Akihabara pre-gaming

Makes sense, reminds me of how the car manufactures slap a different brand name on their luxury cars. Love that hall of recording concert pic. Would of made a great skit on sctv.

 

Be nice to find some decent books of a place during the decades, I did find a nice website of various places in Tokyo during the 1960s (so probably the same ones you have seen), for example here is the Hachiko exit of Shibuya station cira 1961



And a ariel view down the Shibuya shopping area.. seems so bare and empty.



Here is the website.

You will be on a map page with lots of photo icons.

Clicking one will bring up a picture and some information, clicking the picture will give you a larger picture and some history. Clicking the link after the historical information will bring you back to the map.

Scroll the map like most other maps by clicking and dragging, there are a lot of photos so you can drag around mostof the Tokyo area. Zoom in and out (only 2 levels) with the + and -

The slider bar on the left is the interesting bit as you can overlay the current map of the Tokyo area. Top will give you old map, and bottom will give you current map (with English names), half way will change transparency.

 

lol..no 109 back then :110:

 

Oh yeah, we used to have a receiver made by German company ITT (now part of Nokia I believe). It had a automatic (servo controlled) tape deck as well, not those rubbish mechanical "piano key" ones.
Everything had a "Made In Japan" badge on the front, a sign of quality even today imo. Pictures below:

http://itt.pytalhost.eu/itt80/itt80-20.jpg
http://itt.pytalhost.eu/itt80-1/itt20.jpg
http://itt.pytalhost.eu/itt80-1/itt25.jpg
http://itt.pytalhost.eu/itt80-1/itt42.jpg

Source: http://wegavision.pytalhost.com (the site is in German and there are a few pop-up ads).

 

wow..great site. remember some of the adds from my childhood

thanx^^

 

Yeah that site is full to bursting with product brochures and the like. The early colour TV's and VCR's from Europe are quite interesting also.

 

VMS do you have a link to the entire article? I'm sure it's probably in japanese, but it would be nice to look over the whole thing.

 

It's an english-language magazine. The article is just about "audio fans" - I thought the pics of akiba were nice & unusual. The text is pretty boring. Perhaps I'll re-scan and post the whole thing with text. It's only a few pages.

 

Cool stuff! Thanks for sharing! :icon_bigg

Heck, yeah, man. Our family stereo was around as long as I can recall and it was mostly technics components. My mom still has the turntable and it works (as far as I can tell) every bit as good as it did when I was a wee lad.
-ud

 

Well Sir, if you and I lived closer to each other, I would love to have an awesome audio evening with you and my neighbour who is an audiophile just like me, and well let us just say there would be LPs flying and what not, and only MP3 files, if he didn't have it on LP , CD or minidisc and tape. And the genres would be anything from classical music to iron Maiden, so there are some young (relatively young) who are still audiophiles

 

Had something similar some month ago with a friend. Only old electro on records was allowed :lol:

 

interesting pics, cheers

 

I visited a Bang and Olufsen in Akihabara, Hi-Fi is still there.

 

B&O are for RICH people, not the common guy and also I would NEVER in my life call a B&O sound system for Hi-Fi. To me most of B&O´s stuff now a days, is over priced pieces of shit, based on components that they have not made at all. And the only high about their systems are the price. Give me any day of the week some Dali loudspeakers (which I already have two off) and a nice NAD receiver or amp for that matter with a good CD player and so forth, and then I am golden. Please do NOT compare B&O to High Fidelity when it does not deserve being called that. And also their business policy is insane, if you come from an area which is known to be a crime infested area, then they will not deal with you, not even if you pay in cash. That is fucking discrimination when it is worse in Denmark and B&O are so-called Danish Icons. Fuck I would rather choose Jamo or Dali, and they are Danish products too. And my Dali 7 A (looks the same as the picture) speakers are great and better than B&O.

