Vintage Receivers/Amplifiers

This seems like as good a place as any to get the vintage discussion going.

With my recent monetary issues, I did a lot of research into vintage receivers and amplifiers. I ended up finding a great deal on one up in Long Beach, so I drove up there today to pick it up.

I now have a Pioneer SX-880 receiver. Sounds excellent, and I paid less than $200 for it!

 

Nicely done that is a big arse receiver. I too went down that road, albeit a bit differently. Snagged a vintage Kenwood receiver form my ex-father in law. Decent for sure, sounded a bit too bassy and not quite as open as some other amps, but good. Also got a totl Yammy Pre (supposedly great HP out) that the seller just dropped into a box with some paper and decided to ship. You know how that turned out, bent knobs, etc, I think it weighed about 15 pounds. And no it was not so great sounding.

While I think there is a lot to be said about the sq of vintage stuff, there is a fair amount of risk. Components do age, do die and not everyone is a good solder slinger. And I think the sellers have figured out there are lots of folks trying to get good sound on the cheap and have inflated prices well beyond what they should be commanding.

For me, I will take an under ten year old amp over vintage, but better yet, when you can get some of the Schiit stuff for the prices they charge, I am even more impressed. My little Asgard 2 kicks ass and whomps a bunch of amps I have owned, including some pretty pricey dac/ amp combos. I know I sound like a fanboy, but I have only owned 3 of their products and dumped two of them rather quickly, but they have an impressive track record and there are other companies doing well in the space for not a lot of cash.

Oops, so sorry if I kind of went off topic, back to the vintage discussion.

 

My friend found a Sansui AU-7700 in my neighbor's abandoned trailer. He gave it to me for my birthday.

Unfortunately, it is not in working order. Huge channel imbalance, no bass, distorted, very low volume. Bah.

Not sure whether to restore it or sell it on ebay as-is. I've been eyeballing the AU-G99X for quite a while now...

 

I have had a couple of vintage receivers: Sansui, Yamaha, Kenwood. Picked up this McIntosh MA5100 one for an a system with Original Klipsch Heresy's and a restored Dual 701 and it has definitely been my favorite. Also added a my Bifrost Uber and a Wyrd so I can plug in a phone or Ipad when I'm too lazy for records. I run it in a big open space (converted barn) and the power really helps fill the space, but I find it good enough for focused listening at lower volumes. I'm kind of shocked how good the digital sound is coming out of this thing. Headphone listening isn't the most resolving, but it's fine for reading and relaxing.

 

My first vintage/old receiver was given to me by my uncle. Was old Craig receiver. Wasn't too bad sounding and worked fine for time being.

First one I bought myself was perfect condition sansui 5000x for 60 bucks over several years ago. I really loved the performance of it and used it forever. Had a Yamaha r9 as well but, I thought my sansui was cleaner sounding and my Yamaha had some annoying grain to it in the upper register...

Then I went into separates with a Yamaha m45 and Yamaha m65 and it seem nice step up from my sansui finally but when looking for extra preamp I found guy selling h/k 725 and asked if he'll trade instead. Agreed and when he brought it, he also brought the power amp to give and 3 turntables. After playing with the HK 770 dual mono power amp I became huge fan of them and ditched my Yamahas...

But, after that I was pretty done with older stuff. Cause last amp I ever bought used was a crown ce2000 that I found under 200 which while discontinued is not vintage or old really...I did have lots of experience though and still do cause my friends are all bout twice my age and have lot more stuff then me. I really don't like collecting stuff anymore cause they end up never used so I end up giving it away. Favorite vintage receiver I ever liked whole lot though was an old Fisher tube receiver that my friend worked on and rebuilt. Was only 10wpc but, performed really nice and was an actual tube gear done right in my opinion. Next to it is older Harman kardon low negative feedback design and citations I like a lot as well when come to older stuff. I like lot of older altec lansing, Crown, peavey, bgw and crest pro amps too...you made really nice score. The smaller pioneers are nicer sounding than the bigger brothers.

 

I'd love to pick up a mid-70s Harman-Kardon receiver (330B, 430, or 730) and see whether they are as good as I remember them being. I had a 330B in college, and when it was stolen out of my apartment second year in law school I upgraded to a 730.

One thing to watch out for with vintage receivers is high output impedance on the headphone outs. Made sense at the time, given the astronomically high impedance of the 1970s headphones (Senn HD 414 and HD 424 were were 2Kohms). Now, maybe, not so much.

 

My 1983 Pioneer SX-9 (JDM only)

 

I always bypassed them by using speaker outs. Lot of studios used headphone distribution boxes and sometimes separate 1/4" to speaker out boxes for headphones. Some consumer stuff had headphone to speaker out boxes as well. Speaker outputs weren't just exclusive to electrostatics.

I made my own straight forward ghetto 1/4" to speaker box, that I still have and still good from the RadioShack parts I used and, I beat the hell out of it the past years I had it ha-ha.

 

Interesting... how do you do that sort of thing? The headphone out on the SX-880 sounds quite good, but I'd be interested to try a speaker out box as well.

 

They are pretty nice. I picked up a well preserved 430 not too long ago. Warm, bassy, decent mids, but somehow not nearly as open as I would have liked. It only stayed with me briefly.

 

It was economics. The headphone jacks were fed directly from the loudspeaker outputs through a series resister (typically around several hundred ohms) to both pad down the level and to prevent you from blowing up your headphones. A resistor costs a lot less than a dedicated headphone amp.

And not all headphones were high impedance back then. The Pioneer SE-50s my father brought back from Korea in 1971 were 8 ohms.

Edit: The practice continues in more modern gear too. My TEAC A-H500's headphone output fed off the speaker outs through a 300 ohm resistor.

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wow, that's even worse than IEC standard. I can't think of any headphone that would work well out of that BUT the 2kohm senns and some of the 80s electrets with built in transformers. atrocious.

 

They're very easy to make if know basics of soldering. You can also still buy them too but, most already made speaker boxes basically be no different than your receivers headphone out( cause most consumer boxes uses a resistor in series to outputs. No different then what already done in your receiver).

I made straight forward ghetto black box using left over 12awg wire I had just basically wired 1/4" jack to speaker outputs I put in. Simple wiring really. Left positive of 1/4" goes to left positive of speaker post and same goes for right. The negative wiring from left to right goes together to ground of 1/4" jack. No resistors. Just make sure whatever you plug it into is common ground but, most receivers are already.

 

Hi guys. Figured I'd show you my vintage Luxman pretties...

SQ-507X (early 1970s)



R1120 (late 1970s)...











Can't say they're my first choice for headphone listening, but they're lovely things to have around and do sound remarkably decent considering their age.

 

I see a crown there. I have 3 crowns I use at home. I do really like my xti 4002 I use for subwoofer duty.I plan on upgrading to couple i-techs maybe in near future to drive some 21" infrasonic woofers I plan on building in near future.

 

Has anyone here ever heard a Fostex Laboratory Model 300/600 amplifier? There's a local guy with one that's kinda intriguing.

 

How would they pair with modern Sennheiser stuff?
Especially the HD800?
Too much power for it? Or would the insane amounts of power add to the kick & bass significantly?

 

They look like very good power amps. I know their laboratory speakers are well praised. If i didn't have any of my crowns, altecs or jbls i would go for fostex setup but they're rarer than teeth hen around my parts. Great stuff.