Hello Alan,
What's your opinion on vintage receivers (pioneer sx-1250,80,1980)vs new setups?
thank you,
Dave
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Hello David,
Of course the nostalgia factor is very high if you grew up during that era---all that brushed aluminum and big switches. The Pioneers were very solidly built but models that old may have leaky condensors, noisy phono stages (if you still use a turntable) and other internal components whose electrical values have drifted with age, which will compromise their performance.
Solid-state design since then has evolved considerably. For example, the Pioneers of that era used huge amounts of negative feedback in order to get the distortion figures to vanishingly low numbers like 0.003% THD and the like. That design approach is now frowned upon because using high negative feedback may make the amplifier susceptible to oscillation. In fact, one of the units we tested the 1980, I believe (it was huge, with enormous heat sinks and had about 250 watts per channel output) for the magazine I edited (Sound&Vision Canada) was one of the first big solid-state amplifiers that would go into oscillation and audible distortion (it sounded like a rasp in the tweeter) with any highly dynamic input signal. It was a direct-to-disc recording of a Chopin piano work that would trigger the Pioneer. That type of distortion was called TIM (transient intermodulation distortion) and it was nasty.
As solid-state designe advanced, engineers stopped using huge amounts of negative feedback. The phenomenon of TIM was discovered by a Finnish engineer, Matti Otala.
In other words, those old units are fun to look at but don't expect state-of-the-art performance, and I certainly wouldn't pay much money for one, unless you are an obsessive collector.
Kind regards,
Alan Lofft
