Audiophile Quality Vintage Gear Vs Modern Audio Equipment

When I was eleven years old my mom had a friend with whom she’d visit fairly frequently – Hilda. To prevent me from burning down the house in her absence she’d generally take me along to Hilda’s house, where I was unceremoniously dumped on Hilda’s son, John. John was perhaps 18 years of age at the time, and the very last thing he wanted was to be lumbered with a fidgety 11-year-old carrot top like myself.

John was an avid audiophile. His way of ‘entertaining’ the little carrot top for an hour or two was to plonk me down on the carpet between two behemoth
loudspeakers and say “now shut up and listen to this”. I recall only a few things from the experience. His record player was weird-looking. It had wires, pulleys, a counterweight, and other contraptions that I’d never seen before. Our record player at home must have been better than his because we could stack multiple singles onto it and it would play them all automatically. His thing with all the wires and pulleys didn’t seem able to do that. Then I recall seeing various boxes here and there, all of which seemed to be interconnected by heavy wires and cords. Our record player at home, well, it was just one box, far superior to John’s system of multiple boxes of clutter.

But mostly I remember listening to music that, at the time, made little or no sense. The year was 1973. The Sweet had just released their hit single ‘Blockbuster’, and it was riding high at the top of the charts. I was glued to the images of Brian Connely et al on ‘Top of The Pops’ each Thursday night at 7 pm. The Glitter Band, Marc Bolan, and T-Rex, Mud, etc, were the bands catching my attention as a snot-nosed kid. But John wasn’t playing the same stuff that I was hearing on the radio and seeing on television. And he wasn’t playing the same stuff that I was hearing played on our record player at home. There was no Andy Williams, Mario Lanza, or Englebert Humperdink at John’s house, nor was there any ‘popular’ music of the day, like Mud and The Sweet.

What John would play for me on his ‘system’ was a peculiar blend of mostly instrumental music from bands like Kraftwerk, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Camel, and Tangerine Dream. When I’d ask for: “something more like what was on the telly”, he’d play me music from Queen, Led Zeppelin, and even the Canadian band, Rush. Thanks to John, by the time Bohemian Rhapsody was thrust upon the world in 1975, I was already familiar with all of Queen’s albums: Queen, Queen II, and Sheer Heart Attack. Not just the chart hits like ‘Killer Queen’ and ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, but the obscure album tracks like ‘Great King Rat’ and ‘Ogre Battle’.

Around 1978/9, John took me along to see my very first live band. The band was Thin Lizzy and they were playing at Bingley Hall in Stafford, Birmingham UK. I remember the leather, the lights, the weird-smelling smoke, the crazy people in the audience, the LOUD music. I wasn’t quite ready for the ‘live’ scene but it got me into some heavier music nevertheless.

When I turned sixteen my parents gave me a small check from an insurance policy that had matured on my sixteenth birthday. It was probably only a couple hundred dollars but I went straight to the equivalent of Best Buy and picked out a stereo system made up of ‘separates’. The biggest speakers I could afford were some huge things from Goodmans. The rest of the system was Technics – an integrated amp, a cassette deck, and a turntable with strobe – I’d arrived.

I was around 20 years old when I bought my first decent rig, separates from Arcam and a pair of Monitor Audio speakers. A year or two later I’d stepped up to Epos ES14’s, Linn LK1-LK2-75, and a Sondek LP12 with Ittok. Later, a modest Phillips CD player was replaced with a state-of-the-art Cambridge Audio CD2. Now bear in mind that this was still before the days of the internet and easy access to used gear. So everything I’d bought up to that point had been new and from my local dealer. I was still living in the UK, where the markets for used gear were quite small and access to the ‘good stuff’ was via one or two small and relatively underground publications. Still, as time went by I got pretty good at finding used stuff and doing a little horse-trading. One of my first respectable scores was swapping a Linn LK2-75 power amp for a pair of elderly Quad ESL 57’s. Later, I found a completely original Leak Stereo 20 power amp with a matching Varislope preamp, at a local garage sale. I paid less than 100 pounds for the pair. They were mint, still in factory boxes and with the original manuals and paperwork. A while later I came across a nice pair of Sonus Faber Electa’s. Not the Electa Amator but the original Electa, quite rare at that time in the UK.

