The Allure of Vintage Audio Gear

Late 70's I had a nice Phase Linear stack. Looked impressive and sounded better when drinking.  Bought a Sansui 9090 and that changed everything.  Sold the stack and bought all Pioneer separates cassette,  r to r, tt, 4 massive Sansui 7500 speakers.  Still have it all. 

This is a false dichotomy. "Vintage" gear just means whatever gear the beholder could not afford as a teenager. As a result, anything made from the 60s to the 90s can be considered vintage by someone alive today.

A better question would be, what does a certain dollar amount buys you in today’s market? Case in point: rn TMR offers a pair of Krell 600 monoblocks for something like $6500. I think anyone would be hard pressed to buy equivalent new amps for twice that amount, because there simply aren’t any out there unless a person is willing to spend a small fortune.

Given a fixed budget, pre-owned gear will almost always deliver a significantly higher level of build and sound quality than new gear. Just my opinion.

+1 Harmon Kardan 730, my receiver for 40 years.

Never had the bug to upgrade until it died. Now I split the duty between a Cayin tube receiver and Accuphase SS preamp and Class A amp.

I’m having way more fun collecting and restoring vintage gear than my main modern system. I think many people hear vintage and think they are all overly warm sounding, but from my experiance thats a good indication there is old caps and componets in them that needed replacment probably long ago.

In my experiance vintage can compete with moddern systems at similar costs when restored. No a $2000 restored vintage peice wont compete with a $10000 piece nore should it. But doller for doller i’d take a vintage system over a modern system in the $1500-$2000 range, as what i have into them. I really dont know may speaker in that price range that can come close. 

Example my Vintage ADS L910 speakers (restored) from the late 70’s sound very good and very musical. not overly warm or lacking detail. In many ways i prefer them to modern speakers. no they dont have quite the details level or sound stage level but close enough that what they do right makes them very enjoyable.

I was exclusively into vintage gear until 3 years ago. My only tech retired and I decided to go modern. Except for my speakers. I love my JBL 4311s and built my new system around them. I'm still in the process but it's going well. The 4311s, like most JBL have volume control for mid and tweets that allows me to tweak the sound as I change components. 

Over the past 3 years I've listened to 6 other speakers and nothing comes close. I'm still looking at new ones, but replacing these with something I like more will probably cost upwards of $15k. I paid $600 for my JBLs.