My bedroom started looking like that somewhat later in the mid 1980s, kicked off by the winning of some car speakers in a primary school raffle. This inevitably raised the question of what to plug them into. Collecting discarded junk from the 1960s-1970s at jumble sales and car boot sales solved that problem and I learned a lot.
I think that I was privileged to have had a childhood in the age of ubiquitous junk availability. It kept me off the streets and lead to a technical profession and some life long interests. It’s actually more difficult to get hold of stuff now thanks to electrical safety regulations, skips being locked, eBay pushing the prices of trash up and general lack of repairability of anything.
A footnote: 30 years later my bedroom is a radio shack and just as messy and I’m blessed that I found someone understanding enough to put up with it :)
> eBay pushing the prices of trash up
On the other hand, for those who didn't live near ubiquitous junk availability, eBay kinda did the opposite.
"Surplus resellers" tend to grossly inflate the price of all this junk, so it sits on their shelves indefinitely. Meanwhile, eBay became the yard-sale of old, offering a lot of it for far more reasonable prices (so long as the seller wasn't pretending to be a "real business").
Unfortunately it has got a little too popular in the last 5 years or so which has driven the prices up. The only things which are reasonably priced are broken AND require collection from somewhere obscure or buy it nows listed by idiots. I’ve had a few good bits of luck in that space only recently.
Advent of pricey copper and more consumer goods having salvageable precious metals. There's an incentive to destroy functional goods instead of giving away.
Great habit. Trash picking is excellent because people throw out such great stuff. Perfect working condition, sometimes perfect condition period, sometimes just good for materials. One such Mr. trash picking is shown here with his pile of motors and hand made power tools ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d_EN4jB_BI ) though I don't know if this is the video in which he mentions the pile of free motors he has. Another great trash-rescue proponent is DiResta (youtube maker person, seen in glorious trash picking mode here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epBIl4zDk8c ).
Ditto. I have an uncle with a helicopter junk yard, so lots of military scrap electronics to tinker with, growing up in 70/80’s. Nice RF lab today in the basement.
For the last 4 or 5 years, I have gotten heavily into the audio hobby. I've got to say, it's one of the most enjoyable hobbies I've ever taken up.
I know "audiophiles" get a bad rap with their needlessly expensive speaker cables, but I assure you 99.9% of hobbyists you'll find online are vehemently opposed to that kind of snake oil garbage.
I also assure you (from one engineer to another) that the matter of "what sounds good" is actually a fairly objectively understood thing. It's not like art or wine tasting where things are almost entirely subjective.
Audio does not need to be an expensive hobby. Even if you're buying new equipment, you can put together an absolutely fantastic system for a few hundred bucks.
The best part is that audio gear doesn't become obsolete.‡ We as a human race have been building loudspeakers and amplifiers for about a century now and it's a fairly mature art. A kickass stereo you build today will sound great in 10, 20, 30 years.
If you're willing to do a little DIY work, you can buy DIY speaker kits that outperform commercial offerings 2-3x the cost. This is a great cheap ($100) starter kit with lots of reviews online, and a video on the product page that shows you how to put it together. Compares well with $300-$500 commercial speakers.
If anybody has any questions about the hobby I'll try my best to answer them or at least point you in the right direction.
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‡ It doesn't become obsolete for the most part. Once you get into fancy digital codecs and home theater stuff, well, that's still an area of rapid flux. But good old RCA red-and-white L&R analog connectors (or the stereo mini jack, which is only a $3 adapter away) are still king in the world of stereo music.
But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Those engineers were very smart; 44/16 audio more than covers everything the human ear can hear.
> But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Those engineers were very smart; 44/16 audio more than covers everything the human ear can hear.
Yes, but more channels are better. The spatial resolution of human hearing is pretty impressive, and stereo+headphones doesn't really do it justice.
Dolby Atmos is the latest multichannel audio format; rather than mixing down to a fixed 5.1 or 7.1 master, an Atmos master carries spatial metadata that can be decoded and rendered to any array of loudspeakers, from a binaural mix for headphones to a 24.1.10 home theater setup. Windows and Xbox One both support Dolby Atmos support; Windows also has a native spatial post-processor called Windows Sonic.
> You only need two channels to provide complete spatial information through headphones if it's a binaural recording.
I don't really believe this, given the shape of the human ear and my own experience trying to reproduce 3d sound. Humans can judge direction and distance remarkably well up to a few dozen meters.
The whole point of binaural recording is to exploit the shape of the human ear to encode spatial information.
A binaural recording setup uses an artificial head with artificial ears, with the microphone capsules located where the eardrum would be. The microphones capture the phase and magnitude effects of the head and outer ear. Unless you have really weird ears or really bad headphones, the effect is extraordinarily lifelike.