I’ve lots of good memories from the early years of being an audiophile, and some bad ones. I recall returning home from a business trip to the USA to find my home had been broken into. I’d been relieved of my Sonus Faber Electa’s, my Linn amps, and a healthy collection of CDs. The insurance company came through and I was able to buy a new pair of QLN Signature Splifield IIs to replace the Sonus Fabers, and I still have the QLNs to this day.

But from all of the gear that came and went, from my first low-fi Japanese-based system aged 16, through a decade-plus of system building, the most
memorable was the sound I’d enjoyed from the vintage pieces I’d stumbled upon. The Quad ESL 57s were pretty beat up and sparked a little and I couldn’t play them much above 80db. But they sounded magical hooked up to the Leak Stereo 20. The Sonus Faber Electa’s were second only to the Quad’s in capturing midrange magic and sounded amazing hooked up to the relatively underpowered Leak Stereo 20. I recall having a friend stop by one night for a listen to the system, and he was completely taken aback by the sound from the vintage Leak and the aging Electa’s/Quads. He’d heard other versions of my system with modern gear, but he recognized the clearly superior sound playing from the vintage setup. I remember his comment like it was yesterday “Peggy Lee is in the room”.

Less than a year after that memorable listening session I’d moved across the pond to Green Bay, WI, leaving my Quads and 99% of my vinyl and CD collection curbside for the garbage collector. The Quad’s were too fragile to move or to sell, and the music collection was too heavy to justify shipping. The only things that made it with me across the pond were my LP 12 turntable and the QLN Signature speakers. In fact, I’d left all of my life’s material possessions back in the UK, stuff with which I would never be reunited. But that’s a whole different story.

I’d come to the USA on a 6-month work assignment, but I knew early on that I wouldn’t be going back. My UK employers provided me with a generous expense package including the rental of a nice new apartment on the outskirts of Green Bay, money for all of the items required to furnish the apartment, a new car, and a healthy income with fully reimbursed traveling and living expenses. And so, I was fully primed to access the audio gear I’d spent a lifetime drooling over but couldn’t quite reach.

My first weeks in the USA were spent traveling on business and my apartment remained unfurnished and practically empty. I’d purchased a bed, beautiful wall art, kitchenware and utensils, cleaning gear, and stuff for the bathroom, but no couch, TV, chairs, etc, when my first audio purchase landed in the apartment.

On arriving in Green Bay my first real acquaintance was with Jim, the fellow who owned HiFi Heaven in Green Bay. On walking into the store for the first time I was literally like the proverbial kid in a candy store. I’d read about all this gear in the HiFi mags in the UK but I’d never before seen any of it in the flesh. The UK market at the time had been dominated by the likes of Linn, Naim, Arcam, Mission, Monitor Audio, etc, now I was seeing the good stuff (or so I thought) –  Krell, Macintosh, Cary, Audio Research, etc.

Enter The Krell – I’d spent at least a year in the UK lusting after a Krell KAV300i integrated amp, which I’d read about in the UK press and was almost affordable to me, but not quite. The unit sold back them for $3500 USD and 3500GBP. That was a lot of coin. I’d paid half that amount for my LP12. Plus, I couldn’t have bought one locally in the UK, hence no home demo. It wasn’t a risk I’d wanted to take at that time. So the first thing I spotted when I walked into HiFi Heaven in Green Bay was a new/demo Krell KAV300i sitting on the shelf with my name on it. I don’t recall the price being asked, I do recall haggling with Jim on the price and walking out with the unit for only $1750 plus tax. WOW. That was around 1100GBP at the time, less than a third of what I would’ve paid back home. And so it began.

