Setting up your FIRST hi-fi system

this episode is brought to you by roon roon  1.8 is an immersive new music experience   featuring a new look new intelligence and  new features designed for music fanatics   click the link in the description  box below for more information why don't i talk about vintage gear very often  almost never the reason is is that supply and   pricing for vintage gear therefore secondhand gear  is not consistent around the world so for example   an original name nate the little shoebox amplifier  might sell for 500 quid in the uk and there may be   four or five on ebay but in australia there may  only be one and it sells for three times as much   and i don't think it's fair in inverted commerce  to start waxing lyrical about the the wonders   of second-hand slash vintage gear when pricing  and availability around the world vary so much   but i'm gonna make an exception today because  i'm making this video for me not just for   you most videos i make just for you this  one's really for me because i want to take   a trip back to the early 90s 91 92 and i'm going  to assemble piece by piece a secondhand does it   qualify as vintage of its early 90s i guess it  kind of does second hand hi-fi system to show you   on a very very basic beginner level how to connect  all the pieces so you might have inherited some   vintage speakers for example or you may have  seen some in a store that you really really   want to go and buy the first thing to think  about before buying speakers and speakers   other things you should buy first but before  you do that think about how big your room is   i know it's a fairly crude rule and i know that  many pedantic audio engineers will argue the point   but generally speaking if you've got a small room  you want to go for small speakers you've got a   large room large speakers my room is six meters  by five meters it is not large by any stretch   so the vintage early 90s speakers that i  have selected for today's video are these these are the mission 760i i think these came out  in 89 or 90. what's amazing i've only just noticed   this actually is they are made in england so i'm  going to take the grill off pop this grill off got   to be a bit careful not to break the connectors  the plugs there we are now these originally sold   for 120 great british pounds per pair now the bank  of england's inflation calculator tells me that in   modern money that is about 270-ish british pounds  and i paid 129 euros on ebay so about 110 pounds so now when you buy a loudspeaker  secondhand what you want to do is check   that these rubber surrounds haven't sort of rotted  away because this rubber can degrade over time   this one's pretty good this driver  here is called the mid base driver   it's called a driver because it moves air  mid base because it does mid-range and bass   this is a doped paper cone that means it's made  from paper and it's covered in special stuff   and i think it's 13 centimeters below it and  it's quite unusual to have the tweeter below   the mid-bass driver but we won't go there  today there is a two centimeter tweeter   this takes care of high frequencies above what's  called the crossover point because inside here   there's a circuit that splits the signal coming  in from the amplifier between this driver and this   driver the crossover in this speaker is somewhere  between three and five kilohertz so this tweeter   will do everything above that all the way up  to 20 and beyond this mid bass driver will do   everything below that point and it's i  think i think it's three decibels down   at 55 hertz so you can tell it's a kind of small  speaker it's not going to give us a lot of bass   now what loudspeaker designers tend to do when  they've got a box they want to get more bass   extension out of it is they put a port on  it the port on this speaker is on the front   and that helps us somewhat because it means that  we can put this speaker closer to the front wall   now the front wall is not that wall behind olaf  it's the wall there the front wall as you look at   it from the listening position and mission when  they released the speaker back in the early 90s   recommended a minimum distance of i think  somewhere between 10 and 20 centimeters which   is really yeah this is pretty close i position  these much further out into the room than that   but this was my chosen speaker i would say this  is you know this is called a stand mount speaker   because you should really put this on  a stand you can see the one over my   right shoulder here on a stand sometimes  it's called a bookshelf speaker   that's a bit of a misnomer really you should  not put these on bookshelves because you'll   compromise the sound and you want to get them  apart as well stereo separation that's the joy   of having a hi-fi system is having proper stereo  separation that's the number one joy for me anyway   now if we're going to connect this to an amplifier  because we need to because there's no amplifier   inside this speaker we're going to use these  things here now these are called binding posts   and they're called binding posts because that's  you know how they how we bind our loudspeaker   cable because we're going to