This has been a very entertaining thread, with both the pro-vintage and anti-vintage folks making valid points. I caught the vintage (i.e. pre-1980)fever and have been stockpiling a veritable musueum of amps, tape decks and speakers (pioneer hpm, jbl lancer, klipsch, advent, etc). It's a harmless enough obsession--the gear is very inexpensive, looks cool and is uniformly well built. Soundwise, however, I've been more inclined to vote with the naysayers--in general most of the 70s stuff can't compete with good modern designs; 70s speakers in particular to my ears typically lack the high end detail and midrange presence of equivalent current speakers. Older SS amps look and feel ever so much better than ugly, modern utilitarian designs--I want to believe that thye sound better, but in truth my current Arcam is sonically superior in every respect to my old venerated Sansui, Pioneer etc. However, there are (often wholly unexpected) exceptions--I just got a pair of (1979) Polk Monitor 10b which look like thrift store castoffs but sound more transaparent and rich than my (very good) Polk LSi7s and much better than my Spendors. I'm also wildly impressed by a HarmanKardon HK 730 receiver ($30 on Craiglist), though how much is placebo I'm not sure. Anyway, that's the beauty of vintage--a real gem can pop up anywhere, and something old and cheap could, for no particular reason, sound significantly better than a technologically advanced modern piece.
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