Been following the forum for a while and the time came to write my first post. I've been bitten by the HiFi bug and gravitated to early 80's mini-systems and portable devices like walkmans and boomboxes. Nothing fancy/expensive or high-end - just came to appreciate great retro design and eighties ingenuity.
Welcome! At one time there was a bunch of equipment coming from your part of the world, some of it was new old stock, still in the box!
Well, I've started to get interested in this field quite recently, no sight of NOS at the local online selling platform (www.olx.pt), and I tend to run away from eBay as both prices and shipping costs are (generally) prohibitively high. Having said that, I had some nice deals on eBay coming from European countries, mainly Germany and France. Also, I quickly decided on the HiFi niche I wanted to explore and so am happily unaware of good deals on things other than mini setups from the early eighties.
Hello and welcome to the forum, @Gonçalo Dumas ! I remember I read a lot on this forum before joining and making my first posts. I'm also interested in 80s, 90s and early 2000s technology: being it walkmans, portable recorders, portable CD players, DAT recorders and DAPs. I seem to like portable devices the most... I'm more or less interested in all of the categories mentioned and also in new HiFi technology, especially DAPs, headphones, DACs and amplifiers. What is interesting from my point of view is nowadays, with almost perfect quality digital soruces, old formats (especially the compact cassette) can be put much more into value than back then. With properly calibrated recorders, new old stock tapes and lossless digital soruces one can enjoy the highest aspect of what a tape can achieve. In what type of equipement are you into the most ?
Hi. I must admit I’m an awkward dude, I love these devices the most because of their design and ingenuity, rather then audiophile or high end performance features. Overall this is a hobby and I have a very limited budget. I’m happy listening to Monteverdi on YouTube, really happy. Having said that, I was born in the seventies and hi-fi was the best thing you could have if you liked music. One of the dearest memories was making my own tapes on my father setup to then listen to them in a non-Sony Walkman or a mono computer tape device. And I do remember the desire of owning (dreaming of, that is) the latest Sony Walkman or the latest hi-fi setup, of of any catalog I could get my hands on. Right now, I’m into these aiwa mini compo setups. I just love them, they are great devices or check all my present requirements . Also, somewhat cheaper then the big sellers like marantaz, pioneer and sansui receivers, etc.. Even tough modern devices may be highly superior in everything, they just don’t have the same appeal to me. I’ve placed it in another thread in this forum, but I guess this is the right place to picture my current man cave layout: [GALLERY=media, 1677]Man Cave by Gonçalo Dumas posted Jun 16, 2021 at 9:47 AM[/GALLERY]
Nice looking man cave. I must admit for me it’s always about the music and how best I can get the reproduction. I do like to look at these old equipment’s, but collecting them do not interest me. The maintenance and the space they take up is a put off for me. Everything I have is functioning and used, else I don’t have it. Equipment’s is just the means to an end, the end being getting good reproduction.
The models are pretty cool as well. Are they Lego or something else ? Back in the 1970s my friend had the Airfix, Saturn V https://www.amazon.co.uk/Airfix-A11170-Apollo-Saturn-Plastic/dp/B002B555WA You could undo the different stages to take the Lunar module out, which was tiny compared to the main rocket.
Nice set up, at first I thought they were full size components. I'm a big fan of the mini-stereos but sadly they didn't do as well in the USA, we wanted all of our stuff huge back in the 70's and I think the tiny stereos just didn't sell good but the boomboxes did. I've been posting a lot of ads for the mini-systems in the newspaper ads thread.
Hi, they are all Lego. And all great sets of the space theme, highly recommended. The Saturn V is my favourite, all stages and all configurations are available (except the cowlings that cover the lunar module, I don't know if those were jettisoned or had a hinged. Here you have to remove them).
Yeah, I've read elsewhere in the forum those same explanations. And I get it - bigger should logically be better.
Thing is, I guess you can never reach perfection. Not even spending a fortune on equipment, space layout optimization, the lot.. there's always something else you had to do to get to perfection. So I just bail out and content with "simplistic pleasure", LOL. Some years ago Techmoan had a video on the Seiko 5 series, its like that, I like the equilibrium between reality and engineering/ingenuity.
