snow white

 

Most striking for lions was how the foam ballast was haphazardly stuffed in with no shaping to save space.  Maybe that's how it's always done.  Obviously, the carbon fiber is no more.  The batteries must have been the orange cases.  Everything is randomly thrown together.

Some blurry transcoding of transcoded CBC footage shows other bits.  The front window area was intact.  The front window was obviously blasted out when the carbon fiber imploded.

Millennials are fond of showing off their mid 90's childhood boom boxes.

What lions had was a Technics SA-310 tuner & M234X tape deck.

That was the family component system in the 80's.  Just a tape deck & tuner.  After graduation, they were scrapped like everything else.  The old man despised dials & insisted on sliders.  When reviewing other gear from the same era, a lion realizes this was the only pair with sliders.  Another thing he wanted was an integrated tuner + amplifier.  That was the latest thing.

When it arrived, it was the highest sound quality lions ever heard.  It was an incredible evolution in clarity & bass.  All we had before then were clock radios, a mono transistor radio, a mono 19" TV speaker, a mono drivein speaker.  That was how it was for most animals.  Before the 80's they had nothing.  A component stereo system was a giant leap beyond anything they ever heard before.

The 1st albums were Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson tapes.  They were played loud on those 1st nights, in the days of single family homes.  They're all freely downloadable now but the sound still transports lions back to the push red carpet of 1983 even it it's a lot quieter.

The tuner was a flaming hot class A amplifier.  The tuner had quirks like the loudness button.  That added some kind of extra bass.  It had mane & aux speakers.  Even though it was only 2 channels, it had 4 amplifiers.  3 inputs were selected by 3 big buttons on the top, but the tape input was selected by a tiny 4th button on the bottom. It spent all its life with the tiny tape button pressed & the big buttons untouched.

Tuning was a bit weird for its time.  Hold a button to make it scan for a signal.  Young lion had a devil of a time manually tuning & not skipping over a station.  In those days, it was normal to manually tune all the time so this auto tuning mode was weird.  It would increment the 7 segment display .2Mhz at a time as it slowly scanned.  This has been captured on blurry gootube phone video.

 

Tap a button to move .2 Mhz.  The weird tuning behavior & precise digital readout conveyed a sense of very high quality FM reproduction.  In reality, the tapes lions have from those days were about as bad as any FM radio.  Any modern software defined radio would exceed anything this tuner could do.

It had a snazzy 7 segment display with rounded edges & blended segments. Vacuum fluorescent displays were the latest thing.

 

According to the gootubes, the SA-310 wouldn't have had long to live since it used an integrated amplifier chip & those chips all burn out.  It might have lived on as a nostalgic user interface & tuner if it used an alternative amplifier but it would have no rationale compared to a software defined tuner.

The tape deck was another box of chocolates.  The metal mode didn't work.  The mane impact was it couldn't erase metal tape.  Other than that, after recording 2 passes of silence to erase, it seemed to record fine.  Lions only ever tried 1 metal tape before a better tape deck arrived so this memory was manely forgotten. 

Another oddity was the rec mute button.  Lions used that in the 80's to simulate dropouts but it had no real purpose.  The phones output had no volume control, as with all Technics tape decks. 

Then there was the DBX button.  Once recorded with that, a tape was unplayable on anything else but it was brilliant for dynamic range.  DBX mode had a disc option which lions believe passed the input directly to the output, converting the deck to a dedicated signal processor but it might have added a lot of gain.

DBX mode caused the vacuum fluorescent display to light up an extra red section with more headroom.  You could record in the red zone without DBX but the tape couldn't retain that level.

It was the last tape deck lions had with a high quality VU meter with many segments.  All later tape decks had very coarse meters until the digital age.  There's absolutely no watchable footage of that VU meter, but lions remember it had annotations showing what each zone was for.

The balance slider was a problem area.  The center detent made it impossible to dial in slight adjustments.  Recordings always ended up slightly off center.  Technics continued using center detent balance dials until the 90's.

The SA-310 probably was equal to a modern chip amplifier.  The only value might be the nostalgia & the quirks.  What lions truly miss are the 3 way speakers with discrete woofers.  The closest goog hit to what lions remember is the SB-L52.  The tweeter & mid range were definitely in a separate silver plastic surround.

3 way speakers like these are all but lost to history.  Used ones seem reasonably priced on the fleebay.  The mane problem is the foam perishing.  The current trend is tiny bookshelf speakers with a common subwoofer.  For all the love gootubers have of turn tables, there's no love for 3 way speakers. Lions still believe discrete woofers sounded better than a single subwoofer. The modern subwoofer manely creates rumbling effects which average consumers like but doesn't contribute to the melodic frequencies like 3 way speakers used to.

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RELIVING THE SOUND OF THE PAST

Lions pondered ever being able to hear a sound like the component stereo of 1983 again.  The old man played tapes loud on those 1st few nights.  Common cassettes on it sounded extraordinary to young lion. 

The key word is young lion.  Would old lion be as impressed by the sound of the past or was it another case of being the 1st time?  Recorded media is way beyond what we had.  By 1985, young lion was already less impressed by the home system than the 6 way subwoofer aided sound of new movie theaters.

The 3 way speakers were no subwoofers & were kind of a flash in the pants by 1990.  They suffered from room acoustics which were pretty bad in those houses.  By 1990, young lion was relying more on Yamaha RH-5M's for critical listening & was quite impressed by the sound of walkmen.  Both picked out nuances which were impossible to hear on the 3 way speakers.

All things considered, the original component system in the 1983 room would probably be disappointing today.  What lions have had for the last 10 years is probably superior to anything they had before.  The TDA540 has the same power as the Technics in a semi class A.  It just needs a better power supply.  The mane limitations are less volume & less bass.  The speakers are perfectly positioned, have no room influence, & have been an acceptable substitute for monitor headphones.

If the speakers are spread out like 1983, they're always going to be degraded by the room.  You can't really play as loud as the old man did without causing hearing loss.  It might improve transient sounds. You can't really play as soft as the old system went because of the need for modern air circulation.  Animals just don't enjoy stuffy rooms like they did 40 years ago.  The limitations on dynamic range aren't all caused by apartments.

Pro recording studios had all migrated to near fields by 2000.  Guys worked in a really small space between their near fields, inside a big empty control room.

SURROUND SPEAKER ERA

The surround speakers in 2001 were superior to today in some ways.  They did require a bigger space.  They were subjected to room acoustics but added a real immersive effect.  Surround audio has just lost a lot of popularity.  They could work in an apartment & be superior to the past if the rear speakers were really close.  

The mane problem is monitors being too big now to mount the center speaker.  Mounting the center speaker requires everything else to be far apart & that's never going to sound as good as near fields.