head & flash back to memories of people,places & things .

 

[chickenwire]

The Soo in the USA used to have a great fm rock station in the 70s as if i remember it was the first station between both Saults that played entire album sides commercial free.Today i find fm stations have become more like the am stations were back in the day with all the commercials. I must admit i hardly put my vinyl on any more as i end up listening to internet radio stations or xm radio.
I hope some one from the forum elaborates on the 45 turntables they used to have in some of the older cars & did the 45s skip a lot while driving .

Another "great memory" - Friday WSMM had "Fresh Air" - from midnight until 2. Reed Kitridge would pre-record the vocal parts and I'd track the album sides. My normal shift was 6-midnight and on Friday nights it was 8 until 2 a.m. - tracking 2 new albums with the pre-recorded introductions and discussion between sides.

I was 17, underage for alcohol at the time but had found someone to "buy" for me one Friday night. (Okay, maybe it was more than one Friday night.) I came in for my shift and I offered Reed a beer. He looked at me with a bit of disbelief, then smiled and accepted it and said "I KNEW I brought you up right!"

He hung out and had a couple more brews which amazed me. I was 17, he was probably 27, married, working on a family. What really stuck with me was his statement of "You want to be in engineering and you already know that. I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do until just a few years ago. You're good at this and you want to do something else!"

About 10 years later (about 20 some years ago) I was scanning radio stations driving to the east side of Michigan for a family event and I heard Reed's voice. I made a note of the station, found the address and mailed him a letter and he replied. He gave me a brief overview of his career path and seemed to be doing just fine.

Should try to look him up again!

 

[syjos]

I was into music when I was a teenager but not so much with audio equipment. I was into cars and all my money was spent on cars. I did not buy my first home stereo until I was 20.

Started autocrossing when I was 16 and a job to support that, so really had no time and definitely no money for messing around with stereo.

I did have a used 8 track in the car and bought bootlegged 8 track tapes.

When living with parents and attending high school, most of my free time was spent in the car. With gas at 26 cents/gallon and my Fiat getting over 30 miles to the gallon, I drove around just to listen to the 8 track.

My parents had a console stereo/TV. Everybody had them. Really crappy sound and speakers too close together.

All that changed when I was 20. I was at a girls house and her father was an audiophile. He had custom built wall shelving that housed his equipment and albums. When I walked into that room, my mouth dropped to the floor. Her dad had probably over 1,000 albums two turntables, 4 reel to reel tape decks with big spools and speakers that were as tall as me. Now some disclosure; this was over 47 years ago and my memory is vague on brands of the stereo gear and I was so in awe that they could have all been Fisher brand or similar crap and I would still had been impressed.

Both her parents worked, she became my favorite girlfriend and I got to listen to my favorite music through a real stereo every weekday afternoon.

That got me started in the lifelong quest for the ultimate sound.

 

[chickenwire]

Both her parents worked, she became my favorite girlfriend and I got to listen to my favorite music through a real stereo every weekday afternoon.

You just loved her for her big turntables.

 

[JohnWR]

You just loved her for her big turntables.

No, no, no. It was her big spools.

....... 4 reel to reel tape decks with big spools ......

 

[syjos]

No, no, no. It was her big spools.

Hey, your poking fun at a kids lust for audio gear!

I can still picture her dad's big spools but I don't recall what the young lady looked like.

 

[easyryderca]

In the early & mid 60's i spent hours at the library listening to folk & blues albums with those headphones that weighed a ton but it didn't seem to bother me back then.
Some of my best times back in the 60s for me was spent Saturday mornings down at the local record shops checking out the albums & starting to notice who wrote the songs & who played on them & besides checking out the art work that went into the album cover . When cds took over i lost interest in doing that as i became detached with trying to read the small print .
I still remember the Beatles Pepper cover & the Stones 3d cover for there "Their Satanic Majesties Request" which blew me away at the time besides the music. As for 45's i was always amazed at how many small labels there were back then.

 

[wspohn]

When cds took over i lost interest in doing that as i became detached with trying to read the small print .
I still remember the Beatles Pepper cover & the Stones 3d cover for there "Their Satanic Majesties Request" which blew me away at the time besides the music. As for 45's i was always amazed at how many small labels there were back then.

And how could you get a working zipper on a Stones 'Sticky Fingers' CD?

And the LP covers offered enough area to get a lot of interesting notes in. I don't expect that many of you are classical music fans, but the old covers often recited reviews from the times best music critics and were quite useful. These days, you are lucky if you get a simple track list in a CD, and with some of the indie groups I like, you don't even get that. OTOH, we have Google today so can look up lots of stuff that we could only have found in the old days on liner notes or by hitting the right issue of Rolling Stone or Gramophone.

 

[JohnWR]

While a CD case itself doesn't have a lot of surface area, and certainly doesn't lend itself to a working zipper, many of them (even now) include a multi page pull-out booklet that provides space for liner notes, lyrics, and commentary.

 

[TomatoSoup]

Some of my best times back in the 60s ...

About 5.1 seconds?

>

All kidding aside, some of the album covers were quite amazing. Apart for the aforementioned "Sticky Fingers", I always remember Rick Wakeman's No Earthly Connection album that came with a silvered piece of plastic sheet you folded into a cylinder and stood in the middle of the cover to see an undistorted view of the image. Not to say it was his best album, but it was a cool cover!

 

[syjos]

The only album that I still own is the Stones "Their Satanic Majesties Request" 3D cover.

I retained it because I thought it would be big bucks collectible. Nope, maybe $50 at the most.

In college, I worked at a Department Store - The Bon Marche, now Macy's. Back in those days, department stores had record departments with listening booths. I used to spend my lunch hour listening to records in the listening room.

 

[wspohn]

TS - had completely forgotten about that Wakeman album. All my Wakeman is on vinyl and I don't have that one in my library.

When I looked I saw the next album to the Wakeman, though. Joe Walsh "But Seriously Folks" with Joe having lunch under water and the inner sleeve a red and white chequered table cloth.

Damn - I may have to spend the day spinning vinyl! Already had several albums of the recently late Michel Legrand queued up (guess in this instance one could use the word 'cued' as a pun that made sense rather than in the usual way you see it as a malapropism for queued....)

 

[chickenwire]

Grills were in bad shape and at first I didn't care. Then I thought perhaps these things belong in my den and not my pole barn?

Took some old trim lumber and built new frames. Fabric and "plugs" came in the mail yesterday. Will get them wrapped this weekend.

 

[syjos]

Grills were in bad shape and at first I didn't care. Then I thought perhaps these things belong in my den and not my pole barn?

Took some old trim lumber and built new frames. Fabric and "plugs" came in the mail yesterday. Will get them wrapped this weekend.

That looks really good.

Pictures of the finished product will be welcome.

You got me looking at vintage speakers again.

You're a bad influence, according to my wife.