use loudspeaker  cable now when i first started out in hi-fi   i didn't even know what a banana plug was that's  a banana plug i'll come back to this in a moment   what we would normally do is we get our speaker  cable strip the end and then and we insert it   into the hole in the top behind the  binding post and screw that down here   but this for me is a bit fiddly i tend to prefer  having banana plugs on the end of my cables so   here's one i made earlier the banana plugs  have been attached so i connect that one there   and that one there and notice i'm color matching  red to red black to black because we have to get   the polarity correct if we get these wrong so  if you're using bare wire you really need to   concentrate on you know the corresponding  ends with the amplifier because if you get   these mixed up you get a sound that's pretty  messed up you won't damage anything but it   will sound like some of the music is actually in  your head rather than in front of you between the   speakers that's called being out of phase  we don't want that so we have to make sure   that we get the right  termination into the right socket so now i've got both the mission set up  behind me on atacama nexus 6i loudspeaker   stands which sell for about a hundred and  something euros so now we need an amplifier   i chose the rotel 930ax again  from around 92 91 i think   this is a very very good entry-level amplifier  or certainly was at the time and you notice the   things haven't changed much actually in sort of  entry-level rotels they've still got two sets of   speaker binding posts on the back we're just  going to be using the master set this amplifier   is a good match because it offers us 30 watts per  channel into 8 ohms 50 into 4 and we know that   the mission are six ohm nominal which means they  might dip down a little bit below that but this   amplifier is more than capable of going down to  four ohms which these speakers are unlikely to do   so it should be a decent match well i know it is  decent match because i've already set this up and   i've already had a listen i'll talk more about  that in a moment so now we have to connect our   i'm just using my demo set here my our speaker  cable is to the amp there like that we could use   the bare wire if we wanted to bare wire goes in  here we just loosen these up slot the bare wire in   i want to say a word about speaker cable  here actually just for a moment because   i don't think it's necessarily important that  you stress too much over the kind of cable   you're applying to a system that is sort of  even entry level vintage entry level i am   using audioquest g2 speaker cable it comes off the  spool i think it sells for around three maybe four   euros a meter the most expensive part actually  with this sort of setup is the banana plugs but   you don't have to use them you just have to fiddle  more with bare wire no there is no difference in   sound quality between adding a banana plug or  leaving bare wire on the end i'm using banana   plugs because i connect and disconnect gear  all the time so you can see behind me i've got   two sets of banana plugs waiting for this rotel  amplifier i'm going to connect them into this set   here if you do want to connect another set you can  but you have to make sure i checked this in the   rotel manual that's still online for this amp you  have to make sure that both sets of speakers are   eight ohm nominal so we couldn't run two sets of  mission 760i off this amplifier this rotel 930 ax   we've got tone controls here which  are defeatable volume control   balance control source selector and  a function selector for when you're   tape dubbing i remember doing loads of that in the  80s but not anymore and then the power switch is   here now this amp when it came out sold for 130  british pounds which is about 280 bridge pounds   in modern money according to the bank  of england i bought this for 159 euros   it's a pretty decent integrated amp one thing  i like about this is that i guess it signifies   that we've come full circle really it has a phono  input here i'm not going to be using that because   because this is a 90s system i'm going to be  adding a cd player to this amplifier very shortly   so we have our amp and speakers set up a rotel  930 ax integrated powering a pair of mission 760i   loudspeakers we're in the 90s we're going  to stay in the 90s for our cd player   this is the marantz cd 63 se special edition  this is not the ken ishiiwata edition the ki   that audiophiles like to draw over this is  just the normal special edition which i believe   marantz sold a [ __ ] turn off in the 90s we are  concerned with connecting it to our amplifier   oh yeah before i get to that this sold for 250  quid back in the day which is about maybe just shy   of 500 quid in modern money this one cost  me about 150 euros it does have a slight   issue with uh track skipping which a lot of  these do so if you're buying one of these   just check that it doesn't you know very tiny  little track skips appear every now and again   anyway we've got to connect it i am using  an audioquest evergreen interconnect this   is an analog cable so it is therefore an analog  interconnect