Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms vintage versus modern hifi

Alistair, I see you are a man of good taste😂
I remember on first hearing commenting on there being less bass than the other speakers but much more tuneful and less coloured.

I'm another vinyl fan.

I doubt my HiFi would match anyone here on "fidelity" but I bet I could beat most of you on the "high".

Fascinating thread... thanks everyone.
Tomorrow I'll be ordering a pair of Duelund 1.5m interconnects from the HiFi collective. The wore is now £17.00 a meter, so £51.00.
KLE Absolute Harmony RCA plugs at £104.00 for 4.
£20.00 for terminating the wires.
So £175.00

Worth a punt, I think.

Does your Wurlitzer have its original valve amp?

I like that! Each to their own but I don't get it. Maybe I'm tone deaf...

I have a friend that spends more on his HiFi than I do on my cars and I just don't understand it, his speaker cables are thicker than my jump leads!

Give me my Bose Soundlink any day of the week.

Gordon,

Absence of speaker colouration has been the "Holy Grail" for me and has been largely responsible for my love of the QUAD Electrostatic series.
I have a friend who has a full linn system, with their active speakers.
It is very aggressive, dynamic and not badly coloured.
But he has spent hours manipulating the controls of the electronic crossovers in the six power amplifiers in the speakers.
I don't have any ability to do that, because it isn't needed....

Music... if I had to choose between music and driving Tarka I don't quite know what I'd do....

Peter
I obviously have a vested interest so please keep me informed and have patience during the run-in.
Shame about the price hike - but that is the way of the world these days.

I'm certainly not tone deaf (although my hearing isn't what it was 40 years ago) but I have sympathy with the Alan Parsons view (audio engineer for Pink Floyd and musician with his own band The Alan Parsons Project). He said of the more 'extreme' Hi Fi enthusiasts that "Instead of using their equipment to listen to our music, they use our music to listen to their equipment" - which is maybe a bit harsh but there's a core of truth in it.

Being a Hi Fi enthusiast is a great hobby, completely harmless and very effective at getting rid of any spare money one might otherwise fritter away - and now that one can have access to all the recorded music int he world for a tenner a month or whatever the old argument that one's record collection should always be worth more than one's system no longer applies. Certainly the whole subjective experience of settling down in front of a decent system for an evening's listening to some great music of one's choice is a perfectly splendid way to pass a few hours. If one wants to spend the price of a top-end sports car on it, then why not?

Me, I'm perfectly happy with my music streamers and some active studio monitors, but then I'm usually pumping the music through my mixing desk and playing along (or trying to). And if I were ever to come into the £50k+ that many serious Hi Fi folk spend on their gear, I'd spend it with a luthier on a custom guitar. Each to their own.

There is definitely more than a grain of truth in what Alan Parsons said Hamwich.
But I think about it this way, I get all the available pleasure from my chosen album without the distractions of flaws in the sound, I simultaneously get the pleasure from using the music to listen to my system and I get just as much pleasure from collecting vinyl albums.
My hifi journey has always been about building the best sounding system possible but spend very little money. I can honestly say that I've "wheeler dealered" my way to my present system over a great many years and I doubt it has cost me anything in the grand scheme of things.
It also allows the engineering geek in me to get its teeth into something other than cars.
Quite a lot of positives for one hobby I reckon...

My systems are a hodgepodge of kit built up over the years

Tannoy Mercury S speakers driven by a original Cyrus 1 amplifier, still love the sound even though they are as old as me, the only thing i've found so far that beats them is the monitor audio 5 speakers and cambridge audio cxa61, but at £1500 to swap I will be keeping them for longer.

A Project Debut Carbon performs vinyl playback duties after my dual cs505 died. A Sony TC377 courtesy of my godfather performs extremely well with reel to reel however the tapes are horrendously expensive now. A HMV 102 portable also gets used occasionally and is exceptionally good for its age. Most of my equipment has been purchased for the enjoyment and even novelty value, enjoyment is something that I think gets lost when looking at the seriously high end equipment as it starts to focus on aspects that I think most people wouldn't understand, let alone hear in use?

A lot of the real high end equipments does sound amazing, if you are prepared to pay a fortune for all aspects of the system. A lot of the discussions around sound quality (in my opinion) boil down to personal preferences, some people like to hear every detail, others like the colour that comes with slightly looser bass control. As an example, I love the look of B&W speakers but find their sound quite clinical to my ears, it doesn't excite me, however the monitor audio speakers I mentioned earlier reached out and grabbed me.