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Vintage question for the older guyz...

Plec

Venerated Member
I was just thinking a few weeks ago about the flood of gear we're bombarded with all the time, and the fact that some of that are going to be considered classics and further what a classic piece of gear really is. I mean, basically... WHAT is a classic piece of gear and WHY does it become a classic??

A short list of classic gear would be

........................................
Neumann U47/67/87
Pultec EQP1A
Neve 1073
Focusrite ISA 110
Fairchild 670
Teletronix LA2A
.........................................

I know people and clients that really dislike a piece or two of these holy grail gear and really prefer the newer stuff instead. I mean why does old have to mean good? I sometimes catch myself in the act of making gear \"classics\" that I once thought sounded really bad. You know... something totally new comes out on the market that sounds different and you don't like it at all... but then after a few years something else comes out that is a further development of THAT gear and once you hear that you realize that \"hey, that older stuff sounds really good compared to this...\"..... and you get the rolling snowball effect of it.... Like a good example would be the original 16-bit black face ADATs that actually sound horrible compared to todays digital standards but there are quite a few people who refers to them as having a magical sound.

Like, is all the new gear getting worse and worse and so we realize that the older stuff is much better, and the stuff that is older than the old stuff was much better cause... well..etc..... Or is it just that the new gear is \"different\" and you got to learn to appreciate the new flavour of things? I thought since there might be some older guys here that has gone through a few generations of gear could shed some light.

I mean, when the U47 was new, it wasn't a big thing. They cost just about what a Rode K2 or something would cost you today right? My feeling is that it's soooo much about nostalgia. I've not met a single person in the \"new breed of music artists/engineers\" that think the U47 (or similar classic piece of gear) is da bomb, not even the U87 for that matter. About 4 out of 5 people I've talked with really prefer the sound of the TLM103 to the U87. I've more or less only seen the old school engineers pushing the sound and use of the classics, and again... my feeling is that it's more like nostalgia and what you're used to hearing than a piece of gear actually being \"better\" than another.

I bet in 30 years people are going to go...

- Wow man... do you remember the sound of those UAD plugins? **** they really rocked da house!!
- Yeah, I have a friend who just got a hold of an old UAD-1 setup with three cards and the system to match for just under 20 000$
- WOOOW... imagine having the money to buy that kind of gear dude!
 

Akis

Sadly, left this world before his time.
Moderator
Reminds me of a question I had a while ago: When LP's came out, did the grammophone users feel the same nostalgia for the former medium as the vinyl fans feel now that CD is the main medium?

It seems to me that everyone likes what he's got used to. Albini even says that tape doesn't have a sound, it's as clear as it gets. Go figure.
 

Tony Ostinato

Active Member
Its a thing they refer to as \"the test of time\".
 

baronluigi

Active Member
Plec as a guitarist I can definately say that some gear you come across just sounded awsome and you had to have one.

For me it's a 1965-ish Hand Wired Fender Blackface Twin
or 1965-ish \" \" \" \" Super Reverb
or 1955-ish \" \" \" Tweed Champ/Princeton
or 1959-ish \" \" \" \" Bassman
or 1969-ish \" \" Marshall JTM 45,JMP 50 watt, or SLP100
or MXR Script logo Phaser
or MXR Script logo Dyna Comp

or Boss CE-1 Chorus or etc................

Up until the last decade or so there was no thing as \"Vintage Re-issue\" or other marketing crap. A gibson or Fender guitar was good, not like today which most are crap, now the good ones have been relabled \"customer shop\" and they charge an arm and a leg for it.

There is a lot of hype as music gear is a huge business. I wouldn't want most of the new stuff put out by the same companies mentioned above. The \"Re-issues\" are the same in name only, on the insides they are all chinese made printed circut board crap.

Hence that is why a lot of \"Boutique\" amp and pedal makers have cropped up also during the last decade. Whilst the mainstream buys Guitar Center reissues that are crap with good names on them, the rest of us are buying boutique stuff where the boutique cares more about making it sound good then about making huge profits..........

There are exceptions of course like UA's LA-2A for example. They even show you pictures of the inside so we can see it is still hand made quality and not printed circut board disposable junk.

so to answer you question............