I think Jim and I had a little rapport going, whereby he tolerated my British propensity for haggling in return for my relieving him of some of his older used inventory. So the next thing I bought from HiFi Heaven, only a week or two after purchasing the Krell, was a used pair of Apogee Caliper Signature II speakers. I’d heard about these things back home but never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d own a pair.

Apogee Caliper Signature II

Back at the apartment, I still didn’t have any chairs, but the system was magnificent. (Though I was never happy with the sound of the Krell KAV300i, it wasn’t what I’d expected, in fact, it sounded horrible).

The next few years were spent moving around different homes in the area, getting married, joining the North Eastern Wisconsin Audio Society, and spending a lot of time and money acquiring new/used gear, all while trying to get a new business off the ground. The UK company I’d worked at for 17 years had been sold, actually to a much larger company in Green Bay, where I was living, but in spite of a job offer at the new place, I’d decided 17 years was enough – it was time to do my own thing.

The next decade or so was mostly a blur. From an audiophile perspective, a lot of gear came and went, some good, some bad. Highlights of the period were my being active with the local audio society and getting to meet new people and hear a lot of different equipment. There was Nate, who had a basement full of high-end stuff, including a beautiful pair of Kharma Ceramic speakers. There was Nate’s brother-in-law Greg, who lived in a tumble-down house in the ‘burbs of Green Bay and had a pair of $5000 speaker wires from Purist Audio (Dominus). There was ‘Hoody’, or Professor Gene, he had Martin Logan CLS speakers with Cary tube amps; and Doc, who had Conrad Johnson gear with Magnepans. On the higher end of high was Loki, he’d a custom-built music room with Jadis amplification and Cabasse ‘eyeball’ speakers. These guys were all over the spectrum and I was exposed to a LOT of different gear and a LOT of audio-related banter. It was fairly common to have ‘meetings’ at the time, where we’d all gather in the home of some poor unsuspecting club member and basically drink their liquor cabinet dry and strip their fridge bare, all while talking loudly over whatever piece of music was playing on their high-end rig.

For a quick look at some of the rooms and systems I built between 2000 and 2020, click here.

Vintage Me

It’s now the present day, and at the ripe old age of 59, I’ve had enough.

It has been a blast and a good learning experience, but it’s time to put some of what I’ve learned over the last 4 decades of being an ‘audiophile’ to good use.

We moved from Wisconsin to the South in 2018, and the last 3 years have seen me pretty much start from scratch in terms of audio gear. I decided to clean house when we moved from Wisconsin, so most of the gear I owned at the time was either sold or went into storage, where it still sits. The first item of note that I bought here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, was a nice pair of Dunlavy SC-III speakers. I then picked up a preamp from the long-defunct audio equipment manufacturer, Thor Audio. Later, a nice pair of Thor TPA-60 EL34 based monoblocks joined the preamp, and those wonderful power amps lived with me for quite a while. Gear came and went, including some nice solid-state power from Edge Electronics, some hybrid power from Conrad Johnson, and lots and lots of other stuff. This abundance of gear coming in and out of the place served a duel purpose – it provided ongoing fuel for this little review website, a hobby I’d started back in my days with the Wisconsin Audio Society (NEWAS), and, on the rare occasion where I could resell a piece for a small financial gain, it allowed me to steadily improve the quality of my system, piece by piece. That’s not to say that I do this for profit, mostly when I move something along I’m out the cost of shipping if I’m lucky. But occasionally I do find a rare piece that when resold has netted me a useful gain. That, with cash injected from my own pocket, has allowed me to assemble a pretty good system over a three-year period. But now, I’m ready to settle down and put my feet up and enjoy the music, well almost.

