inquiry

> They make all kinds of stuff to this day. I loved the > design of Marantz hardware until I discovered Cambridge > Audio, but Marantz (to me) encapsulates the GOOD parts of > 1990s design architecture/language, or whatever. I STILL > want a vintage Marantz tape deck from the 80s (hard to find > (one that works anyway)). Pioneer is gone, I think. Made > the coolest looking stuff though, for sure.

Fascinating.

I was talking Marantz in the late 1970s, actually, and for me that sort of “big components” stuff seemed already passe (aka “lame” aka “whatEV”) by the 1990s.

Wish I could remember what brand CD player I favored. All I know is it supported pushing a set of six CDs sitting in a cartridge into its frame, allowing selecting any track of the six CD... or just having it play through them all. (It was programmable in various ways, but I don't remember the details.)

That was super handy, especially for favorites, because then I could just grab one or a few of those cartridges for road trips, extracting them one at a time as needed for the single CD car player without having to worry much about any of them getting damaged.

I still have all those cartridges (I believe I had at least 10...). One of these days I hope to go through them all.

Saying that reminds me of the trade off between doing this (“blogging”) and doing that.

> MacIntosh makes INCREDIBLE looking (and sounding, probably) > stuff, but it is almost too “in-your-face”/over > the top, for me. Also, comes at a price. But, the > aforementioned Cambridge Audio is stuff a normal person can > actually afford, and I may opt for an AXR-25 unit someday, > as it is display-less, kinda “modern vintage” and just > what I need (and affordable, too).

I long ago concluded utility was what was most important to me. I never needed to impress anyone with gear, and realized my ears were likely not good enough to appreciate finer (read: more expensive) spectral differences... and of course just because the audio processing portion is better in that way doesn't mean one's speakers are... or one's headphones... earbuds... and then listening context is even bigger than that, e.g. extraneous noise of all varieties. <exhales hard>

And then I was mostly a Beatles fan anyway, and their stuff mostly wasn't engineered for the playback wherewithal details to matter much. So....