Did the Old Receivers Sound Good?

I had this pretty good single modern speaker that i used for test purposes on my work bench. One day I came across a very old Fisher 500 mono receiver for little money.  I replaced the original  coupling caps with Hovland Musicaps just because and hooked it up to  the lone speaker, and was quite surprised by the very good quality of the sound just using its tuner. I added a cd player and felt humbled by the results. I left all in place and used that oddball system as my music source while I dinked around on projects. I still remember having someone comment on how good that all sounded. It would never replace anything I have used in my listening room for these many years, but I am still impressed by that 1950's product.

My receiver is a g9000.

Fsntastic! 
pioneer pl58

dahlquist 20’s

perfect in every way.

Sansui

I’ve been putting back together my basement system. For the past 2 weeks I’ve been swapping out between a Musical Fidelity A1008, upgraded Jolida 302CRC, and my Sansui AU9500 on my Focal vinyl only system. That damn Sansui just sounds more alive than the other 2. Slamming bass and mid bass and soaring high end. It sounds meaty or juicy is the best descriptor I can think of. Really good array of analog tone controls as well I fiddle with from time to time depending on the recording. Not sure if it’s neutral but don’t care. Been thinking of trying out my 801 matrix V2s with it but probably doesn’t have the juice for those. 

Back in the late 70s there was a race by the major electronics manufacturers (Pioneer, Kenwood, Sansui, etc.) to lower Total Harmonic Distortion or THD. Sales were often driven by these numbers and lower THD was a great way to generate interest in upgrades. As new electronics were coming out with ultra-low THD many listeners began to notice that the newer gear actually sounded worse (harder edged, less musical and more electronic sounding) than similar previous models which had higher THD.

Engineer Matti Otala from Harman Kardon then discovered a new type of distortion called Transient Intermodulation Distortion or TIM, which seemed to correlate to the negative sound attributes heard with low THD designs. He found that decreasing THD which was commonly accomplished by adding negative feedback created higher TIM which was believed to be more harmful than the higher THD. So many of these manufacturers then started cutting back on negative feedback and TIM became a measurement which was often included along with THD.

This demonstrates how just focusing on measurements can be counter productive, in that we may have errors in measurement due to test equipment limitations or we may be measuring the wrong things. Who knows how many other forms of distortion may still be unknown that can have an effect on human perception of music reproduction.

Many of the receivers from that era are being serviced and sold for very high prices, with sellers saying "they don't make them like they used to!" and playing up the perception that larger and heavier electronics must be attributed to their high quality. The truth is that many of them don't sound good at all due to the focus of their initial designs during that era.