It's also possible to process sounds digitally to create a binaural effect using convolution. Using a mathematical model of the ear and head (a head-related transfer function), you can position sounds in a 3D space around the listener. Many games offer HRTF audio and it provides remarkably accurate spatial information. HRTF audio is a key aspect of the immersiveness of VR experiences. It's possible to generate a unique HRTF based on your own anatomy, using either an audio capture from a microphone placed inside the ear or a 3D scan of the user's head.
I did a thing as a kid that basically proves it out.
I recorded my home, an afternoon with the family from the speakers that it would be played back from. After some fiddling with a pre amp to get the recording balanced well enough to play back, the effect was pretty effective.
I didn't expect it, but when that recording was played on that system and speakers, it was possible to sit in my room and basically hear the house! TV in the front room, dog walking around, doors closing.
Brought people in late at night to play it. Was spooky to hear midday sounds, and believe them. The illusion was that good.
Here’s the funny thing: humans can discern vertical positioning as well as horizontal positioning. Binaural recordings can’t reproduce that, since it’s highly dependent on the shape of our ears.
Yes, but the way our nervous system does this is by two mechanisms:
1) The inter-aural time difference. Sound takes time to travel, so any sound coming from left of the head will arrive at the left ear sooner than the right ear.
2) The head-related transfer function. The shape and auditory characteristics of the head and ear canal change the sound slightly depending on the frequency and the direction of the incoming sound. Since this direction is different for the two ears, your auditory system can compare the 'shape' of the sound it gets from each ear and use that to position the sound in space.
The inter-aural time difference is, by far, the more effective of the two, but it only gives horizontal bearing. It also can't give 'in front' or 'behind'. The head-related transfer function can give both horizontal and vertical bearing, but it's not that accurate. Together, these explain why humans are far more accurate at localizing sounds horizontally than vertically.
Binaural recordings try to capture both of these mechanisms through stereo recording with a mock head. That's why listening to a binaural recording gives you the feeling of sounds coming from a point in space, because it's replicating the same experience you'd get from actually being in that space.
I have a friend into binaural recording, he has a rig shaped liked a head with 3d-printed ears. He wanders around the woods recording birdsongs with it. I would imagine that provides a fair degree of verisimilitude.
DIY speakers, if you get the basics of speaker design right, can be really good. It's because if you build them yourself you can build an enclosure as big as you like, as thick and heavy as you like, with enough dampening as you like and as long as you balance the drivers and crossover right they can sound fantastic and for not much money. Also amplifiers since the 1990s have been great, they just need a service with some fresh capacitors and some hack (e.g. a smart plug) to deal with the fact that they suck power when on/standby but not in use, so getting a good one second hand is worth it. That said IC amps have improved a lot too and kits with these are also now easier since getting a clean power supply is not as difficult as it used to be.
48khz please! Not because of the extra frequency, but because of compatibility with video :)
And RCA? What's wrong with balanced audio on an XLR?
I saw a lovely post on Facebook about how a freelancer had brought in something odd, that could only get the audio out of via analog.
He proudly came out with his crappy £50 RCA cables. We had to tell him that we only dealt with balanced audio. My friend went to the stores and found the most beat up converter she could find, and some ropey looking cables :)
>And RCA? What's wrong with balanced audio on an XLR?
There's nothing wrong with it, it's just totally unnecessary for line level signals over short cable runs in domestic environments. Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection.
> Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection.
Unfortunately for me, when you live downtown near a radio station that leaks into all your audio equipment, better EMI rejection definitely sounds better.
Reminds me of dropping off a composite/svideo video mixer as a favour loan to someone running an event and their first question being "so how do I plug my Macbook pro into this?"
I agree with you on 16/44.1 audio, I have a transparent DAC that can output 24/96, and on repeated blind tests I have failed to identify which is which, using files from the same source (a 24/96 song converted to 16/44.1). For audio production and mixing 24/96 makes a lot of sense though, because of dynamic range.
> For audio production and mixing 24/96 makes a lot of sense though, because of dynamic range.
Obviously only the bit-rate matters for dynamic range, and a 16 bit signal has 96 dB of dynamic range. That is more than enough for even the most dynamic of audio signals.
A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody needs 16bit+ for anything other than improving their noise floor (which is still borderline inaudible at 16bit).
> A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody
Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use. 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor.
And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor.
> Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use.
Yes, but the comment was specifically about dynamic range in audio production, not about higher bit rate's prime benefit of reducing artefacts in digital summing. The noise floor at 16 bit is -96db, if you're down there, you're doing it wrong.
> 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor.
It's more than enough if you're doing proper gain staging - the number of tracks is irrelevant.
Any mastering compression of more than 3db gain reduction is
mostly excessive, but let's say 6db. So a final master will bring up a noise floor 18db at most (if gain staging was done properly and as you say you left plenty of headroom for the mastering engineer - although clearly you wouldn't be able to use all the headroom). That's still a noise floor of less than -78db, but more realistically around -85db.
Saturation usually only add harmonics not gain (obviously depends on the kit you're using).
> And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor.