 

Interesting, I always saw an audiophile as a pursuer of quality. Never thought of just playing with older formats just because. Although my girlfriend has taken a liking to LPs recently, specifically Bowie - she even bought a player to play them. I'm more a flac man myself. ;-)

 

And I'm a sooooooul man! So, for me the odd bit of vinyl here and there is almost essential. A lot of music is still not re-issued on CD (for whatever reason), so a lot of the time vinyl is the only option.
I also listen to a lot of House music as well, so again there's only vinyl for the older stuff. I like the huge covers with the nice big artwork as well, got me thinking about starting a LaserDisc collection, just because of that!

As for B&O, their TV's were pretty good back in the day, and for most of the 90's. Indeed their stuff was very expensive, and you could buy similar specification TV's in Europe from the likes of Philips, Hitachi and Salora. I always thought the Hi-Fi gear was a bit too much style over substance, much prefer a chunky separates system with some decent floor-standers (room size permitting).

 

Oldgamingfart: High Fidelity is a seperate parts system, or at least that is what I see HIFI as. which mean you have your amp, you have your turntable, your CD player, and your speakers and so forth.

 

It depends on what the parts are made of.

If it's all analog gear (tube amps and the like) then yeah.

If it's just home consumer level digital stuff, an integrated system can be just as good (or better) due to the shorter paths.

-hl718

 

Can any hardcore vinyl heads answer this question for me?

I heard recently that 99% of all current vinyl releases are just the digital source transferred to vinyl. High end audio fans consider that to sound actually worse than MP3 or CD, because it comes from the same source. Is this really a big debate?

Mastering an analog vinyl record straight from an analog master recording seems to be the way to go, but most music these days isn't recorded using analog equipment, with some exceptions. Re-issues of old records, however, are being watched closely by fans. Only some of them are coming straight from analog, while others are using digital remasters. Apparently Japanese record labels are still doing a much better job reissuing old records staying within the analog pathway.

 

Well from what I understand of the subject, it's a difficult and subjective debate that depends on what qualities of a recording you consider to be most important.

Most modern day original audio recordings are usually made at 24bit I believe but the red book standard for audio cds (which is what plays in a normal cd player) is 16bit meaning you are losing resolution from the original recording when you choose CD as a medium. Being analog, vinyl is a constant signal and therefore has unlimited resolution so to speak. Vinyl does have other limitations of it's own though (reduced stereo width being one if i remember rightly).

possibly the simplest way to sum the situation up is to say that the different formats have different characteristics which can be better suited to certain types of music.

In repsonce to the first part of your query, a modern day recording that is cut to vinyl is certainly not necessarily inferior to a CD version, in many cases the result can be considered superior if the music is better suited to the format (Vinyl for example tends to have a warmer feel to the low end in my opinion).

I think in the case of an old analog recording being reissued on vinyl, there is a reasonable argument for using the original, untreated analog source as it's the only way to replicate the sound of the original commercial release (the vinyl that was originally available that is). this makes sense from a nostalgia point of view for people who used to own that record. If on the other hand, you are an original fan who's memory of the material is from listening to the session/performance first hand with your own ears (and not a recording) then personally I feel that you'd be better off using a carefully treated 24bit digital remaster (itself created from the analog source) as this resolution is arguably sufficient and todays audio processing tools may well (in the right hands) restore a lot of color to the sound that could have been lost in the original analog recording process due to technical limitations of the time.

So... if your master is a CD or a piece of vinyl in the first place, using it to create the opposite format is a poor plan as it's native limitations have alreay been imposed (and you'll end up with the combined limitations of both). If however we're talking about an original analogue recording (analog reel, etc) or a modern day digital recording (24bit) as source material then you can make a decent job of creating either a CD or Vinyl version but they'll each add their own characteristics to the end result.

as stated though, I see this as a hugely subjective area and others could well counter much of the above with equally valid points. I'm interested in this too (as you might have noticed) so do weigh in and correct me if you know something I don't.

I think there is a lesson for me here about drinking coffee after midnight and then sitting down to lurk around assembler :icon_bigg