[HN Gopher] Were the 1970's the Golden Age of Audio?
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       Were the 1970's the Golden Age of Audio?
        
       Author : PaulHoule
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2021-11-09 16:16 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.audioholics.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.audioholics.com)
        
       | simonblack wrote:
       | Well, there certainly lots of audiophile features back in the
       | 70s: Direct-Cut disks*, Quadraphonic music, dbX compressor-
       | expanders, high-quality speakers that didn't sacrifice quality
       | and efficiency so that they could be hidden away on a bookshelf,
       | electrostatic speakers and headphones, feather-light stylus and
       | tone-arm combos, very high quality tape decks, and so on.
       | 
       | Most music today is digitally compressed when it really doesn't
       | need to be, as most storage media can hold hours and hours (weeks
       | even!) of high-quality music.
       | 
       | Why would people bother with crappy MP3s when they could have no-
       | loss storage instead? SMH.
       | 
       | * A friend and I spent an evening listening to direct-cut disks
       | and then put on a normal pressed LP. We thought there was
       | something the matter with the stylus, the pressed disk sounded so
       | muddy.
        
         | PaulHoule wrote:
         | I got large numbers of 1970s garage-sale speakers, hooked them
         | up to a modern multichannel home theater receiver and add a
         | pair of powered subwoofers. I matched the stereo pairs but
         | figured the room correction can handle the difference between
         | the backs and the fronts. My center is a ridiculous speaker
         | you'd expect to see on the stage at a live music bar that I
         | recovered from an abandoned building and replaced the
         | crossover.
         | 
         | It kicks ass!
         | 
         | If you compare 128 kbps MP3 files to a CD the difference is
         | night and day. 320 kbps MP3 is transparent, 192 kbps is not bad
         | for most recordings. As I am writing this I am working on a
         | python script that recompresses FLAC files from my music server
         | to put on a USB stick for the car or for my Garmin watch. Right
         | now the target is 192 kbps AAC for the car and the high end of
         | the spectral band replication range (maybe 64-96 kbps) for the
         | watch.
        
       | zwieback wrote:
       | I had a Pioneer A9 amp back in the day and I loved it. All
       | analog, massive non-switching power supply, nice sound.
       | 
       | However, the golden age of audio is right now and tomorrow will
       | be platinum. Everything else is nostalgia.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-10 23:01 UTC)