Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms vintage versus modern hifi

I tend to do a lot of listening from my MacBook, iPad, or iPhone these days, but I do quite like the idea of getting a Quad speaker + amp setup sometime. When I was at the BBC, the small edit rooms used to have Quad 303 amps and Rogers LS3/5a speakers, and larger rooms often had the Quad 405 with LS5/8s. And the sound sources were Studer A80 tape machines - very nice for editing 1/4-inch tape!

Falcon now do a modern take on the original LS3 5A that is quite special. If you get a chance have a listen. There is no such thing as a cheap LS3 5A these days and I used to buy them for £100 a pair and sell for £150-200.

Please do not forget the placement of the equipment as key to success in getting the best out of it.

I sold some expensive systems and then used to offer to fit them for free to help make the most out of them. If they just took them home and plonked them on the sideboard you were at risk of disappointment which is not the goal.. I went to their houses to fit the equipment and guide on any extra stands or mounts as the small extra for a pair of good speaker stands made a lot of difference on wooden floors. I usually loaded some shelves and stands in the car just in case and the difference sold them in ten minutes. If you had suggested the £250 speaker stands in the shop you would always get that odd "how much?" look but on audition at home instantly. With really loose floorboards it was a pair of spiked stands and some sandbags on top if they could get away with the aesthetics. Then a big slab of bluetac from the stand to the speaker!

One chap came in at least once a month for about a year. In the end he bought a BIG system for the time. It included some monster Kef reference 105.2 speakers. I went to fit them at his house and his wife had a turn when she saw them. The end result was that he had to have cabinets made to hide them. When he wanted to listen to them he could open the front doors on the cabinets.Tj effect this had on the sound was beyond horrible and I felt so sad for him. I think one of the best things I ever did was to get him to try some Stax headspeakers which were electrostatic headphones. He ended up using them most of the time and preferred them to speakers. I have to say that I thought they were better than most speaker systems.

Since 16 years I have a Stirling Broadcast LS 3/5 with „Something Solid„ light speaker stands. It is not played every day but such a very good speaker. I read about the Falcon which seems to have a genuine heritage link to the original gear.

What a rich seam you have started Barry and particularly suited to Morgan owners who like to tweak ad fettle!

Whilst never aspiring to the very high end of the market where, as has already been said, the sound can become more important than the music, some of the comments have led me to remember some of my forays into this world since the 1960s. I expect that, like many on here, we resorted to self-build in order to climb the quality ladder, particularly in respect of speakers. For my part I built cabinets for Jordan Watts Modules in the '70s which I only dismantled a couple of weeks ago with a view to re-building into something smaller.

These odd designs in cast steel could originally be bought in ceramic studio pottery speakers of all things. Slightly later I built a turntable using a Connoisseur kit and SME 3009 arm which I still regard as a beauty to look at and still have tucked away in its original box. This was all of £62.90 when bought in the '70s. Never being able to afford the early Quad amp and pre-amp I bought a Sinclair System 2000 Mark 2 which looked the business in my view but was pretty useless. Still have that as well. Having worked up to something better in the '80s all my kit apart from that already mentioned was stolen and I never went back to decks and visible equipment and built cupboards to conceal amp (Audiolab 8000A) cassette deck , CD player and radio. The speakers (Monito Audio) are also behind opening doors. Not the best arrangement acoustically but am happy that the equipment does not dominate the room.

Much fun has been had along the way although my biggest regret was never buying a Linn Sondek when I could have afforded it. My other regret was letting go of some of my vinyl, particularly my smallish collection of early jazz that I had been building up when I worked near Mole Jazz in Kings Cross. Incidentally, It is interested to recall some of the Linn adverts of the '70s and '80s which would probably be regarded as sexist now!

At this point I feel I have to throw the Not the nine o'clock news hi-fi shop sketch.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvswW6M7bMo

In the early 80s when as a student I was working for a yacht builder in Lymington, I shared a house with a South African guy who was a complete hi-fi obsessive. He had a good system, with a quad amp and kef speakers and really wanted to get a Linn Sondek LP12 to complete the set up. Lo and behold, we sold the company demonstrator J29 racing yacht to the boss of Linn Products. The boat was re-named Lingo and went up to the Clyde (where it is still winning races). Doug went up and helmed the boat in the Tomatin Trophy that year; the customer was delighted with his performance, and he was rewarded with an LP 12 for a fraction of the market price.

Amazing piece of kit.

Think I’ve gone the other way and simplified things down to a Naim Muso and a QB.

Way back in University I had the classic Dual cs505, NAD 3020a and a set of Bose Studiocraft speakers as my set up. Most of my pals used Mission 700s but I stuck with the Bose.

Then life struck...and money had to be spent on needs not wants and I never really got back to HiFi.

Giles, this is a nasty sketch and a nice story about the LP12. The sketch captures the zeitgeist of the seventies and eighties, as well as the arrogance (of the "knowing" caste) on the one hand and the complete overstrain of many customers on the other hand at that time. In the hifi area I used to get to know some types of salesmen, some of them were terrible, of course there were also competent and trustworthy salesmen.
But nowhere else were and are there so many possibilities to play the keyboard from the sober electrical engineering and mechanics on the one hand to the left-handed snake oil, from which you put a drop on the speaker membrane at full moon.

I only wanted 3 things when I was in my teens
Sex (obviously)
A car
A hifi and record collection
Not sure what has replaced the 3rd one these days.

Surely if you had the first two as a teen, you wouldn't have any need for the third?

As a teen, all I needed was a motorbike. That got me sex, and the hifi was an inline four and straight through pipes