Hi-Fi
What do you get when you start to realise that your growing collection
of all the LPs you would have loved to own when you were younger but are now
available on CD are being played through crummy PC speakers or some funny
ear-pieces plugged into your Smart Phone?
An attack of vintage hi-fi syndrome.
Let's begin at the beginning and the beginning for Hi-Fi and me was back in the
early 1960s.
The whole problem with being a teenager is that you have huge aspirations
backed up by roughly zero spending power. I was listening to music that I liked
but the equipment I was using ranged from poor to very poor and even I could
hear that that was the case. My Dad had upgraded from a simple fifties
radiogram to an amp with a larger loudspeaker that he had built into a
book-case so that was a definite step up but it wasn't exciting and it also
shared the front room with the TV so it wasn't freely available in the
evenings. I started to try and build my own system piece by piece, based on
pocket money and birthday presents. This was in parallel with drooling over the
latest and greatest equipment in the hi-fi magazines I bought. There was this
perfect system in my head and I knew the bits I would choose... All I needed
was this huge pile of money.
Well in the end, after several years, the home-made wasn't too bad. A
reasonable Garrard auto-changer deck with a cheap but reasonable Decca Deram
ceramic stereo cartridge. I bought some commercial PCB only amps and preamps
and built it all into a plywood DIY case covered in a 'proper' leather finish
material. I also assembled a pair of nice eight inch speakers also in
relatively thin plywood cases because that was all I could buy on pocket money
and carry home on a push bike. It worked, was so much better than the system
downstairs and it was mine. This was the system that went up to the University
of Sussex with me in 1968 to read maths and physics.
Finally the inadequacies of the cheap amps became too apparent and I built a
full Class-A amplifier that was my rework on a Linsley Hood design in Wireless
World magazine from April 1969. This stayed with me for many years through the
rest of my academic time. The picture on the left is my desk, part way through
my time at Brighton Polytechnic studying Electronic Engineering in about 1974,
with the same turntable in a more compact box on top of the (homemade)
oscilloscope and the amplifier (spot the big black heat sinks with a TO3
showing) on the left with the preamp (with all the knobs on) underneath that.
Sadly this picture is all I have left to remember it by. I don't even have a
copy of my modifications to the circuit diagram any more. I never did manage to
improve on the speakers.
This home-made equipment finally got squeezed out for the sheer practicality of
an off the shelf 'System' that worked for my wife and I in our new home in
about 1978. This was the point where Hi-Fi and I parted ways. The new system
was adequate. It played cassettes and vinyl and it had an FM radio. It wasn't
convenient but it worked and since my wife and I differed in musical taste I
didn't use it all that much anyway.
Now fast forward another thirty years or so. The children have now long since
grown up and have left home and, as a widower, I have fewer restrictions on my
silly ideas. Plus I had a growing collection of CDs, both my own and my late
wife's that I wanted to play. What I did not have, since the demise of the old
system, was an easy way to play them other than through my PC and, let's admit
it, normal PCs don't really do hi-fi. The decision had to be made about what I
wanted to about it all.
So what were the options? Well the first was the obvious 'do nothing' because
music doesn't have to be scrupulously hi-fi to be enjoyed. The next option was
to purchase another ready made system but somehow that just didn't quite seem
worth while... Then the teenager that every grown man seems to carry not far
below the surface remembered the old dreams of the 'perfect' system.
OK, I admit it, I laughed at myself. What was silly money back in my teenage
years was probably even more silly money now but I banged the old names into
Google and browsed the pages it threw up. Yes, it was gratifying to see that my
old choices had stood the test of time and that they were still highly regarded
by people who probably weren't even born when they were being manufactured.
Then I looked at the Ebay pages that Google found and was quite surprised to
discover that you could still see the stuff changing hands. Yes, the prices
could be a bit steep but it made a fun read. Nostalgia is always a bit like
that.
Well, what has happened is that over the next few years I watched the stuff for
sale and slowly, when I thought the price was right, I acquired the bits I
wanted. It might not be up-to-date by any stretch of the imagination but it is
still a seriously good system that delivers a high quality sound. Some parts
admittedly did needed fixing and it all needed work to turn it into a
convenient rig to run but that is all done now. It makes a pleasant evening sat
in front of the computer even nicer to have some music properly played even if
it is slightly perplexing, at times, to be sharing my office with a jazz
quartet. However I am now at least able to assure myself that I was right all
those years ago. It really is a first class system even if, by now, it probably
out performs my poor old ears.
It all started with a pair of Quad Electrostatic loudspeakers. There are two
classic models now identified by their launch dates as the 57 and 63 models. I
have a pair of 57s which many people prefer although there are reasons why the
63s ought to be better. They are not high power but the stereo definition is
magnificent. Hi-Fi buffs wax lyrical about detail and transparency and, while
I'm not quite sure what is meant by those terms, I can assure you they are very
good. I have a thing for 'unplugged' live jazz and on the ESLs musical
instruments just move that magic step further towards 'real'. Yes, mine have
been refurbished recently.