....I like to think classic gear is good gear that was engineered for sound and quality that the public \"discovered\" and bought and used and kept using and stills keeps using. I mean if it ain't broke why fix it, I have many of the guitars and amps that I had back in my childhood when I was learning how to play and begged my parents to buy for me (going back to even 8-9 years old). I would have to mortgage my house to buy some of those today, ebay and such have driven the price of some classic's through the roof. I've seen guitars I own and paid $500 for sell for over $15000 on ebay, and the same with amps. (Had I only known I would have bought so so so much more and could be retired today).
 

Eric Dahlberg

Purveyor of musical dreams fullfilled.
Plec said:
I mean, when the U47 was new, it wasn't a big thing. They cost just about what a Rode K2 or something would cost you today right?
The U47 was $335 when it was released in 1949. Today, that's equivalent to $2,655.60 according to the Consumer Price Index or $7,471.46 using GDP per capita.

I've not met a single person in the "new breed of music artists/engineers" that think the U47 (or similar classic piece of gear) is da bomb, not even the U87 for that matter. About 4 out of 5 people I've talked with really prefer the sound of the TLM103 to the U87.
According to the UA Webzine, Ray Charles recorded with U47's exclusively. There were other great mics available at that time so there must have been something to that decision. While I'm not personally a major fan of the U87, anyone who rates a TLM 103 over it must have other factors motivating them besides sound quality.
 

Plec

Venerated Member
baronluigi:

Haha, yeah.. I hear you! I'm a guitarist at heart myself so I understand perfectly what you're talking about and so I agree. I remember when Marshall released the Valvestate series, and at that time I was like \"yuck!! this sounds really fuzzy and awful!\". Then when they released the AVT series or something that was a further development of the original Valvestate series,,, the original series sounded sooooo much better compared to the AVT it was silly!

However, I think that nostalgia still applies. I own a couple of early 70's Marshall heads and also a couple of early 60s Fender amps that sound amazing and then I have the full range of high-gain stuff from ENGL, Mesa, Peavey. When producing of course the old amps really sit back 90 out of 100 times 'cause they just don't fit into the modern sound frame. Then and again I reach for those earlier amps to get that vintage tone, and it's never been because \"they sound so damn good\", it's just to get a vintage flavour to certain things. That recognizable old tone...

Eric Dahlberg:

My feeling would be that Ray used that mic because it sounded right for his voice at the time and now it's a \"sound\" because of it. What if Hendrix would still be alive and got up on stage with a Dual Rectifier, which compared to an old marshall would be percieved as fuller, louder, broader etc... it wouldn't even sound like Hendrix. Hendrix used Marshalls... and that sound is his sound, like Ray's U47. And about the U87/TLM103... only the factor of sound was considered i.e if they would both be priced the same, they would've still chosen the TLM mic. I can agree that for more modern, clear, upfront sounds the TLM103 sounds way better than the U87, but then again if you want that older character the U87 might be your friend... just as if you we're going for a Ray Charles type of sound.
 

Eric Dahlberg

Purveyor of musical dreams fullfilled.
Roger Mayer custom made Jimi's pedals for him so Jimi wasn't stuck to using any old things available in stores. That was a deliberate sound they were going for. They had the technology then to get what is now considered a modern sound (the JCM800 was little more than a Super Lead with a diode goosing the front, after all) but that isn't what they were after.

I used to play lead guitar in a band where I was playing through a '63 Deluxe & the rhythm guitarist was using one of those armor plated Dual Recto half stacks. The Recto is all lows & highs so he got drowned out by the drums & bass night after night, whereas the midrange-heavy sound of my Deluxe always cut through beautifully (of course, his amp looked so awesome that everybody assumed that's where the guitar was coming from ;)).

Listen, lets stop talking about vintage stuff so that an understanding of quality doesn't get confused with snobbery. The first time you hear someone sing through a Neumann M149 or a Blue Bottle, there's this 'duh' moment where you just know these are great mics. Voices pop out & sound more intimate, more in-your-ear. Put a TLM 103 up beside them & you'll hear it for what it really is.
 

Plec

Venerated Member
I used to play lead guitar in a band where I was playing through a '63 Deluxe & the rhythm guitarist was using one of those armor plated Dual Recto half stacks. The Recto is all lows & highs so he got drowned out by the drums & bass night after night, whereas the midrange-heavy sound of my Deluxe always cut through beautifully (of course, his amp looked so awesome that everybody assumed that's where the guitar was coming from ).
Yes, the modern stuff can really be a hazzle to get right during a live set, especially the Rectifiers since they have that very unique sound and hard to dial in, but the 63' Deluxe is the total counterpoint to that... what style of music did you guyz play where you mixed those two together? :) What I mean about the modern soundframe is just that all the vintage stuff couldn't handle the low end, and now you can pretty much get all the low end you need and the high-end sizzle to match :roll: When you place a gained up Rectifier or similar modern amp in the right context in a recording it does something that the older stuff wasn't really designed to do. And I think that is true for quite a lot of the gear out there. Modern sounds require modern gear, more or less.

