Show us your stereo's?

i know some of you have some cool systems, whatcha got?

my beloved salk HT2-TL’s in brazilian rosewood. now illegal to harvest, i was told.

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I’m pretty sure you win stereo today, sir.

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I’m counting how many fretboards I could make out of those…

Can you send dimensions? :thinking:

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Not sure it can be now, or ever was, considered cool, but:
At my house, we have vintage 1970s equipment, and yes, some of it is still working. That is, working well enough to listen to AM/FM, vinyl, and CDs.

My very handy engineer hubby recently replaced the seals on the eight speakers on the back “V” surfaces, plus the front one, so now they actually can be used again (I’m sure there’s a better word than seals, but whatever, the mounts for those small speakers had dried up/deteriorated over 40+ years). The accompanying Bose active equalizer may not be in the best shape, though.

  • Due to my husband’s amplifier not working any longer, we dug up mine: a Tandberg TD-1055 tuner and amplifier.
  • Turntable is his Kenwood KD-2055, with new stylus(es) from turntableneedles.com. We did not re-purchase many in our vinyl collection on CD, so use it at times. I still also have my Dual 1249 turntable, although it probably needs work as well.

CD player is a Denon DCD-460, much later vintage (probably over 20 years old), and usually operates okay, but with a glitch or two. You can program different tracks from the potential five disks.

The bulleted equipment is all what 20-somethings might be able to afford in the 1970s.

I would like to obtain a stereo cabinet, vertically oriented, to use with this equipment and the CDs and some of the vinyl records. All that currently is housed in a low, horizontal cabinet that I don’t find easy to use for the CDs and vinyl. The potential cabinet types I like are pretty darn expensive, though (example).

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Quite the opposite, vintage stereo equipment is quite the rage right now, very nice :+1:

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Boy did I lust after these back when I was in college. We’re too far out of my price range back then.
I used to have all Boston Acoustic speakers and sub for surround back before sound bars and wireless.
I was a Pioneer receiver/amp guy for a long time until switching to all Sony. My setup was a dual cassette deck, two techniques something turntables wired through a mixer for personal non-stop DJ’ing, one of those 100 or so disc CD changers and a blue ray player after a DVD player. I moved at one point to a house that none of it fit in and sold it all (foolishly) and now am in the Sonos universe fully. 5.1 surround in living room, One SLs in bedroom & kitchen, move for outside and two Play 5s and Project Carbon turntable with Blue Ortofon cartridge and Project vac cleaner. Not the same as all the wires and bits but works great.

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@John_E, Your current system sounds nice, although I have no idea about modern equipment. I used to read the stereo magazines, learn everything about that stuff, way back when. It’s all gone now from my mind.

Regarding the Bose 901’s, I had saved up all my hard-earned dough for a stereo system in the mid-1970s, but really originally was in the market for the then-the-rage quadraphonic systems. The guy at the stereo store talked me out of it, said I could get a better system for the money buying stereo. I guess he was right. At least he treated me, as a female, with dignity as a paying customer, unlike an annoying experience at a Circuit City I had in those years, with the employee looking past me to instead address the guy who had accompanied me there.

Speaking_of_Speakers.pdf (66.9 KB)
(Washington Post article by Norman Eisenberg from Sunday, Oct. 31, 1976, about Bose 901 speakers). They are a bit of a pain to position correctly, and I’m sure we could do better with mine.

I had those Bose while still living at home with my parents, and at one point my father hung them from the ceiling in our finished basement, using chains and I suppose eye screws in the bottom of the speakers, hanging them upside-down. They were connected to the stereo in the living room upstairs, so you had to run up there to adjust volume, change records, etc. I recall playing Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” cranked up nice and loud; loud enough that I could see the lights dim with the pulse of the music. Whew! R.I.P. Donna!

https://youtu.be/bHfrdQ8h2Pw
(listen to THAT one go back and forth in your headphones!)

Decades later, my husband somewhat blew the Bose speakers out playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but I guess they still worked enough for my low-discerning ears. We had problems with the connections, one channel would drop out, blah blah, and it was a problem either in the amp or the speakers’ equalizer unit, but hard to fix.

One more anecdote, but regarding Quadraphonic: I had already bought a few Quad LPs before ultimately not buying a quad-capable system. A year or two ago, I thought I’d break out my pristine, little-played Janis Joplin “Pearl” Quad LP to regale my son with it, and did not conceive that I should look to see that there was a stylus in the cartridge in the turntable arm - I mean, why wouldn’t there be one? Set the arm down, and a horrible noise ensued. I was not amused, but guess I learned a lesson in this house. My husband had removed the existing cartridge for whatever reason, probably awaiting a new stylus. I’m not happy that LP was damaged!

Oh yeah, we each had/have tape decks, although I don’t think either work anymore. Not sure of the make of my husband’s unit, but mine is a(nother) Tandberg, the TCD 310 Mk II. But we never had much music or anything else that we listened to on cassette, and have a portable player we could use if we needed one.

I saved all my instruction and promotional material (plus repair receipts!) for all the equipment I’d bought, so they’ve come in handy a few times.

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I used to read Stereo Review and High Fidelity magazines cover to cover! Loved all that stuff.

I also had a multi-floor speaker set up but at one point got a Pioneer “remote repeater” (receiver/transmitter and wire in between) and a second multi-remote (this the reason I went to all one brand) so I could turn on A/B (upstairs/downstairs) speakers and play things without running up/down the stairs.

Lots of hole drilling in floors / ceilings back then!!

Good stuff

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I am running pioneer amp and CD player with a rega p3 turntable through Yamaha NS 70 speakers in my music shed


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I have to say, while looking through my equipment manuals (to get the model nomenclature), I also found a copy of “How to Be a Recording Engineer,” “written and compiled by Phil York,” a 27 page 8.5" x 11" booklet from 1975. This is no doubt from a course I took at a community college, and finding my “Peter Principal” level about electronics. :grin:

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My system inside consists of rotel rc1570 pre amp,
Musical fidelity A5 power amp, Oppo blue ray player into a pair of Krix Nuephonix speakers

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And rambo :thinking:

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Yes I have 2 Rambo’s @itsratso :+1:

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She was awesome. And this was another classic really defined by its producer; Giorgio Moroder was a machine at the time. Still is, but man, back then his influence was everywhere. “I Feel Love” inspired other club classics for decades.

So much music was influenced by his work. Across genres too :slight_smile:

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One on each side of the TV, for a stereo effect, I presume :nerd_face:

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Absolutely @Mike_NL :+1:

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