They weren't cheap but they were local and 'buyer collects' must have depressed
the price into my range. Remember at this point I had nothing to plug them
into so they were a very silly thing to buy.
However I knew, as electronics has been my business for many years now, that
ESLs are an appalling electrical load to drive, especially around the zero
point. Most conventional solid state amps are just not quite suited to the job.
This called for one of the old Quad Current Dumper amplifiers to run them. Now
Quad improved on these amps over the years since I stopped following them so
the 606 model here, although still old, is later than my dream team but I'm
sure I would have approved. It does need limiter diode boxes as it has enough
power to destroy my ESLs but they are available. I bided my time watching
vintage audio auctions and got the matching model 34 preamp, the late version,
and the model FM4 VHF tuner module to go with it.
Now I did have a turntable, an arm and a cartridge on the old magic list in my
head but as I didn't have any significant investment in vinyl I tried in a
reasonable CD auto-changer deck from Marantz and thought that was it. It
sounded good and it just ran. It encouraged me to listen to more music which
made it definitely more worth while.
There was one other member of the pipe dream team but reel-to-reel tape isn't
really a thing these days and I assumed that digital systems via the PC would
cover me for anything like that... Until I saw it. It wasn't cheap and it did
have some problems but it was a real Ferrograph Logic 7 straight out of my
teenage fantasies and it was in my price range. I caved in and bought it. I had
to put some time into it to fix the broken linkage but I hit snags with the
pinch wheel pressure and it got side-lined for a few months. In the end I put
it into Servicesound in Bexhill to get a complete refurbishment and I confess
I'm very pleased with the results. Admittedly getting good bulk quarter inch
tape is a pain these days, most of what is on offer is rather old and the
coating is coming off in clouds. I get mine in pancake form from a supplier in
Germany. Yes, those are 10½ inch reels and No, I don't really use it
enough to justify it, it's just a big toy.
Well all this kit sits with me in the 'office' which is, I must admit, just the
dignified end of the workshop. It does music on demand. OK the 'office' is not
an ideal 'listening room' but it is where I go to flop. It is where my mind can
work or can go off duty so it is where I want to listen to music. I'm never
going to have a dedicated music room but the ESLs are remarkably directional
and are very forgiving.
So what happened next? Well once the honeymoon was over I began to find that
the CD player was getting to be a bit of a chore. I realised the PC's ability
to click-and-play anything in my library system had made me lazy. I considered
a few options and tried a VortexBox system that ran the Logitech Media Server
but finally went back to the PC with a big 24 bit external DAC connected into
the 34's CD inputs. This swallowed all my CDs and just regurgitates
them.
What else? Well, I've started collecting music again but, sadly, the fact that
some of the things I wanted are still only available on old vinyl meant that I
realised I still needed an LP deck. I waited and watched vintage auctions as I
didn't fancy any of the funny looking new ones and found a Thorens TD160 deck
with a TP16 arm with a Shure M75ED cartridge. That felt like it would fit in
comfortably with a vintage system so I added that to the collection. Now I can
play old stuff too as some of the material I like will never make it onto
re-released CDs. One thing this system lets me do is to dump an LP via the PC
onto disk. This means I can run it through a waveform editor and hack out the
more annoying of the vinyl clicks that are unfortunately what you have to
expect from second hand 1950s recordings of Alfred Deller and the like.
More? Well I did start to worry that certain parts of the audio range weren't
being handled quite as well as others. I did wonder if this was just my poor
old ears not being up to the job any more but I read up on the items I have and
identified the 34 preamp as a common customer for a refurb. Well the before and
after reviews used lots of audiophile words that make me, as an Electronic
Engineer (retired), very suspicious that the people involved haven't a clue
what they are talking about but I invested in appropriate bag of capacitors and
chips from the Dada Electronics online shop and had a big
rebuild session.
Now can I be careful to point out that if you haven't worked on electronic
systems repairs this is not a nice job. I have done the time and I have all the
workshop gear so it wasn't a problem to me but I can see beginners coming badly
unstuck with this sort of work. Did the rebuild help? I think it did. Certainly
I haven't noticed the effect since. There is probably an audiophile word for it
but I'd say it was intermodulation distortion but that's based on my ears not a
good spectrum analyser. Oh, and while I had the 34 apart I took the opportunity
to move component C44 from S2 to S3 so the default
selection on power up is now CD not RADIO. So I'm lazy.
Well we are all very happy together. I sit at my desk and click for music and
it is just the music with no colouration from the system playing it. It's all
that I wanted all those years ago. As a friend of mine once said "You can't
hear good hi-fi, it adds nothing and takes nothing away".
As I type this John Williams is playing Vivaldi's Concerto in D major for me.
The wonderful second movement that builds up. Life is good.
by Nigel Hewitt
