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 Bose 901 Series II speakers (not everyone’s cup of tea, I know). Mine stand on the “tulip” pedestals as shown.
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).