How to Buy a Vintage Stereo That Looks as Good as It Sounds

There has lately been a resurgence in love for the hi-fi. Sales of vinyl records have increased steadily every year since 2006, many American cities now host listening bars, and old-school audio gear is more in demand than it’s been in decades. "I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I’ve probably seen, just for the normal vintage receiver and speakers, the price has probably gone up three to four times," says Steve Messinger, owner of Fly Hifi, a shop in the Sacramento, California, area that specializes in buying, selling, and servicing vintage audio equipment.

A few different factors, I think, have contributed to this. One is a newly reactionary desire for physical equipment, stuff you can push and pull and bop and twist, in a world where everything else is controlled by smearing a finger on a glass screen. The other is that technology has made it much easier to listen to music and other audio: we have access to more of it than ever before, and despite what some might say, it’s available in very high quality. And yet just as we’re marveling at this access, the shameful trends of the 1990s and 2000s removed our means to show it off, to make it a centerpiece. Luckily, this stuff was made well enough that much of it is still out there, sitting on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace and eBay, just waiting for its chance to shine again.

One of the digital revolution’s lesser-mourned victims was the hi-fi. Since the 1920s, when radio took off in the United States, audio—from credenzas with built-in turntables to 8-track players— was the centerpiece of the living room, functioning as both audio and decor. But when music collections migrated from the living room to the home office, where the computer lived, the immediate availability of so much music, and so much of it for free, raced out in front of the hi-fi’s ability to include it.

As physical music disappeared, first into MP3s and later even more fully into streaming services, the physical hi-fi sort of disappeared, too. Audio today comes through battery-powered Bluetooth speakers, aggressively nondescript streaming blobs, or extruded black soundbar tubes mounted above or below or behind TVs. According to subreddits and forums dedicated to discussing speakers, which lately have been anguished over the latest destructive Sonos firmware update, this hardware exists to almost reluctantly do its job. Its ethos is to be heard and not seen. What a bummer!

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way, and many in the home hi-fi space have seen dramatic increases in popularity. People are rediscovering the stereo, but it’s different than it was before.

A nice stereo looks sick

The design element is singularly underappreciated in the hi-fi space. These products, whether they’re a $30,000 Nagra digital audio converter or a $150 receiver from 1974, are gorgeous, and designed to be admired. There are machined steel faceplates, luscious wood-enclosed speakers, sinuously elegant turntables, knobs and buttons and switches and toggles, each with their own (sometimes mysterious) purpose. A nice stereo looks sick, is what I’m trying to say, and to place that at the forefront of home decor is something that’s coming back from a few lost decades.

 As with so many other product categories, a price race to the bottom led to shittier products and lifespans measured in months rather than decades. Obviously a $20 Bluetooth speaker whose Amazon product name doesn’t even have a brand name in it is going to be a worse product in every conceivable way than a 1970s hi-fi system. And that race to the bottom has made it much harder to find a quality product that’s both well-made and nice to look at, unless you happen to be very rich. (This happened with just about everything: sofas, fast fashion clothing, appliances, you can pretty much name it.)

The decline and now resurgence of home audio as decor and furniture in its own right is much more interesting. This has paved the way for new, or at least reimagined, businesses like Common Wave, a combination record store, social listening space, audio showroom, and high-end audio installation service in Downtown Los Angeles. "The whole idea behind Common Wave was to bridge the gap between what seems like an outdated business model when it came to hi-fi, which is like, big box, let’s move these products, give you the specials," says Wesley Katzir, who runs Common Wave. "Instead, I like to think of hi-fi as a design exercise, so we’re crafting custom sounds for our clients."

If you’re buying new, you can get an awfully nice-sounding stereo for around a thousand dollars. But, from a design perspective, there’s much more fun to be had.

Get weird, and go vintage 

"In a nutshell, it’s that old cliche: they don’t make them like they used to," says Messinger, talking about equipment from the 1960s, 1970s, and (to a lesser degree) the 1980s. "Some of the materials they used, like the amount of copper and iron in older transformers, aren’t necessarily sustainable today. If they are found in modern stereo equipment, it’s very expensive." If you’d like to spend under, say, $1,500 all in, you have many more options in vintage than in quality new equipment. And if you’d like to go much cheaper, on the order of a couple of hundred bucks in total, it’s really your only option. But it’s gonna take some work.

"There’s a reason why all this stuff is still here," says Messinger. "It still works, and it’s serviceable." Messinger was hesitant to fully recommend much in particular, because sometimes we’re talking about electronics that are upwards of a half-century old. If you do have a good refurbisher near you, seek them out. If you don’t, there are still some guidelines to follow that will, at the very least, ensure that the broken thing you bought is of high enough quality that it’s worth fixing.

A nice stereo looks sick, is what I’m trying to say, and to place that at the forefront of home decor is something that’s coming back from a few lost decades.

Finding a good vintage receiver for an outrageously low price, at, say, a flea market or garage sale, is less common than it used to be, largely because people can now very easily look up what they have and price it accordingly. One tip for finding the good stuff: look at the front of an amplifier. "The easy answer is typically a silver face versus black," says Messinger. This is a shorthand to date an amplifier or receiver: the faceplates, with all the fun knobs and buttons and stuff, were most commonly silver in the 1960s and 1970s, and moved to black, and then black plastic, in the 1980s and 1990s.

One issue when looking for vintage receivers and amplifiers is that vintage doesn’t mean good; you’re looking for the best models, not just an old one. This will, unfortunately, require some research. Forums like Reddit, Audiokarma, and Head-Fi, and databases like HiFiEngine, are all of use here. An amplifier doesn’t have to be powerful to be good, but in vintage, most of the good ones were pretty powerful. Output will show up on the spec sheet on HiFiEngine as watts per channel: 20 watts per channel would be quite low; 100 would be very high. (Theoretically, you could run into an issue with impedance, which measures how hard it is to deliver power, but really only in a situation like a vintage amplifier, new speakers, and volume high enough to be considered evidence for an eviction notice.)

Speakers are trickier. Messinger notes that his personal preference is for American-made speakers from the 1970s, from makers like JBL and Klipsch. Other great brands: Acoustic Research (AR), Cerwin-Vega, Advent, and Dynaco. Here, though, you’re looking at another "Google the model name and dive into the forums" situation, as it’s often near-impossible to tell at first glance whether you’ve got a top of the line or a budget model.

Whether you’re going new or vintage, you’ll need a media streamer. On the higher end, Katzir raves about the Bluesound Node, which costs $500, but packs in features including amazing audio quality, Ethernet for faster connections, voice controls, and all sorts of other stuff. On the budget side, the WiiM Mini ($90) offers most of the Bluesound’s features, albeit with fewer connectivity options. Either of these will work with any of your existing services: AirPlay, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, podcast apps, you name it. (If you’re interested in goofier options, look into a used Apple AirPort Express or Google Chromecast Audio, or screw around with a Raspberry Pi.)

Will it work...?

The big problem with buying vintage is, well, this stuff is old as hell, and who knows if it works? If you’ve got the money and a good shop like Messinger’s, you can get an amplifier and speakers fully refurbished: that means everything, hundreds of components, taken apart, cleaned, and replaced if needed with parts that are hard to find and increasingly expensive. This is likely to cost a lot. It’s actually very similar to the theory of reupholstering a used couch: The only time it’s worth it, really, is if the used item is a top-of-the-line product.

Top photo courtesy of Marc Tielemans/Alamy Stock Photo

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