Sunday, September 13, 2009

Showdown

On Saturday afternoon, a friend of Seventies Stereo brought over an 80 watt/channel receiver from the nineties. He was curious to see how it compared to a seventies vintage receiver. We listened to a few tracks on his, with digital and vinyl sources, then switched to the Sansui 8080 and repeated the tracks. I was confident that we would both prefer the sound of the Sansui, but was surprised by just how much more musical it sounded. The music was more dynamic, sweeter, and had much cleaner, clearer and tighter bass. My friend's receiver is beautiful looking, appears well made and has good specs. It just sounds more like a piece of electronics and less like music.

1 comment:

meathenge said...

Ya know, that's really cool. I haven't done that in a while, but it's nice to share with others what these old rigs can really do. I do know when people show up, they get to choose an LP, put it on and actually listen to it, how amazed they are.
Another fun thing is to have them bring their ipod and jack it in to my Magnapans. "Why do my MP3's sound so bad?" Because they're compressed music and they suck. Kinda like a propane grill compared to a real fire to cook over. Fun!

Biggles