Myth. Watch this [1] and you'll realise that there's plenty of range with 16 bit. People were producing with 16 bit for years perfectly fine. Before that high end studio tape machines (like the classic Studers or Telefunkens) were equivalent to about 14-16 bits (based on their noise floor) and we had decades of music produced and recorded on that format.
I am not saying that 24 bit isn't better than 16 bit. Of course it is, there are tangible benefits in summing and it gives you more headroom to work with. But, I'm saying it's a myth that there's not enough dynamic range or that you're somehow just bumping along above the noise floor. If you are then you're doing it wrong.
Another much appreciated advantage of 24 bit is that it allows so much extra headroom:- when recording, levels can be set so the peaks hit maybe -18 -- -12dB(FS) which helps eliminate any chance of clipping in unexpected circumstances.
> Yes, but the comment was specifically about dynamic range in audio production, not about higher bit rate's prime benefit of reducing artefacts in digital summing.
But audio production often involves lots and lots of digital summing. I don't see how that's not related.
> Any mastering compression of more than 3db gain reduction is mostly excessive, but let's say 6db. So a final master will bring up a noise floor 18db at most (if gain staging was done properly and as you say you left plenty of headroom for the mastering engineer - although clearly you wouldn't be able to use all the headroom). That's still a noise floor of less than -78db, but more realistically around -85db.
That's only counting mastering compression.
What about NY style parallel buss compression on drums where you want to hit -20db GR as an effect, which will inevitably add some saturation too. 6-10db of compression on an individual drum track is common too if you're doing metal or electronic music. So you've got 10 drum tracks, each with several effects and a parallel track with distortion/compression.
> Saturation usually only add harmonics not gain (obviously depends on the kit you're using)
If it's not adding amplitude to your signal it's almost certainly bringing up the noise floor. Saturation generally works by applying gain until the device/plugin distorts. Just because amplitude isn't going up doesn't mean gain isn't increasing.
> Myth. Watch this [1] and you'll realise that there's plenty of range with 16 bit. People were producing with 16 bit for years perfectly fine. Before that high end studio tape machines (like the classic Studers or Telefunkens) were equivalent to about 14-16 bits (based on their noise floor) and we had decades of music produced and recorded on that format.
This is true for when you're operating on friendly signals like a sine wave signal generator with a fixed amplitude. Not so nice when you're tracking with 20db of headroom and the drummer some how manages a flam 24db f*cking louder than everything else which clips the overheads (this actually happened using 24bit, but now with crazy dynamic drummers I give myself TONS of headroom because there's no reason not to). At least when tape "clips" it doesn't ruin the take.
I do agree with you that 16bit can be good for recording (and for home audio I agree you'll never be able to tell a difference) but I don't believe there are literally zero differences between 24bit, and hard disk space is so cheap that there's no reason not to use the extra bits.
If you are into headphones, you could start hanging out on the subreddit. It's a big community, and you'll see many of the current technologies. It could get really expensive, I mean the new Sennheiser closed-back HD820 has a ~$2k price tag (ouch!), but certainly you could call yourself done with a $400 dollar setup, including DAC and Amplifier.
EDIT: You could also try IEMs, Etymotic makes some of the most clear, coherent, natural and neutral sounding. Their TOTL (Top-Of-The-Line) is the ER4 line which has a MSRP of $350, but you could get the same value with the ER3 line at $179.
The first thing to do if you want the best quality sound is to sort out the acoustics in the room you're in. Do that before buying or building any high end gear, otherwise you're just throwing money away. Shit speakers in a well treated room will sound better than the most expensive ones in a poorly treated one.
Get yourself a reference/measurement microphone so you can measure the room, then use REM [1] to analyse the results (it's free). The Behringer ECM8000 is fine ($50), you don't need to spend a lot of money on that. You put the reference mic at your ideal listening position (you're not going to make an entire room acoustically perfect without needing a second mortgage, even high end studios aren't).
What you want to get to is a flat response across the frequency range. You won't get it, and you will need bass traps, mid traps, etc. to fix the problems. If you're doing it for your TV then you can get attractive looking traps that don't look ugly. But if you're doing it for music, and you want lots of bass, then you may end up with big bass traps in the corner of the room. Although the PSI Audio AVAAs [2] are another (more expensive) option for trapping bass without taking up any more space than a regular speaker. I trialled a couple of these and they were exceptional.
Depending on how bad the room is you can use room correction systems to fix it. I use a Trinnov ST2 Pro [3] (on top of a treated room) in my studio and the difference is astonishing.
This is my frequency response before and after the Trinnov [4]
Once you have got your room acoustics to a pretty good place, then the world's your oyster in terms of audio gear and speakers. I would advise against getting trapped in the super expensive audiophile world, you won't get much difference once you're above the $10k speakers range, and actually you can get results which will blow your mind with $1k speakers. Building your own is tough, because the dimensions are so critical, but if you're up for the challenge, it could be worth it!
I've spent a large amount of time in this world because I've built a high-end music studio in my house. And going much beyond this advice isn't worth it. You need to go and listen for yourself and work out what you like. But acoustics will always win over gear, always.
