Honestly, aging capacitors and cracked motor drive belts aside, a complete hi-fi is a thing of beauty. And it’s supposed to be, hence the showy front and glass case to keep the dust off.

I’m no audiophile, but with refurbished power supplies, updated noise reduction* & EQ, and modern speaker technology, that setup would be an old media blasting beast.

* - for the uninitiated, or if you’re old enough to smell OP’s photo, the way tape-hiss intrudes on music is just hot garbage by today’s standards. So, having a way to mitigate it would be strongly advised.

The audio equivalent of having a homelab

No RTR? Noobs

I grew up with vacuum tube TV, (we got one channel, maybe a second if the weather was right), and reel to reel tape players.

I still remember the TV not working and my Father pulling it away from the wall and removing the back to look for the burnt out tube. Then since this generally happened on a Friday evening, (no Saturday cartoons), we had to wait until Monday to drive into town and go to the drug store to test and search for a replacement tube.

When I got to be a teen, I remember listening to the local am rock radio station and waiting for hours for the latest hit to come on so we could record it on a portable cassette recorder. Both my sisters spent many evenings doing that. We were sailing the high seas of piracy before it even existed.

Ahhh, those were the days. I’m so glad we don’t need to do that shit anymore.

I bought a similar set up from a thrift store not long ago, came with the cabinet and everything. $60. The speakers it came with with put my newer tv speakers to shame, and I started building a vinyl collection because of it

Even older, huzzah!

I’m slightly younger so all of that would have been black plastic instead of brushed steel.

My best friend had this (1980s) and he also had something I’ve never seen before or since: an 8-track recorder. We would make mix tapes on the thing and take them to parties - where we were extremely, extremely unpopular because our 8-track mix tapes had shit like Laurie Anderson and Ultravox and Jon and Vangelis songs on them. Also the tapes played back at 125% speed so everybody sounded a bit like the Chipmunks.

Personally, I find the current vinyl craze kind of amusing. I spent the first ten years of my listening life with LPs and the moment I got my first CD player that was the end of that shit forever. The clicks and pops and the physical PITA of taking records out of their sleeves and setting the stylus down somewhere to hear a particular song and then cleaning the record and putting it back was just so incredibly annoying. The only good thing about LPs was (is) the cover art; as a huge Yes fan growing up I should perhaps appreciate that more, but it wasn’t enough to offset the negatives.

I’m not that old, and we were in poverty growing up so didn’t have anything even remotely like this.

But now that I’m older with a decent job, one of my favourite things I’ve bought for myself is a nice stereo system. It feels like such a nice luxury, especially when all my friends rely on tv speakers or Bluetooth speakers

You call that old? It’s got one of those fancy, new-fangled CD players! Not old at all.

Amplifier at the bottom, when it’s the only thing that generates significant heat? Plainly not an audiophile set-up. Should be on top, and the turntable should be off to one side on one of those vibration isolation decks. Kids these days, eh?

Why do you need to hit me like this… Right now i’m fixing my dad’s old telefunken hifi. I’m a lot younger than that generation. But my first taste of music was on that motherfucker with old cassettes and radio…

Fuck how am i nostalgic of a time i only saw the aftermath of?

My dad had a set-up like this because my mom and him used to be DJs. I was forbidden to touch it but, in the 90s, when we had cassette players and CD players as part of a separate cabinet, those were hard to mess up.

So, as a compromise, my dad showed me how to power up all of the amps and receivers to get the cassette or CD player working. At the time we had a massive subwoofer next to our CRT TV and, when the subwoofer magnet messed with the TV coloring, my dad blamed it on our Sega Genesis instead of the sub.

Good times.

Shit, my folks still had their 8 track player when I was a kid, although I don’t remember them using it much in favor of records instead

Look at Mr. fancy-pants having an EQ in his rack.