Retro Stereos

[psyolent]

Does any on here do any retro hifi/stereo stuff?

I have a few Marantz pieces now and a JVC Nvico turntable which are awesome, although I do need to fix my PM250 amp. I also have rather large 15" driver Marantz speakers and a pair of Realistic Mach2 speakers buried as well.

I'm trying to locate an old Kriesler Q4 Disc-O-Tape - I grew up with one of these, it was great for its time.

Anyone as crazy as me?

[vlad01]

yeah i know a guy out on a farm between geelong and ballarat. his house is full of old radios. But most of the stuff he does is circa 20s to 60s, more vintage I would say.

[antus]

I used to get in to the high end old school equipment. I had a luxman L-80V which I loved and it sounded sooo good. Had some old linear design speakers which were given to me which were nothing special and the old paper cones desintegrated. I put jaycar 12" polycones and the matching mid-range plus tweeters in the boxes with the right crossover and it worked out so well. In the end I was pressured to get rid of them because they were too big some 15 years ago (bad life choice, corrected that one a long time ago now), so I sold the kit to my mate for on the proviso I get dibs if he ever wants to sell them. I still know the guy and whenever Im at his place (like the weekend just been) I hear it and it still sounds fantastic. It died once about 10 years ago but he had the sense to get it fixed and so it lives on. Fantastic how the manual shows you the response of the human ear at different volume levels and how the loudness circuit is tuned for this. I reckon thats why it sounds so good, even at normal room levels.

Heres a pic of the actual unit and some radio hacking from 2002... an atmel circuit connected to the expansion port on a T2020 radio providing a received signal strength indicator (RSSI, which was not available on the radio face). Right in front of the luxman.

And heres the reference photo from the net:

luxman_l-85v_amplifier.jpg (62.89 KiB) Viewed 2981 times

[antus]

I think my mates Rotel RA-913 should get an honorable mention too. 2 different mates had these, one still has it. Pre-dates torrodial transformers so with big watts RMS the internal transformer was a huge heavy brick. I remember at a party once telling a mate to try and pick it up to check out the weight and he grabbed the front and lifted but wasnt ready for it and instead of the amp going up he pulled his head down smashing it on the top of the amp. It was halerious at the time.

[vlad01]

pretty sure we had the bottom one when I was little. looks same as I remember.

[jenko]

i liked the marantz stuff still have the turntable but the amp died long ago