Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Vintage Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

I just had a really scary thought..

Posted by DavidLD (A) on June 9, 2007 at 05:31:23

Having recently run some experiments with these budget 5.1 home theater audio systems typically with 5 cube speakers and a subwoofer featuring a 5 1/4- 6 inch driver, the thought occurred to me that while many vintage buffs tend to dump them all in the category of unlistenable garbage, could it be that...

1. every one of these systems is quite different?
2. Some as serious designs are far more successful than others?
3. Price may or may not not have that much to do with sound quality ie a $400 setup from manufacturer A may sound better, the same or worse than a $100 system from manufacturer B ?
4. These may vary as much as, say there are differences in various vintage budget speaker systems from the builders in the 60s and 70s?
5. Lets say the year is 1969, say late 1969. I have saved some money for two speakers, $140. I could buy a. a pair of small Advents, or b. Something for $69 from Allied Radio. Lets see that would get me the 2330 AK in thew 1970 Allied catalog ($59 as a kit, $79 assembled) One of Allied's famous Utah clones with the 12-inch cloth-roll woofer, 8-inch cone mid and 3 1/2 inch cone tweeter, all in a quite large ported box, at least in comparison with the small Advent for the same money or about the same.

Suppose then that it's late 1969. Which of these options would you choose for a similar budget? For starters the Allied/Utah system is going to be a LOT more efficient. I'm not sure where I would come out on the low end response as the small Advent is going to do pretty well in that department. The 4-ohm Advent is going to present a more difficult load in the easy to drive dept. Those big 12-inch cloth-roll Utah woofers aren't slouches in terms of deep bass either. But the Advent is gettiong all the magazine buzz as its a brand new design from an even-then well-known guy. Utah/Allied designers in contrast are namelass.

We would not have concluded, even in 1969, that despite the near identical cost, these options were not in any way similar speakers. About the only thing the two options share is that they are both boxes with drivers inside.

OK now fast forward to 2007, and the various stores have all sorts of "home theaters in a box" at various price points, $100, $200, $300, $400 up to maybe $800 if I want my unit to say "Bose"

All of these units contain some sort of 5 channel amp often with a built-in DVD/CD player and increasingly even an AM-FM tuner. Claimed advertized "total" wattages range from 150 watts up to several hundred. It's never quite clear whether this number includes or excludes the wattage of the subwoofer amp, typically alone 50 to even 100 watts, tho it might be possible to sort this out from the detailed specs. This reminds me of amp advertizing in the 70s prior to the FTC rules when we dealt with peak power, and IHF power which was higher than continuous (RMS) power. THen again, if the bass is largely handled by the woofer, is that much wattage really needed to drive a single drive in 4-inch cube only above 250 Hz or so?

AND these come in various "brands"

Some I saw in my digging included a unit with most of these features at Wal Mart for $59 under the no-name "Durabrand" label,
$100 (Best Buy "house" brand "Insignia)
$100 (Wal Mart branded "RCA")
plus units in the $159 to $400 price range with familiar and not so familiar brand names from Pioneer, Sony, LG (that's actually GoldStar, guys), Phillips
and of course at the top price point a Bose setup, or various Bose setups.

More money seems to buy a slightly larger subwoofer, physically at least and a little more advertized power, and as the price goes up the built-in DVD players seem to disappear in favor of a simple 5.1 receiver w/o the DVD. (This is funny, just like the old consumer-grade electronics from the 70s that had built-in 8 track player versus the serious stuff (aka receivers) "audiophiles" bought sans the built-in tape player. A DVD player is the 8-track unit of the 21st century.

BUT can the consumer in any way be confident that the amount of money spent here is any gauge of sound quality, any more than we understood this as applied to speakers in the 70s? that is, a higher priced setup is undoubtedly "better" sounding.

Of course a lot of guys here would reject the whole idea that ANY of these all-in-one theaters in-a-box (including the rather expensive Bose) are at all listenable (for the same reason they would reject the idea that any all-in-one compact stereo with built-in 8 track and maybe a record changer on the top from the 70s is listenable too), so maybe my entire question is silly on the face of it.

OK lets go back to my $69 Advent versus Allied dilemma. I don't know of any magazine that did a comparison of these two similarly-priced speakers. The major magazines (aka SR and HF) simply refused to test or comment on any speaker made by Utah or Allied period, tho they tested the small Advent over and over and over (go figure!)

Meanwhile now we have all these theater-in-a-box systems and we are all still clueless as to what is really going on here. The brands and models on them change faster than the numbers on Allied's Utah clone speakers changed over three decades ago.

Of course, I bought the "real" Utahs, tho an acoustic suspension version with similar drivers on sale at Team Electronics in Lafayette IN in 1970 for $49 each. A couple years later, a pair of $116 ea large Advents in walnut veneer came home with me. Both pair are still right here, and hooked up in the living room.

D

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Schiit Audio

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---