said by dogfish3 :

The UPS man dropped by today with the AT I ordered.

I'm pleasantly surprised! For ~$25, it is a significant upgrade from what I had. Most of you probably won't like my choice of music, but attached are two songs ripped with the new needle. The first one is the first song on the album and the second is the last song on the album.
[att=1]
[att=2]

said by gallowsroad :

Of course, they often fudged the parameters of the measurements in order to gain a strategic advantage in those wars, but when the end result is so monstrously huge and beautifully lit up, who cares? Give me MOAR KNOBS!

said by howie :

Just the opposite is true, at least in the case of Kenwood and Pioneer, among others. These monsters gave true output numbers, as shown above , compared to some of the crap they sell today. They were heavy by necessity. To achieve decent output, huge transformers and filtering capacitors had to be used. Nothing was fudged on the TOTL equipment of the day. I'll agree to disagree.

said by gallowsroad :

I'm content to be wrong, but some of those beasts did not measure up on the bench. And it is undeniably true that the race for more power did lead to a lot of fudging by all of those companies eventually - see the early 1980's models and onward. They got far lighter and smaller, their specs swelled, but their real world power capacity shrank.

Still, must have MOAR KNOBS!

(Yes, I love those beasts too.)

said by dogfish3 :

The UPS man dropped by today with the AT I ordered.

I'm pleasantly surprised! For ~$25, it is a significant upgrade from what I had. Most of you probably won't like my choice of music, but attached are two songs ripped with the new needle. The first one is the first song on the album and the second is the last song on the album.
[att=1]
[att=2]

said by dogfish3 :

Thanks. I'm still tweaking the counterweight and anti-skating to suit my tastes. Not sure if it'll get much (if any) better, but we'll see.

said by howie :

I probably read 1000 Stereo Reviews back then and although they may have been a bit biased at times, they really did do extensive tests on this equipment. I'll agree, at some point in that era that many specifications were worthless such as "1000W Music Power" and the receiver weighed 7 pounds... More knobs and analog meters, please!!!

said by gallowsroad :

"It was often left to me to disassemble them and clean out thirty years of gunk from their guts".

said by howie :

I trust you.
I was just stating that for that era, these units (aside from multi-thousand-dollar top-end audiophile stuff) were excellent sounding, well made, powerful audio equipment that most "average joes" were dying to own.
I did have a pair of Adcom GFA-555II power amps in the mid-90's (sold 'em) that were rated at 200WPC (600W Bridged Mono) at 8 Ohms and had no problems at all driving 2 Ohms all day long. Man, I miss those!
Time to spin some vinyl!

said by gallowsroad :

I had an Adcom 555 (you know what "GFA" stands for, right?) also for a couple of years. Pretty beefy. It lacked speaker relays, so if you left your music playing when you powered it off, you'd get sound for thirty seconds after the switch was thrown as the power supply caps discharged.

said by Steely :

This thread sure has gone off on a crazy tangent....but I'm loving it!!

said by howie :

..and my Sony Elcaset EL-7 (remember the Elcaset?) tape deck.

said by drjim :

As much as I like Kenwood Ham gear, I could just never get into their audio gear. I know it sounds good, but I preferred Pioneer.