Vintage solid state amps
I like vintage amps (pre 80s) for their looks, sound and feel. They have their charm as pieces of antique “furniture” (decorative stuff we use every day) look great with vintage or retro styled loudspeakers and when recapped sound great too.
But although the vintage amp market is probably one of the strong holds in vintage electronics, it seems to start suffering a from ‘feature deterioration’.
I get it that people want to hook up a turntable, but tape playback and tape recording fell into obscurity of an extreme niche market.
Integrated tuners (and seperate tuners in set); count on a near to zero market value soon. Fm disappeared from the cable her in the Netherlands to free bandwidth and there are no reasonable workarounds to keep a vintage tuner functional. So prices dropped from hundreds to 20 euro’s for even free give-always of full functional separate tuners. It also means that a gigantic and heavy amp flagships with an integrated tuner, (which is 50% tuner )will risk more failure from its almost literally “bricked” components. In the end owning a fm tuner will be something like owning a telegraph set.
If we also single out features like loudness buttons, balance control and treble and bass control as being highly important..
What’s basically left of it all is an amp that we switch on and off and of we admire as a piece of art or slight sound signature differences. I could be on that side of vintage amps.
A new threat to vintage gear is the active speaker market. But it still needs loads of time before passive speakers will be vintage as well.
Modern amps
I also really like the sound of my Yamaha Wxa50 amp as much as the vintage sound of Quad and Pioneer. The integrated streamer instead of an integrated tuner, the p&p options, option to turn it on/off and fully control it with the app. And that it is a power amp and hidden pre-amp. I was surprised that I could make it serve a classic amp from aux out; the only difference with its pre-amp version(Wxa50) is the volume control.
Wondering about your input
I like vintage amps (pre 80s) for their looks, sound and feel. They have their charm as pieces of antique “furniture” (decorative stuff we use every day) look great with vintage or retro styled loudspeakers and when recapped sound great too.
But although the vintage amp market is probably one of the strong holds in vintage electronics, it seems to start suffering a from ‘feature deterioration’.
I get it that people want to hook up a turntable, but tape playback and tape recording fell into obscurity of an extreme niche market.
Integrated tuners (and seperate tuners in set); count on a near to zero market value soon. Fm disappeared from the cable her in the Netherlands to free bandwidth and there are no reasonable workarounds to keep a vintage tuner functional. So prices dropped from hundreds to 20 euro’s for even free give-always of full functional separate tuners. It also means that a gigantic and heavy amp flagships with an integrated tuner, (which is 50% tuner )will risk more failure from its almost literally “bricked” components. In the end owning a fm tuner will be something like owning a telegraph set.
If we also single out features like loudness buttons, balance control and treble and bass control as being highly important..
What’s basically left of it all is an amp that we switch on and off and of we admire as a piece of art or slight sound signature differences. I could be on that side of vintage amps.
A new threat to vintage gear is the active speaker market. But it still needs loads of time before passive speakers will be vintage as well.
Modern amps
I also really like the sound of my Yamaha Wxa50 amp as much as the vintage sound of Quad and Pioneer. The integrated streamer instead of an integrated tuner, the p&p options, option to turn it on/off and fully control it with the app. And that it is a power amp and hidden pre-amp. I was surprised that I could make it serve a classic amp from aux out; the only difference with its pre-amp version(Wxa50) is the volume control.
Wondering about your input