> But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD.
Not true at all..
Just because 44/16 well covers the frequency and amplitude domain of human hearing, it doesn't mean that the representation of the waveforms within that domain are precise. Other digital systems like 96/24 and variable encodings are much better at this because of the higher sampling rate and precision, and have much less error due to quantizing jitter.
Anyone with a decent set of ears and a bit of patience/training can learn to tell the difference in quality, and once recognized, the difference is quite clear.
I will agree that although clear, the difference is still subtle, and 44/16 is generally pretty good.
Not true at all.. the bit rate will only affect the noise floor, you'd be hard pressed to notice any difference between 16 and 24 bits (you won't). And when it comes to the Hz - (width of the time-slice, 44 / 96) that will only make any difference on super high frequency sounds, but again, even with that the vast majority of people will perceive no difference. Band limited sound waves can only solve to one solution, and making the slices smaller in the time domain will have relatively little effect because you can perfectly represent all signals in the range of human hearing at 44khz sample rate.
Higher bit rates are useful for people using DAWs like Cubase, ProTools, etc. where your 'signal' is going through myriad processing and summing stages because of the use of multiple tracks, plugins, etc. (sometimes hundreds) That's when you don't want the artifacting from summing multiple approximations. I use 32bit / 96khz in Cubase for this reason.
The human brain is very good at convincing itself [3] that it can tell the difference, but in a double blind test you'd have no chance.
So you say 'not true at all' to my repudiation, and then go on to say:
"you'd be hard pressed"
and "the vast majority will percieve no difference"
which is it?
bit rate: yes, as sounds are at the lower end of amplitude within the bit depth, the more 'stepping'/'zippering' occurs to the input waveform since less bits are available to represent the shape of the wave at that amplitude, and so things become more distorted, and the signal noise goes up. similarly, for higher amplitude sounds, the less need for compressing/limiting to remove clipping artifacts, so again, less distortion (though the latter isn't inherent to the signal encoding per-se).
sampling frequency: irrespective of the nyquist theorem, the shape of the wave is different. even if you can't explicitly hear at a base frequency of the overtones above a certain frequency, the waveform is not the same and your ear is not being moved in the same way, period, and relative distortion of overtones with respect to the base frequencies within the nyquist spectrum increases with frequency, so the tonal effect of the sampling frequency on the sound (and net distortion) is diminished as the sampling frequency increases. aka overtones become increasingly distorted to a lesser extent as the sampling frequency increases; banded spectrum (e.g. FFT display) is much cleaner, as a visual example.
both of these can be masked somewhat with dithering, but again, this is introducing noise into the signal, which you can also hear; all other things equal (which they arent), the dither free signal will inherently have less noise and so be cleaner sounding.
I agree that bit rate is harder to perceive, and for most things, this is more important w/r/t multiple generations of distortion introduced by software.. but just because something is 'hard' to percieve doesn't mean it is imperceptible and therefore a net zero, which is what the original post is claiming. whether a net 0.0001 is relavent is a different matter (as I said previously, 16/44 is generally fine, so I'm not in the 'I can totally hear the difference from my monster cable digital edition' camp), but it is not a net 0, and when listening for tambre rather than frequency, quite clear once you know what to listen for.
also yes:
I did a blind listening test for this while in an audio engineering program. Was able to clearly tell 44 vs 96 and vs 192, as well as 16 vs 20 and 24 (though 24 vs 20 was pretty difficult). That was a while ago so not sure if my ears are still as sharp.
How about percussive sounds, such as a cymbal crash? These show very high frequencies in a Fourier analysis. Wouldn't that invalidate the application of the Nyquist-Shannon theorem?
It's worth watching the video in my references [1] - it's a proper hacker's view of digital audio and how it translates to the analogue domain. Even with a 20khz sound you're not going to get any aliasing at 44khz sample rate. Most people's hearing starts to fall off significantly after around 12khz or so (depending on age). Most cymbals have a fundamental frequency around 2-5khz in my experience.
Also, because cymbal sounds are pretty close to being noise, it's arguable whether it would matter or not. Although if you listen to a 128 kbps MP3 then you can often hear the top end frequency sounds (like cymbals) becoming 'mushy'. To the vast majority of people once you get to 192 kbps it's inaudible, and then above that most people with 'perfect ears' would struggle. And that's with a lossy format, never mind the lossless formats of CDs, WAV or FLAC which is the discussion at hand.
The ADC (Analog-digital-converter) will always have an anti-aliasing lowpass filter to remove any frequencies above the nyquist and prevent aliasing in the recording. Sometimes it's analog, nowadays it's often a 2-stage system with oversampling and a digital anti-aliasing filter. But the result that goes into the recorder is the same, any frequencies above the Nyquist (which would become aliased and mirrored) are removed or reduced to inaudible levels before being finally digitized.
