Whatever happened to component stereo systems?

[JohnnyTheFox]

Pulled my dads out of the closet and hooked everything up, amp, receiver tuner, cd players, 150 watt speakers only to find out the CD player would only work half the time and the quartz display on the tuner wasn't working.
This thing/s is at a minimum 22 years old if not older and being that its was at the time a high dollar Yamaha it still sounded pretty darn good.
Did a bunch of searching{amazon etc} online and the majority of stuff I come across for sale looks like nothing more than a glorified boombox with removable speakers.
When did this happen and is this what I get for living under a rock for the last 20 years?
Thanks Best Buy........

 

[arglebargle]

Yep The last ten or fifteen years. Probably worth it to get the tuner fixed, but better off to pick up another CD player. Sorta depends on whether your local area still supports electronic repair shops. Yamaha components are pretty decent quality and value, so don't chuck 'um.

I've got an old silver faced Marantz running as a preamp into a Rotel power amp and some Polk speakers.

 

[AzCowboysFan]

Yeah, everything is compact now, but the sound quality is still there.

 

[Fritsch_the_cat]

Ahh, the mispent days of my youth come back to me. I still have a component stereo in my shop out back. I call it Frankie after Frankenstein because I put it together from older, individual components I bought at auctions. I have a whole bank of speakers, 8 of them in fact plus a bass booster.

I occasionally bounce the rubble and let the kids in the neighborhood with their bump bump car stereos know what a real stereo is. Frankie will go to 11.

 

[JohnnyTheFox]

Ahh, the mispent days of my youth come back to me. I still have a component stereo in my shop out back. I call it Frankie after Frankenstein because I put it together from older, individual components I bought at auctions. I have a whole bank of speakers, 8 of them in fact plus a bass booster.

I occasionally bounce the rubble and let the kids in the neighborhood with their bump bump car stereos know what a real stereo is. Frankie will go to 11.

 

[BrAinPaiNt]

When I was in the army I started working on a JVC rig.

Started with the TV. Got a top of the VCR they made (this was back in the early 90's).

Got the Receiver.

Next was the tape deck

Next was the CD player that had a stand alone cd drawer and also had a 10-12 cd cartridge you could pull out and put back in.

All of these components matched in color and appearance. And I could plug the all in and use on universal remote (even the TV and VCR)

At that time for speakers I was using either my guitar amp or my buddies kicker cannon from his truck lol.

A few days before I left I went down to finish the system off by wanting to get the equalizer and a set of speakers.

My mistake was waiting for the last few days but I had to as I was cashing in a month's worth of leave time I had accrued.

So I go in to get the equalizer and they sold the last one that matched the system. So that was a nogo.

Also was going to get a set of Bose speakers but they were out of smaller and mid size ones and only had these monster ones that were out of
the price range I wanted to pay.

So I settled on some midsized Infinity speakers and they still sounded pretty good.

I still have the stereo system in the spare room and the speakers. The TV and VCR are long gone.

But if I would go get some new speaker cables and hook the system back up it would still sound killer.

 

[iceberg]

Yeah, everything is compact now, but the sound quality is still there.

not out of the speakers it's not. i don't care how much you can fit on a phone, the speakers still suck poodonkeys. now that stereo units are getting "bluetooth" so you can slide your music to your home stereo, it's not bad. but the simple fact of the matter is all these things are gone and FM isn't far behind. i've given away 95% of my cd's and threw out what i couldn't give away. just takes up space. if i want nostalgia for sound quality i can reinvest in vinyl but i'm not that much of a audiophile.

the tuners you will need a new one anyway just to integrate "stuff" into it. those doing "pandora" and "spotify" to me are clueless - just give me internet access and ability to type in my own address and don't worry about where i go. but something had to replace:

tape 1
tape 2
cd
vcr
turntable
AUX

for the buttons on the front.

 

[65fastback2plus2]

they still do...you just need to have $$

 

[BrAinPaiNt]

not out of the speakers it's not. i don't care how much you can fit on a phone, the speakers still suck poodonkeys. now that stereo units are getting "bluetooth" so you can slide your music to your home stereo, it's not bad. but the simple fact of the matter is all these things are gone and FM isn't far behind. i've given away 95% of my cd's and threw out what i couldn't give away. just takes up space. if i want nostalgia for sound quality i can reinvest in vinyl but i'm not that much of a audiophile.

the tuners you will need a new one anyway just to integrate "stuff" into it. those doing "pandora" and "spotify" to me are clueless - just give me internet access and ability to type in my own address and don't worry about where i go. but something had to replace:

tape 1
tape 2
cd
vcr
turntable
AUX

for the buttons on the front.

I still keep my CDs and still have probably around 100 tapes (most tapes were sold or went bad and trashed).

And anytime I buy an album online...I almost always make a hard copy on cd....even if the copy is just used in my car. Which I always make cd copies for my car so if they get stolen I won't be out anything.

But I am OCD about my stuff.
I save my music on my phone SD Card, Tablet SD card, my desktop computer hardrive and my wife's laptop hard drive.
It is much faster than losing (going bad) a harddrive or SD Card and having to rip my CDs again.

 

[AzCowboysFan]

not out of the speakers it's not. i don't care how much you can fit on a phone, the speakers still suck poodonkeys..

I wasn't talking about the phone speakers. I say there are plenty of high quality compact home systems available these days if you look around.

 

[iceberg]

I still keep my CDs and still have probably around 100 tapes (most tapes were sold or went bad and trashed).

And anytime I buy an album online...I almost always make a hard copy on cd....even if the copy is just used in my car. Which I always make cd copies for my car so if they get stolen I won't be out anything.

But I am OCD about my stuff.
I save my music on my phone SD Card, Tablet SD card, my desktop computer hardrive and my wife's laptop hard drive.
It is much faster than losing (going bad) a harddrive or SD Card and having to rip my CDs again.

well i pretty much gave 500+gb to my brother and nephew in cd's. i know this because i said they can only have them if they rip them for me. now i put them on 3 different hard drives at a time.

 

[morasp]

I've still got my two channel system and it's impressive. For what it's worth vinyl sounds better than CD audio. I haven't heard the new blu ray audio discs they are coming out with. They probably sound pretty good with the higher sampling rate.

 

[jimmy40]

Damn I'm old, guess I've gone from compact to component to compact again. My first "sound system"

thought it was great till I blew all four speakers listening to "In the Air Tonight". damn those drums. lol

 

[rynochop]

I didn't do home stereo, but man we were in the car audio shops all the time back in the late 80s early 90s. Had all that stuff, Kenwood tape deck, punch amps, kicker speakers, crossovers. Surprised can still hear. I don't know if younger people even fool with that stuff, my 18 year old son has no interest.

 

[TheCount]

Damn I'm old, guess I've gone from compact to component to compact again. My first "sound system"

thought it was great till I blew all four speakers listening to "In the Air Tonight". damn those drums. lol

I still love the physical designs of these things. Nothing beats the feel of actually flipping switches and turning dials. To me, that thing is a piece of art.

 

[trickblue]

Still have my component gear... wife won't let me set it up because it will shake the house apart...

 

[jimmy40]

I still love the physical designs of these things. Nothing beats the feel of actually flipping switches and turning dials. To me, that thing is a piece of art.

Actually I was wrong, the wedge died before the speakers did, it was a component system that I blew the speakers with.