Why vintage stereo?  

Being asked to author this column on vintage stereo components is a huge honor. Its purpose is to share some of my experiences on the topic and highlight the audio industry’s rich product and brand history.

Audiophiles often have a special place in their heart for vintage gear. Aside from performance, they appreciate the aesthetics and sensory cues that often come from owning and using this type of gear. I myself enjoy the glow of tubes and display bulbs as well as the look and feel of real wood.

Many of us recall the era of a “stereo shop in every town” which existed from roughly the 1960s through the close of the century. Generally, those shops carried the best-known and most heavily-marketed brands (think Pioneer and Marantz) along with other smaller brands that were primarily intended for specialty dealers. While I will cover both types of brands and their gear in this column, my focus will be on the smaller ones. Perhaps surprisingly, it is this gear that most often represents the best values in today’s vintage stereo market.

Why me? 

My background: I managed stereo stores in the 1970s and 1980s, during which time I evaluated hundreds of components of all types. As leading specialty dealers in our region, the retail stores and chains that I worked for were generally offered newest stuff first. There was also a constant flow of product trade-ins, often from brands that we did not carry.  Sometimes, I’d take such gear home to audition it in my own system.

After leaving retail, I worked on the marketing side (and at times product and business development) for stereo companies such as Technics, Bose, Marantz, JBL, Harman/Kardon and Carver. I also performed consulting and project work for others, including Onkyo, Snell and Velodyne. In those roles, I regularly attended audio industry events where I heard the latest audio components and met many of the hi-fi industry’s leaders and insiders, including some of the “founding fathers.” I don’t pretend to know everything when it comes to vintage gear, but I think that I have seen and heard more of it than most.

What is “vintage stereo”? 

Before we proceed further, let’s define the word “vintage” for our purposes. If you ask any ten audio buffs for such a definition, you’ll likely get fifteen different answers. I define it as anything from the dawn of home high-fidelity in the late 1940s and early 50s to approximately the mid-1990s. 

In its infancy, consumer high-fidelity’s roots were in theatrical and commercial sound and electronics.  A few of the more prominent examples include the following:

1.      With the arrival of “talkies” or movies with synchronized sound in the 1920s, James Bullough Lansing began making drivers for theatrical applications as a partner in the Altec-Lansing company. Later, he became best known for the speaker components he designed, built, and branded with his initials, JBL.

2.      In 1954, Sidney Harman and Bernard Kardon were at David Bogen & Co., a commercial sound firm. During their off time, they invented and launched the first “all-in-one” high-fidelity receiver for home use. It included a tuner, preamp, and power amp all in a single enclosure.

3.      John Koss owned a TV repair shop in the 1950s when he invented the modern hi-fi headphone by modifying old military surplus headsets into something more comfortable for his customers’ late night home listening sessions.

Using this heritage, which also included the work of many other iconic audio pioneers such as Paul Klipsch, Henry Kloss, Koss, and Saul Marantz as a baseline, we can fix consumer high-fidelity’s starting point. At or near the other end of the vintage timeline, many stereo brands now considered to be vintage either started or gained traction during the late 1970s and early 80s. They include Carver, NAD, Rotel, Adcom, Parasound, PSB, Mirage, Definitive, Kyocera and others. Also, from the late 1980s to the early 90s some iconic brands such as Marantz and Harman/Kardon launched successful comeback product lines that today stand with their finest earlier offerings.

A final note on a definition of vintage. There were formal specification and performance standards in place, including DIN 45 500 in Europe and the Institute of High Fidelity (IHF) in the United States. Among other criteria, these standards covered frequency response, distortion, channel separation, and signal-to-noise ratio. They helped prevent the term “hi-fi” from being loosely used on everything from portable radios to low-end stereo record players. While no longer used, these standards are historically relevant and still useful today for determining what vintage gear is and isn’t considered “hi-fi.”

A jungle of vintage gear 

What are the top components and brands from the vintage era? Due to the enormity of the industry and its sheer quantity of its output over the decades, there’s no simple answer. As I write this, sitting on my desk is the 1990 Orion Audio Blue Book-- the stereo dealers’ “bible” for audio components that lists all of the brands, component models, and their market values going back to the Eisenhower era. Its 700 pages covers over 500 brands and roughly 25,000 vintage hi-fi components! (Today, that book can be found at www.usedprice.com.) 

This Amazonian jungle of vintage gear creates a challenge – one that benefits from having a safari guide’s view on what’s worth capturing by a vintage hunter. My role is to bring you some of the most interesting vintage products and stories out there.

Next time – Yamaha’s CR-620 Natural Sound receiver

In the next installment of this column, we’ll look at Yamaha’s CR-620 Natural Sound AM/FM stereo receiver ($365 USD in the mid-1970s). The CR-620 is a solid “under today’s radar,” specialty alternative to the receivers from the big-name vintage brands that I mentioned earlier. 

As I’ll cover, Yamaha was a century-old Japanese metallurgy and musical instrument firm that had diversified into other areas including sporting goods and motorcycles before it moved into home stereo components. In my opinion as a former Yamaha dealer, the CR-620 was the finest mid-powered receiver of its day and a forerunner of the “budget audiophile” category that could rival separate components in performance.  

If the topic of vintage audio is of interest to you, check this space for this column's newest installments, most of which will appear on approximately a monthly basis. Also, follow the Listening Chair’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/people/The-Listening-Chair-with-Howard-Kneller-Page/61556741638528/) so that you don’t miss anything.