So while cymbals do have lots of high frequency content, in a 44.1khz recording any frequencies at or above 22.05khz should be removed first. (In reality it's not a brickwall filter at that frequency, but tends to steeply roll off once it gets nearer).
"Kids these days" wouldn't understand but the ordinary family didn't have the money to buy anything they wanted, unlike today where middle class people can largely by most of the ordinary day to day consumer electronic stuff without much thought about the money. I'm not saying everyone can, but certainly in my middle class life in the 1970's there was no money for buying teenagers a bedroom full of electronics.
I had to beg and wait many years till we got a home computer.
If you read it he notes how he earned the money to buy some of the components. For one, he built a stone driveway, which would be pretty backbreaking work. Other pieces he found at the town landfill.
And to be honest it isn't high-end gear for the most part. I mean, a lot of it is from Radio Shack. And the higher-end stuff isn't new and/or had to be repaired.
The reality is, even if it were all free, it would be rare for a teenager to have enough physical space to store all this crap in the 1970s. Especially in their bedroom vs the garage or basement.
"Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years"
Just having your own bedroom if multiple kids would be considered wealthy!
Certainly in Britain.
America was always different though, middle class kids always have more. I remember watching tv shows with kids having a phone in their room that blew my mind as a kid sharing a room with two brothers and very locked down phone in the house.
Free local calls amazed me too when I found out about that.
It's less "land of plenty" than it is the federal government paying for big bedrooms instead of universal healthcare and a proper social safety net. As part of the post-depression New Deal and especially after WWII, single-family housing was very heavily subsized by the federal government. However, these policies were coupled with segregationist housing restrictions that pretty much excluded non-white Americans from the rise of suburbia in the 50s. While white suburban families were accumulating wealth through home ownership and mortgage equity, black families (as well as rural Americans who didn't see many of the benefits of the industrial boom of the 40s and 50s) were increasingly pushed into poverty.
TBH it looks like a remodeled attic room. And the way it's all crammed in a corner suggests that it isn't taking up an especially large amount of space. We don't see how large the rest of the room is.
I live in a pretty average US home (built in 1971, raised ranch similar to this:https://photos.zillowstatic.com/p_e/ISi3u8fp8ljszu1000000000...) and there's plenty of room in the 2 non-master bedrooms to dedicate half the room to a crammed-in arrangement like this, with a bed crammed in the other half.
I also had a bedroom full of electronics in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I certainly wasn't a rich teenager. All the audio gear was given or scrounged. For example, I got given a very good turntable by the father of a friend of my parents for free, when he upgraded his. I didn't even know him, but I'd got a reputation for knowing about electronics, and it was starting to become a little flakey. People would just give me old gear, if it developed an intermittent fault. Old gear was pretty easy for me to fix, but getting it repaired professionally was expensive, and so they replaced things and gave the old ones to me.
My mother worked for a company that made cash dispenser (ATM) machines. Every now and then, they'd scrap some old machines, and she'd tip me off. I'd raid the bins behind the company, and carry off whatever I could carry - professional grade power supplies, AC motors, all sorts of electronics that I'd de-solder components from and re-use.
We'd also raid the local council dump when the workers weren't watching. A surprising amount of stuff got thrown away that could be fixed and re-sold to friends for a little extra pocket money.
Sometime around 1982, aged 15, I saved up and bought a Jupiter Ace computer. It had 3K of RAM, and was programmed in Forth. That summer, I wrote a whole load of games for it, and sold them on cassette through a computer magazine. That paid for the computer several times over. It was never a popular machine, and I think I was one of only about three people selling games for it that summer.
Then my school threw out an old teletype. I got permission to take it. There was no printer available for the Jupiter Ace, so I resolved to connect the teletype. Trouble was there wasn't an RS232 interface available for the Ace either. I'd built a TTL-logic parallel board for the Ace from scratch. To get +/- 12V for RS232 I used one of the cash machine 24V smoothed power supplies, used second hand cash machine transistors to switch the power via a parallel port pin, and wrote an RS232 implementation in software in Z80 machine code (hand assembled, as I didn't have an assembler). Eventually it all worked. I must have been the only owner of a Jupiter Ace that had a 1960s printer attached.
The Jupiter Ace had one of those crummy rubber keyboards. I'd scavenged enough cash machine keypads, so I desoldered all the keys from them, etched my own circuit board, and made a proper keyboard. That made programming much nicer.
Anyway, my parents weren't wealthy, and I certainly wasn't. But you should never underestimate a resourceful teenager.
I totally recognise where you're coming from. I was the same, skip raiding, etc. One Christmas I asked for a present which was a job lot of ex-mainframe PCBs I'd seen advertised in the back of an electronics magazine, Can't remember the cost, but a significant chunk must have been delivery, because it was a fair haul. The boards were just stuffed with 74-series TTL DIP chips, and a lot of red LEDs too. Pretty much every logic chip I used throughout my teenage years came from those boards, and I know for a fact I still have some of the LEDs in my collection - I recognise them by their rather pointed profile, not as cylindrical as modern ones.