It all comes down to the speakers – I have most of the pieces in place for a good sounding system, but I haven’t been able to settle on an ‘end-game’ set of speakers. I thought I’d never sell the Dunlavy SC-III’s, they’ve been as close to an end-game speaker as I’ve come, given the constraining factors of my listening room (somewhat small and square). But as I nudged up the quality of the supporting gear in my system, I began to feel that the SC-III may have hit a performance plateau and may in turn be constraining the performance of the other gear in my system. So I set about finding new speakers that might allow me to bump up the performance of my rig a notch or two, and in doing so I’ve tried out speakers from Klipsch (Heresy and Klipschorns), Sonus Faber, Dali, and quite a few more, including, most recently, my Spatial Audio X3. Throughout this experiment, I retained the SC-IIIs, and after living with a new speaker for a while I’d always revert back to the Dunlavy’s and decide which of the two I liked better – a controlled experiment, if you like. In all cases, the return of the Dunlavy was welcomed, and the speakers under test would be moved along on the used markets. I don’t generally roll the dice on any new equipment without spending a good deal of time researching it, so it’s very rare that I end up with a real dud. All of the speakers I’ve tried have come with solid strengths and minor weaknesses and there isn’t really anything that I’ve tried that I couldn’t live with, happily, if required to do so, but in all cases, the Dunlavy SC-III was simply a better all-rounder.

From everything I’ve tried, the Klipsch Khorns were among the most impressive, and in so many ways. Big, bold, and dynamic, they do so many things that ‘normal’ speakers cannot do. Their main weakness was the requirement for corner placement, which, I believe, seemed to mostly account for a rather shallow depth of soundstage. I’d been used to having other speakers placed well out into the room, often as much as 78″ from the front wall, and all other speakers had rewarded this placement with a nice deep soundstage pushed well behind the front plane of the speaker. The Khorns projected forwards into the room, and I found it ‘different’ in a way that felt less natural, less ‘audiophile’. With hindsight, perhaps I should have given it more time.

When the Spatial Audio X3’s became available, and within a reasonable driving distance of my home, I began the usual process of doing online research. To cut a long story short – I’d heard Spatial Audio speakers at CAF2019 and liked what I heard. I’m a big fan of dipole speakers, having owned several pairs over the years. All of the reviews I could find of the X series were positive. It was time to act, so I bought them.

It has been around six weeks now since I brought home the Spatial Audio X3’s. Where I’m at with the X3’s in my system can be summed up in one word – frustrated. I believe there’s much potential to be had from the X3, but so far it’s eluding me. I think though I’m far from certain, that the biggest issue is with my room. If that is the case then I’ve made a big miscalculation. My experience of working with dipoles is that they function far more independently of the room than a conventional box speaker. Given that certain constraints are met, like a suitable distance from the front wall, the ability to get some distance between the speakers, the placement of room treatments to catch the back wave, and first reflection points, etc, the dipole design ought to function well. But in my room, they do not. I find the sound amusical. There’s a hardness to the sound – a beaminess in the upper bass lower-midrange frequency range that becomes quite irritating after a short while. I won’t get into it in any detail here, suffice to say that I think these speakers need more room to breathe. [Here’s my review of the Spatial Audio X3]

So What’s Next? – My battle with loudspeakers has caused me to pause my endeavors and step back for some much-needed introspection and evaluation. The key to the next step of this journey is the fact that I sold my Dunlavy SC-III. While I’m still working on the X3’s, and I do hold out some hope that I may finally get them dialed in to my liking, I have to start thinking about the next step.

As part of the preparation for the next step, it’s occurred to me that perhaps my speaker dilemma is part of a bigger issue – what exactly is it that I’m looking to achieve with my system? Is buying/selling equipment the real motivation for being in this hobby, or does the music really come first? Will I ever be truly satisfied with how my system sounds, and if so, what will it take? These are just a few of the lofty questions I’ve been pondering of late.

NEXT ISSUE – WHAT EXACTLY IS AN AUDIOPHILE?