sometimes this is called an rca cable   i think the americans call this a cinch cable  whatever they call it we need to make sure that   we get the red connected with the red on the  analog output here and the white with the white   if we get it wrong it's no really big deal it  just means that the channel information will   be swapped that comes out of the loudspeakers if  we get it wrong twice at the other end happy days   but anyway we now have this end  ready to connect to our amplifier uh so so behind me i now have a vintage hi-fi system  from the early 90s three pieces a cd player   an integrated amplifier and stand mount  loudspeakers and together including the stands   for the speakers and the cables that connect them  all together it costs me i think around 600 euros   now you might be wondering why i chose these  specific components the marantz the rotel and   the mission well that's because this is the exact  hi-fi system that i owned in around 92 93 actually   just as i was getting into electronic music i  thought i might be disappointed by the system   sound after so long and also after having heard so  many great hi-fi systems with this job in the last   10 years but actually no i'm not disappointed at  all as you might expect there's not a lot of low   bass but these missions which clearly dominate the  sound here can kick pretty hard when they want to   and there's a lot of very good mid-range  information coming forward i mean coming   forwards in that it really pops forward it really  jumps into the room but i think best of all what i   like most of all about this hi-fi system is its  speed it's extremely fast it makes music sound   very very exciting and engaging and that  engagement is the key word i think that i look for   when i'm assessing a hi-fi system engagement  right and speed of of gear doesn't really   get spoken about enough i don't even know if  there's a measurement that could capture it   i'm not quite sure but that sense of momentum  and forward motion especially from electronic   music like underworld or ultramarine or the future  sound of london but i also think that because the   cd player on its own sounds so smooth why is  it smooth i don't think that's the right word   it's certainly not one of those bright sounding  cd players because i remember when i swapped out   my marantz because it was the last thing i changed  in the late 90s when i swapped it out for an arcam   cd player i was never happy because the r cam was  just brighter and edgier and it just didn't sound   quite as relaxing you know in this last video i  was talking about the lower treble energy stopping   me from sort of relaxing into a system this morant  cd player has it in spades i think it's really   cool the amplifier ties the whole thing together  and even though it's only 30 watts per channel we   barely get past nine o'clock on the volume wheel  mainly i think because the loudspeakers are 89   db efficient what does that mean that means if we  put one watt of amplifier power into the speaker   and we're sitting one meter away from the  front of the loudspeaker if we had an spl   meter we would measure 89 db of spl that's  roughly what it means so it really means like   how much loudness kind of you get from how many  you know how much power goes into your loudspeaker   remember this video is meant to be very  beginner friendly i hope this video inspires you   to go out there and maybe put together your own  vintage hi-fi system or secondhand hi-fi system   because there are some bargains to be had but i  don't talk about it very often because yeah things   can go wrong it's a pain to deal with problems  like if a pair of speakers arrive and one of   the drivers surrounds is rutted that's a pain to  deal with you have to ship it back and deal with   the ebay seller and sometimes they're not always  very accommodating not as much as hi-fi stores are   one final thought the cd player yes i know not  many people are going to be into that these   days my focus here was the 90s obviously there  was no streaming back in the 90s there is now   if i were building this system without a cd player  i would add something like this the elo boss two   player which is a plug and play raspberry pi  based network streamer so it does spotify connect   and kobo's entitle no apple music the analog  comes out of here that's like the back of the   cd player remember how we connected the green  analog interconnect to here well that's what we   do here but we have to connect it to our network  obviously and then we power it on the front as its   display here if you like this video if you found  it useful please hit the like button down below   if you like my attitude towards high-end  audio in that i'm prepared to go off on   i guess tangents not just in the video but in in  my sort of life investigation of hi-fi gear if you   like that then please subscribe to this channel  and as always thank you ever so much for watching

Channel: Darko Audio

Views: 141,261

Keywords: Audio, streaming, High-End Audio, Audiophile, head-fi, porta-fi, sound quality, Darko, reviews, show reports, berlin, techno

Id: iZ6VCzpuG2c

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021