It's been a long time, but I'm fairly sure it was 110 baud RS232, 7 bit ASCII, all upper case.
I think it was an ASR 33, or at least I recall it looking like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33
Unfortunately I don't have it any more - my parents threw it out a few years after I left home.
Wikipedia certainly implies the ASR 33 used current loop. If I recall correctly, mine had a DB25 connector, which likely indicates RS232, and is probably how I figured out it was RS232 in the first place, as information was hard to come by back then. I do know I used a 24V power supply from a cash machine, using a potential divider to create a +/- 12V signal, which is consistent with the model I had having an RS232 interface. Getting the timing right in software was a lot of trial and error.
I had one of those too, an ASR 33 with RS-232. I connected it to an Intel SDK-85, which had optional RS-232 stuff on it. Fun times!
If I recall, the teletype was sourced from the Green Bank Observatory, which had some really impressive old equipment - racks of hardware with nixie tube displays, all that kind of stuff.
Electronics has gotten cheaper though. I bought my first PDA more than 15 years ago. It was second hand and still cost me something like £200. Last year I bought my son a Kindle Fire to play with on long drives and that cost me something like £40 in the Black Friday sales and frankly it does a lot more than my PDA ever could - not just technical capability but also software availability. Plus finding cheap or free software for the PDA would mean turning to less legal avenues where as tablets these days are full of cheap and free software.
Even the ZX Spectrum, for those unfamiliar: it is a 30 year old British micro computer designed around being _cheap_, was £125 of "old" money. Now compare that to a Raspberry Pi. Heck you can even get a wide choice of budget laptops for the same price as what the Spectrum was (if you take inflation into account).
So I wouldn't say people are financially better of now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. I just think the financial barrier for entry into electronics has been lowered.
Electronics has gotten cheaper, but a lot less DIY.
The UK had a huge DIY computing, hifi, and music hardware scene in the 70s and 80s. Even with DIY, the products weren't as cheap as they are today. But the DIY element made them more accessible than professional equipment, and far more educational.
For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene. You can find copies of kit-promoting magazines like Electronics Today International online, and the Canadian and Australian issues were a lot less music-oriented than the UK editions.
Even Adafruit etc are lightweight compared to some of the 70s/80s DIY, which needed analog design skills and a willingness to build your own unsafe DIY power supplies.
[1] My guess is the UK had some very early synth startups like EMS and a solid hifi scene. When EMS folded some of their designers needed new work and there was enough interest in kit synths to keep them busy for a few years. Likewise with hifi.
Elektuur, now called Elektor, was popular in central Europe in the 70s.
The ham radio people and strictly non-ham radio people like to pretend the other doesn't exist although they do nearly the same hobby, and amateur radio is much larger, more active, and richer (in the sense of more stuff and more expensive capable stuff) ... Funkamateur from Germany and some title in kanji that I can't enter on this keyboard from the Japan Amateur Radio League have been published for most of a century and are pretty active.
There is an uncanny valley effect. German schematic diagrams are full of "R" as a decimal place, rare in the 80s metric prefixes (cut it out with the nanofarads plz) and swapping periods and commas in long numbers. And there was something unusual about European scientific notation that I don't remember.
Also there is more total electronic hobby and electronic kit activity and sales now than at any time in history, despite endless accurate yet misleading claims that since the death of the Heathkit company no individual company has come close to monopolizing 90% of kit sales. No slice of the pie today is nearly as large as heathkits slice of the pie, but the pie overall is vastly larger.
Yeah I really miss the DIY aspect. But I wonder if that's partly down to electronics on the whole getting cheaper meaning there's a lot less people getting into DIY as a cheaper route into the scene.
That said, I have also noticed the brands have largely won the consumer war and people seem far more willing to drop cash into Apple / Sony / Samsung / etc because their hardware has a desirable aesthetics. However that might also be a symptom of the electronics industry going mainstream.
There was also Heathkit, which sold built-it-yourself kits for all kinds of electronics. Stereos, amateur radio gear, televisions, multimeters and oscilloscopes, etc.
15 years ago would be the heyday of the Palm and there, lots of software was free or even open source. I certainly didn't need to buy any software back then to fill that little productivity machine.
BTW, I was much more productive on the Palm than on modern smartphone devices. For example note-taking was much better with a stylus than with a touch interface.
This was a proper PDA rather than a smart phone (I refuse to accept what Apple "invented" smart phones). So a large screened Windows CE device with a stylus.
Maybe I was looking in the wrong places but there didn't seem to be much free stuff for Win CE back in 2002.
WinCE devices were much more business oriented than Palm, probably because they had in the beginning a much smaller market share. So your experience was likely representative for this platform.
I completely forgot that they were around at that time.