Listen, lets stop talking about vintage stuff so that an understanding of quality doesn't get confused with snobbery. The first time you hear someone sing through a Neumann M149 or a Blue Bottle, there's this 'duh' moment where you just know these are great mics. Voices pop out & sound more intimate, more in-your-ear. Put a TLM 103 up beside them & you'll hear it for what it really is.
Hm, I can't really say I agree with you there.. of course I agree those are great mics, but I can't see them smoking a 103 just because of the price? Yes, quality shouldn't get confused with snobbery, but it shouldn't either be confused with character. Just because something is of great quality doesn't mean it has the right character for the job. I recently mixed an album where the vocals was tracked with a Manley Reference Gold, but I didn't know it at the time. I thought it sounded good but nothing special besides that and I had to resort to quite a bit of EQ and other stuff to make it fit into the music right. If I had done the vocal engineering I had chosen a different mic for the job 'cause it didn't have the right character for the vocalist IMO, in the end the clients loved my work so I guess I was doing the right thing in that case, pretty much washing away the character of that Manley Gold. Wasn't it Joe Chicarelli that was tracking vocals for an album and the vocalist thought he'd gotten the best results earlier with an U47. Apparently Joe set up an U47, a vintage C12 and a few other mics... among them a Rode K2, and they just thought the K2 sounded perfect for this guys voice in the end.

I think it's overlooked a lot that a piece of gear has absolutley no idea at all what's being fed into it. IMHO I don't think that quotes like \"This mic sounds great on vocals...\" or \"This preamp really kick ass on guitars...\" really matter at all. If quotes like that would have any relevance you'd have to know the exact answer to \"What does a voice sound like?\" or \"What does a guitar sound like\". It's like figuring out the answer to \"How much does a dog weigh?\".
 

Eric Dahlberg

Purveyor of musical dreams fullfilled.
Plec said:
of course I agree those are great mics, but I can't see them smoking a 103 just because of the price?
I never mentioned price, it's in no way the gauge I was using for defining quality. Echoing your example, a K2 is a good mic regardless of price. However, I personally feel the TLM103 has been built up to have a much better rep than it deserves. The K2 & older Rode tube mics, the Blue Dragonfly & Blueberry, & the MXL V69M are all better mics for less money, IMO.
 

T-Dogg

Active Member
IMHO there's not a huge difference between quality gear built now and then... As far as analogue audio signal paths go, circuits may have changed, but I can't think of any super-huge redefining movement since the transistor...

But one thing that didn't exist back then was a \"pro-sumer\" recording market like we have today -- products were turned out for the professional broadcast and recording industry, where cost it not an option and build quality is paramount. Production runs were smaller, as was the available selection of gear... So the cream rose to the top, engineers latched onto them, they became classics, and subsequent generations of gear took from the best aspects of these venerable products and tried to tailor them to the current scene.

But manufacturing has changed so much since then... Point to point discreet construction, transformers, tubes... Back then everything from naval telecoms to console radios were built like this. It was easily implemented in the broadcast market, maybe even at reasonable prices due to the availabilty of those parts. Now everything is IC's rolling of the assembly line -- engineers and audiophiles are the only people that care about tubes and transformers, cumbersome discreet circuitry and a nice board layout... Think about the analog audiopath of an iPod... Small, cheap, and energy efficient. This is where things are headed in consumerland. Granted, you can still get it the old way -- but it costs a lot of money to build, hence the typical \"vintage = quality = $$$\".

But I don't wanna sound like the vintage snob guy either. There were alot of terrible sounding designs back then too. But at least they all sounded different, each had a character... Today, everyone outside of the high-end market (including some within the high end markets!) uses the same damn NE5532 OpAmp. API, Sontec, Melcor, Yamaha, Neve, ADM, Helios -- the best examples this stuff used discreet opamp stages that gave (or lended to) a signature sound... In IC land, you pretty much get two sterile options -- An NE5532, or the burr brown equivalent if you're a fancy boy... And neither has that much character.
 
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