Vintage muscle cars, old stereo receivers, speakers fromthe ‘60s, and other cool relics are enjoying a resurgence. But are they betterthan the new stuff?

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Having been ateen during the 1960s, I became very enamored with audio gear and muscle cars.I owned some classic examples of both. I had my share of tube electronics, theobligatory Big Hi-Fi Speakers, and I even raced big-block Fords at the dragstrip. (Never on the street, of course; certainly not. Cough.) Those of us who livedduring this period often had a love of cars and hi-fi that could make a Venndiagram that looked like a total eclipse.

Vintagemuscle cars are works of art, and I love them. But despite their lofty performancereputations, hyperbolically augmented with the passage of time, they were slugsby today’s standards. The nicest muscle car I owned was a new ChapmanAutomotive-tuned black 1969 Mustang with a 428 cubic inch engine. It had noluxury options, but it had every performance option offered that year. It ran a14-second-flat ¼ mile, which is, shockingly, the same as a pedestrianVolkswagen Passat V6 or a recent Nissan Altima. My Mustang rattled, handledpoorly, and got around 11 mpg on leaded premium. It was unreliable,uncomfortable, it reeked of raw gasoline, yet I loved it and I wish I stillowned it. Most performance cars of that era were similar in that as cool asthey were, they weren’t very good machines.

1969 Classic Ford Mustang Muscle Car

In contrast,over the past twenty years, I’ve owned four new cars capable of running 11.6 to13.2-second ¼ miles. They all have yielded 25-33 highway mpg, and they’ve doneit safely and reliably. Recently I read that the 2016 Mercedes AMG GLA45 SUV,with a diminutive 2-liter, 4-cylinder engine, will be rated at 375 horses. Thecurrent 355 horsepower model does 0-60 in a scant 4.2 seconds and the ¼ mile in12.8 seconds, which is faster than anystock vintage muscle car, whether it be a 426 Hemi Challenger, Yenko L-72Camaro, L-88 427 Corvette, or Boss 429 Mustang. Newer may be better, but notnecessarily cooler, and I’ve found this also applies to audio gear.

I belong to afew vintage audio pages on The Interwebs. I expected to see posts of coolaudiophile pieces from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, and yes, there have been manyinteresting posts featuring the better components of the era. But much of theactivity features yard sale, thrift store, pawn shop, and found-at-the-curbfive-buck junk. And, truthfully, even many of the most respected vintage pieceswere terribly flawed and of laughably poor quality. Like classic muscle cars,vintage audio gear is truly wonderful, magical, lovable stuff, but theperformance is, on average, way below what you can buy new today. (There is onecategory that is a notable exception, and we’ll look at that one later.)

Loudspeakersfrom the ‘50s and ‘60s ignored many of the laws of physics, but so what, aslong as they were made with real walnut! Big speakers with 15” woofers rarelyextended much below 50 or 60 Hz. The woofers used flimsy paper cones, stampedbaskets, small-diameter voice coils, and inefficient “Alnico V” magnetstructures. Tolerances weren’t tight. Enclosures were not considered especiallyimportant, and they were generally made of cheap pressboard or even plywood. Thecabinet walls were often thin and resonant, and rarely was any internal bracingused. If any acoustical material was used in the enclosure, it might have beena small bit of cheap batting or fiberglass, but not enough to control the backwaves within the enclosure. Those unmitigated back waves, unabsorbed, tended toexit the enclosure through the undamped walls or, even worse, through the paperspeaker cones, adding to distortion. The worst offenders were the big, cheapJapanese speakers, but American loudspeakers weren’t much better. In fairness,of the Japanese speakers of the period, Yamaha, Onkyo, and Pioneer had some reallydecent products, especially at the top of their lines.

Vintage Pioneer Speakers

Drivers ofvintage speakers were usually attached to the enclosure with wood screws,something you won’t see even in a modern entry-level speaker. Crossovers hadelectrolytic capacitors in the signal path, right up until (and after) WalterJung published his seminal papers on distortion in cheap caps. Electrolytic andceramic disc capacitors had poor tolerances over time, and generally had harshersound, possibly due to saturation. Sometimes three and four-way speakers didn’teven have crossover circuits; they just had a single capacitor on each mid andtweeter to filter out lower frequencies at 6 dB/octave. One of the most famousthree-way speakers in history utilized the woofer full range, high-passed themidrange, and then high-passed the tweeter. Throughout the midrange, all threedrivers were simultaneously reproducing the same frequencies, and the resultwas an annoying, blurred mess. My friend Scott Lowell has made it his missionto modify vintage Bose, Infinity, and JBL speakers by replacing the caps (and evensome drivers) with higher-quality components, yielding better sound. Wecertainly have learned a great deal over the past decades.

Midrangedrivers and tweeters ignored physics by being placed randomly on their baffles,disregarding the acoustical interaction among the drivers. Multiple midrangedrivers, placed next to each other, or even a foot apart, inducedcomb-filtering effects. Often baffles were recessed with as much as a half-inchlip around the edge, which caused diffraction, which is, (duh), called edge diffraction. Beyond tuning theenclosure to the resonant frequency of the woofer, not much real engineeringwent into the design of many vintage loudspeaker enclosures.

There weremanufacturers who did try to address some of these acoustical and electricalissues. In the early 1960s, Wharfedale used a double wall enclosure for many oftheir loudspeakers, and filled the void between the outer and inner walls withsand to damp the enclosure. This worked very well, and I’m a bit surprised thistechnique isn’t used more today. (Please note that I did not say “dampen” theenclosure, because that would have meant making it wet. Damp ≠ dampen.)

Over theyears, I’ve owned dozens of speakers, some of which are considered classicvintage. I owned a pair of Altec A7 Voice of the Theater horn speakers in theearly ‘70s. They were used as P.A. speakers for one of my working bands, andthey did a very nice job in that application. On a rare off week, I wrestledthem up into my apartment, salivating in anticipation, and hooked them up to myvintage Dynaco tube electronics, expecting them to handily outperform the two LargeAdvents I owned at the time. Instead, I was shocked at how horrible the Altecssounded. They had no bass extension (60 Hz at best), no treble extension (12kHz at best), and they possessed a forward, harsh midrange, something that canbe confirmed by looking at their frequency respon

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