I didn't get the impression it was more business oriented than Palm. I mean CE certainly had productivity tools like a cut down version of Office and support for Active sync (which I hated). I think the real problem was Windows PDAs of that era didn't even share a common CPU so you'd have multiple versions of software targeting different chipsets. I'm pretty sure that would have put a lot of developers off. But there were a few gems on the platform, like Tomb Raider (which actually played really well).
I might had a dig around and see if I've still got it. Might be a fun device to repurpose.
The Note 8 has a pretty nice stylus. Better than any stylus I ever had on a Windows CE device (never owned anything from Palm, so I can't really comment on that).
Our family got a IBM PCjr, in 1991. We couldn't afford a new PC, but I am thankful we had the PCjr because it sparked an interest in programming in me. If we had a new one that could play cool games I might not have gotten the programming bug so early.
> ...but certainly in my middle class life in the 1970's there was no money for buying teenagers a bedroom full of electronics.
While I'll agree with all the other responses that electronics have gotten a lot cheaper, I think there's another compounding factor. Back in the day, I think far more adults were dismissive of this sort of technology (or were personally unfamiliar to the point that they didn't see the value). So for kids, not having much money of their own, it was always an uphill struggle to justify the expense of any of it.
Today's adults were the kids from back then, and so are not as dismissive. So they do see the value, and are likely far more willing to spend the money.
I would say this is a mostly true comment, but it assumes that the author (or their parents) paid for everything. Many people are willing to trade their time (and leisure) to scavenge parts like those in the author's post, and needn't be rich.
To be more accurate, you're not making a useful point. You're just complaining about the way you grew up.
In the early 80s I used to, every tuesday morning at 6, with my nephew, go past all the houses in our neighborhood because that was the time when people put out their non-organic garbage. We used to find stacks of stuff like in the picture, so my room did look like that. In those days you could find serious treasure if you had interest in electronics; big boxes with circuitboards in front of the tv repair shops (we had a few in the village), many machines or boxes with beautiful old switches and electronics inside (wish I had those still). Every few weeks we would find an something with tubes inside which was a great find. Very rarely we would find a game console or handheld game. Good times :) We didn't have any competition for years so it was like christmas every week.
In the early 80s we had an electronics factory a few miles away from home. A friend and I used to cycle there in the summer evenings and weekends and avoid the security watchmen and raid the rubbish skip. Amongst all the general detritus we'd find PCBs and discarded, fully functional components including relays, LEDs and seven-segment displays. We briefly ran a small business at school selling some of our haul to equally nerdy, but richer kids - until the other kids worked out where we were getting the gear and started raiding it for themselves!
Hahaha yeah, my grandfather brought the last tv he bought to the shop he bought it from and was rather baffled they recommended to him to buy a new one without even trying to repair it.
We had an electronics recycling day in our neighborhood once a year. It was fun to just go pick through the old boxes to find blank tapes, old computer games on floppies, assorted cables, keyboards, tape decks and VCR's that needed small repairs, and the occasional outdated computer or two.
> 40+ years of service out of a piece of gear... most of the junk sold today would be lucky to last 1/3 that long
Recognizing the reel-to-reel was refurbished from the junk yard, in the context of a picture of an entire corner of a teenager's bedroom dedicated to (at the time, relatively) expensive equipment for playing music and communicating with people, this may be a bit tone deaf. Maybe the "junk" sold today would indeed last 1/3 the life span of some of this stuff, but it would cost an inflation-adjusted fraction of the price and fit into a low-to-middle income teenager's pocket. Other than the speakers, of course.
I agree stuff was more expensive relative to today, but I wonder how the cost would fair compared to the buying power of the average income at the time. Also, I suspect most of that stuff was second hand.
I still have the 12" subwoofer cabinet I built in high school almost 30 years ago. It's gone through 3 amps and a couple drivers over the years, but it's still my main subwoofer in my current home theater system. I wish I'd taken pictures of its evolution from particle board with discrete amp to nicely veneered with rounded edges and integrated amp. I don't ever think of documenting stuff like that…
For some reason I especially love the motorized planispheres. All you need to do, really, is to stick the star chart onto a clock that moves fast by about 4 minutes a day. Neat little project for a kid.
In the UK I spent nearly nothing at all really. Most of it was scrounged, stolen out of skips and bins or bought for trivial prices at car boot or jumble sales. The latter you could pick up an old late 1960s amp for 5-10p (7-15 cents today) because the fuse had gone. Usually turned out to be something trivial.
The big expense was a soldering iron which I paid £5 for, a lot of money, by trading excess book vouchers I got for it (people kept buying me book vouchers endlessly). That landed me a 1965ish weller iron. That allowed me to fix anything.
I'm surprised that a soldering iron cost you so much. You could probably get a soldering iron for £5 today.
Not a great one by any means, I certainly wouldn't be doing SMD soldering with it, but adequate for through hole and point to point wiring. It probably won't last as long either.
My old man has a couple of soldering irons for the 70's that still work great. You'd be paying over $100 for the same iron these days.
He also still has the same roll of solder that he had in the 80's. A kilogram of solder lasts a long time. In fact, most of his electrical tools from the 80's are in good condition and get regular use.
