Sep 12th, 2015
There is an old expression which might be appropriate here but not necessarily truly my philosophy “don’t say anything unless you can say something nice”. Ironically this applies to friends and acquaintances but when talking about audio, electronics, etc. saying something bad, whether true or not can get a lot of people irked or worse a lawsuit from a megalomaniac electronics company. This is a reason why a negative critique is seldom available from audio magazines. One has to be careful in the professional realm to not make bad comments unless it’s universally accepted by the public.
Many years ago I was asked to review and critique Audio equipment by a popular local music magazine, but they assumed I would say nice things about products obviously because some were their advertisers. It’s obvious to see the conflict here. Today with the internet, the average guy or a BSEE fellow can make comments without too much repercussion. It’s a curse and a blessing. The average guy has his stubborn prejudices and some brilliant insights too. The engineer type can be a little cold hearted and may have higher standards which most consumer equipment will never match. Now the situation is sometimes well done and apparently simple equipment may not get a fair review by either due to name appeal or design criteria.
So with this preface in mind, I’ll make it clear where I stand. I like good nuts and bolts designs which do the job of audio reproduction well, are fairly priced for the technology they contain, and especially when the product is designed for service and longevity. I’ll admit it, I’m a staunch environmentalist and it’s shameful for companies to build throw away products and spoil our earth. Ironically, I’ve seen super-duper audiophile equipment which has no service info available, and such weird unreadable designs which limit serviceability. It's not so important if the faceplate is black, blue or pink and made with ½ thick metal. You can’t judge a book by it’s cover as they say. I am an avid reader of all kinds of science, history and culture – the cover art seldom discloses the amazing information within a book. Fancy marketing and myth does not make a better product.
I've done this business for 25 years and opened a lot of “books” (electronics). I’m not going to write about what I sell because the machines I will mention, I don’t have in stock, mostly for the reason I tell people to fix them and return them if they need such a functional product. If I have them they sell off quickly. So I’m not trying to hype what I have in stock. I’m trying to inform you as to what is worth repairing and updating.
So here we go.
In no particular order, except may alphabetically, I’ll start with ADCOM. Here’s a company that consistently made well made, nice looking , quality parts and especially endeavored to incorporate many “esoteric” audiophile qualities into their product. Adcom’s use of quality capacitors, especially correct use of types of capacitors (styrol, mylar, non polarized capacitors) for circuit designs which were good stable designs. When I say stable, I mean the performance of the unit remained consistent and over time and age. Certainly all electronics can have a failed part, but their equipment was easily serviced with a few exceptions (like the GFA “cube” Amp – which was very troublesome) this is good equipment. The same comment applies to Apt, BGW, Rotel, Crown Straight line series, Audionics, and some others I will mention later. This was excellent late 80’s – early 90’s equipment. With some reservation I will now include Yamaha, Marantz, Phillips, Onkyo, Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood, Sansui, but here we must cherry pick the better items. Soon I will try to list which models are dogs and which are exemplary. The reason these names could be good or bad depends upon who and which designers actually made their products. But in general when they kept it simple most are pretty good. However it must be made clear at this point many Japanese items need some updates to take them into the near Audiophile realm. Most manufactures simply had certain circuit designs which used incorrect parts creating, for instance, limited bass response and definition. Truth is such parts were acceptable and worked in their era but certain name capacitors aged poorly and get out of tolerance. Minor updates can clean up this situation. This replacement service is easy to do. Obviously we are seeing a resurgence of “vintage” (really 1980) Audio equipment, and rightly so. Admittedly most of this 1980 designs are “single ended transistor designs” whereby a few transistors amplify the audio signal in class A design. (One transistor device amplifies the whole signal) and passes it along through capacitors to the next stage, i.e. the tone controls or to the amplifier module. In essence it is like a tube design except with transistors. When done well and many were, there is indeed a slight “tube-a-phonic” character that occurs. This is due to very low level but ever so slight audio non linearity, distortion due to such designs. Indeed many older mixer consoles (Neve, Soundcraft, etc.) used virtually identical designs, which imparted a slightly veiled, blurred audio quality. I stress the “slightly” adjective because this effect is very subtle and although I myself don’t mind it, on most program material it does become a problem in the phono preamp designs which become very audible. I prefer really accurate, low noise, very clean phono preamps as the vinyl itself has enough sonic flaws that quality phonograph cartridge and preamp is critical to reveal the potential of the vinyl records. Some updates to the phono sections are critical to improve this fidelity issue.
The irony is I see some very expensive phono preamps that can be worse and of course some which are better. Truth is it doesn’t require much to make excellent phono preamp it can be hard for $50-$100 separately. One of the most amazing products which I would desire for both cosmetic and circuit design is Accuphase. (Whoah – stop here for a second). This company’s equipment is probably the most overlooked gem in the vintage and modern audio world. What can I say, they did so many things right, especially for the era. I’m talking true star ground power supply, gold/silver plated switches housed in shielded cages, with high quality shield point to point wiring and best of all truly usable tone controls, correct impedance loading of phono cartridges and a quality of parts unsurpassed (although a few certain capacitors do age out badly). This was McIntosh of Japan. Apparently built by a Teac/Sony partnership but the “audiophile” magazine didn’t give it enough credit.
Since I mention McIntosh, yes I am a born again Mac fan. Those Mac amps and preamps ant tuners, (both tube and solid state), when restored properly are excellent. Yes they definitely have that veiled, warm sound character, but what annoys me is so many people are operating them at sub par performance. They too also need aging capacitor replacement to return them to original state. It’s fairly easy to upgrade the crucial parts. In fact from my point of view these are not as costly to service as people have been lead to believe. These are the easy items to fix and upgrade, plenty of space to add in parts and restore and improve the fidelity. As an overview, I’m annoyed some shops charge high dollars to fix such products, as there are the easier ones to fix.
More to come...