Senior Audiophiles - Audiophile since the 60-70's?

OopS - Forgot to menetion my favorite system from years gone by. It was a CM Labs 914 amp,Audio Research SP 4 preamp,Denon DP 1200 with a Denon 103D cartridge. Speakers were stacked Large Advents. That was it. No designer interconnects,speaker cable or power cords. That was way before designer cords came on the market. Still miss that amp though, it was magical.

As good as it was then will keep what I have now, but ever find a CM Labs 912 Power amp that is fully operational,would snag one of those in a heart beat.

Had this up and running from 1976 to about 1984 or so.

I'll confess to being hooked on a desire for high quality audio since about 1967 in high school. The faculty advisor for our school yearbook was an audio nut recently graduated from college. He still lived with his parents at the time, but the basement was his for his audio use, and his pride and joy was a big Crown reel-to-reel tape recorder, a big Crown solid state amp and, in 1969 he acquired a pair of "new to the world" Magneplanar speakers. I remember being amazed at the sound those 1.5" thick Maggies could create from his tapes of live amateur performances. The best I could manage at the time was a suitcase style Magnevox combination turntable and radio: the speakers folded out on hinges (and you could remove them to place them farther apart) and the turntable, such as it was, folded down from the recess inside. Janis Joplin sounded so great to me over this thing And by the time I hauled it off to college, I'd acquired a Teac real to reel (big expenditure at the time) and had spent the summer bugging the devil out of various friends so I could dub their parent’s classical LPs to tape to take with me.

At about this time, I found Stereophile and the every now and again publishing schedule of J Gordon Holt. And when The Absolute Sound got started, I was an early subscriber: probably Issue 3 as I recall, and, yes, I got the back issues to read what I'd already missed.

For me, the 1970s were an exciting time in audio. Seems like we were all learning (or re-discovering) so much about what made for great sound. Tubes were being recognized again in a few places for the great sound they'd always delivered, but that we'd forgotten in the rush to transistors. And many of us, me definitely included, were getting introduced to the concept that the turntable could have a dramatic impact on the sound quality we could get. Today that seems hard to imagine, but then Ivor was fighting virtually a lone uphill battle to convince everyone that his TT really did sound different and better than those direct drive thingies with the strobe lights.

My particular lust, around 1972, was for the drop dead gorgeous linear tracking, belt driven, B&O Beogram 4000 turntable. Boy, talk about being blinded by the beauty of design – to me this turntable was a piece of sculpture worthy to grace any art gallery (and it did find its way to the Museum of Modern Art, I believe). But, this little mis-adventure also taught me a big time lesson about sonics versus styling. I gratified by visual aesthetics with the purchase of one of these jewels in 1974 (the model 4002 by then), but when I traded up to an early VPI turntable some years later, became a much happier camper. (The one thing that did stick with me is a love for linear tracking tonearms.) I’ve never since considered the appearance of a piece of audio gear, just the sonics.

On the very positive side, at around the same time I purchased a used pair of the classic Marantz 9 tube amps on the recommendation of a friend. These amps were eleven or twelve years old at the time, and I paid a total of $360 for them. What a great investment they were as they graced my system for the next 25 years through several sets of speakers!

As much as I enjoyed the excitement of learning about high-fidelity in the late '60s through mid-'70s, and introduction of some great sounding gear (for its time) during this period, I think the world of high-end audio has never been better than it is today. I see a high degree of innovation, sound quality is vastly better for more components than ever before, the best components are simply better than ever before, and source material is superb. My system today is the best I've ever had, and I wouldn' go back to any prior system I've had (or that I’ve heard, for that matter).

And, one final really good thing about enjoying audio today is the online community we can enjoy, such as here at Audiogon and through email listserves. Today I'm able to share my enjoyment of this rather insane hobby with a sizeable group of like minded nuts, and that's very different (and better) than in past decades.

Cheers,

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First, my AARP card, and now this.
First real system was a set of baby Advents, a small Marantz receiver (underpowered) and an AR Turntable. After I really got the bug, I 'advanced' to:
Double Advents, Phase Linear 700, various preamps and Technic SP-10 TT.
Quad '57's with ARC SP 3-A-1 and Dual 75a (which I still have in the theatre system); built a few ST-70 Dyna's along the way.

Graduated to SP-10 mkII and went through a series of ARC tube amps, ending with a Classic 60. Switched out the Quad 57's for a pair of Crosby Quads. Still have all these components, along with the Well-Tempered TT that I bought at the time.

Now using horns and low powered tube amps along with hybrid front-end. The system today is far more alive, although it is less 'coherent' than the Quad 57 setup. (My old Quads deserve to be restored- I also have a pair of old Quad mono tube amps that were restored a long time ago that I occasionally press into service).
Vinyl has been my mainstay since the outset.

My first interest in HIFI as it came to be called began in the mid-50s; I was just out of high school. A neighbor (Stanford EE grad) had built his own amp, had a Gerrard, and, IIRC, a JBL corner-loaded horn. I had never heard anything like that sound. I built a Heath Kit amp, then bought his amp. We used to visit the many HIFI shops around western LA and the beach area, drooling over the EV Patricians, JBL Hartsfileds, etc. Then I started building speaker cabinets and Dynakits, built a bunch of them.

As a post doc in the late 60s, I bought my first high-end piece, a Marantz Model 18 receiver, for a whole month of my fellowship. I moved on to the the AR-3a, and used an AR turntable with a Shure V15II cartridge.

I still have that receiver, but in the early 90s I replaced it with a Proceed PAV and Amp 2, and replaced a pair of ESS Heils with a pair of KEF 102/2s that I still use, along with a KEF 200C, to supplement a pair of KEF 104/2s for HT.

I've heard a lot of high-end systems, but nothing that has made me want to write a check. I'm happy with the sound of my system, even though I tweek or upgrade it a bit from time to time.

Although my musical intersts have remained mostly classical and jazz, I agree that the mid 60s to early 70s seemed a very inventive time for music.

db