It was a really nice Weller one that was temperature controlled so it was worth it at the time. The other option available was a new Antex one for more money which was rubbish. The Weller was still working fine when I sold it in 2001.
I’ve got a newer Weller TCP station now that gets used for everything from 0603 SMD devices through massive capacitors. Cost around $300 (more than a Hakko) but was worth it as it’s absolutely bomb proof and a pleasure to use for extended periods.
Most of my equipment now is from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s cheap, reliable and easy to repair if it does break.
Modern lead-free solder is excellent, but most hobbyists who never buy solder only have a roll of historical lead-free solder from when it was crap, have awful experience with it, and pass that experience on. You can still buy leaded solder everywhere today and the flux is not as nasty as the ancient ones. Make sure you don't mix the two as lead-free solder doesn't like to stick to leaded and vice versa. So for repairing old stuff leaded solder is still important, but it's no longer a compromise to use lead-free. Also, wash your hands after soldering!
Scrounging is a fine art. I had a room full of electronic gear as a child, a steady stream of computers (286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, III) and hi-fi components (amp, tuner, tape deck, turntable). My folks were poor, but Dad was a technician and new how to find stuff (garage sale, auction, school/office offloading gear, etc) and give it a quick fix up and a polish.
I suspect it also depends on where you lived. I lived in a small town in South Africa, and I am in awe at the quality of the junk this guy picked up and when I moved to the UK seeing the stuff that people threw away was like witnessing the most amazing treasure. I'm sure there's even such variation depending on where you live inside the US.
Teenagers in the US often work, but typically have no rent to pay or other necessary expenses.
Combined to growing up in a non poor family, some scrounging around second hand stores, getting broken stuff from friends/family members that you repair yourself, etc... is how it’d happen.
You'd be amazed at how much an enterprising person can collect for nothing but some blood, sweat and ingenuity. I ended up with a room looking somewhat like that by finding and repairing stuff here and there, often dumped at the street for the garbage truck to collect. Amplifiers with blown channels? dump ' m. Television with a fried tripler (HT ladder) or HT diode? On the street! Speaker boxes with one blown driver? Get rid of it. Reel to reel deck with some bad rubber here and there? Tube radio which just sits and hums? Begone, who wants a boat anchor like that?
Well, I did. It launched me on a career of 'rescuing' left-over hardware which still keeps me from buying new stuff unless absolutely necessary. While I might not be a good consumer (my father's oft-heard reaction when I spoke of my latest conquest: 'if everyone were like you the economy would crumble, just toss the rubbish and buy something new') but I don't feel this to be a prime responsibility: we're not here to support the economy, the economy exists by virtue of all our interactions. If the economy can only survive by virtue of people being wasteful the solution is not to produce more waste but to fix the economy. This will lead to some articles becoming more expensive - like they used to be - but it will also lead to less waste being produced, fixing another problem.
The rapid pace of technical developments between the 50's - the era from which some of the stuff our teenage bedrooms were filled with - and now has been part of the reason for the development of modern throw-away equipment. Now that this pace has slowed down and in some cases halted or reversed (want a good compact cassette player? Buy a second-hand older model and restore it) there is often no direct incitement for replacement of 'obsolete' hardware: an amplifier from the 90's sounds just as good as one from two decades later. It would make sense to repair that older model instead of buying something new, were it not for the fact that somewhere along the line manufacturers 'forgot' to think about repairability when designing hardware, 'forgot' about providing schematic diagrams or only provided them to 'authorised' repair centres, started using hard to source components, etc. Fortunately those latter 'omissions' have been reversed for a good deal by the existence of active repair communities on the 'net ([1], [2], etc) so the curious and enterprising can still continue on their mission of learning and discovery.
Computer people take it for granted that prices collapse. Of course the GTX1050Ti that I bought a couple years ago is now a third of its selling cost. I paid a lot of money for a Matrox G200 graphics card almost exactly 20 years ago... what would you pay today (in a strictly utilitarian non-collector sense) ? If my son asked for it, I would hand it to him, not implying he's rich, but that graphics card was made long before he was born, so its not terribly valuable beyond collectors.
The era of the linked article was an era of transistorization. His vacuum tube amp reminded me of the research lab grade Tektronix 545-series o-scope I owned with 500 watts of vacuum tubes and those weird ceramic and gold plate standoffs instead of PCBs, my Heathkit SB-102 vacuum tube ham SSB radio, and my motorola land mobile receiver and transmitter strips converted for the then new 2 meter ham radio repeater fad (which has since mostly disappeared). That o-scope in the mid 50s cost someone about one new house, by the mid 80s I got it for $100 with all the plugins, while living in a $100K house, figure it dropped in value by a thousand over a quarter century. My dad paid about a mortgage payment for the SB-102 when it was new, maybe 15 years later I got it for free when he upgraded, just too many microprocessor controlled features with no change in performance specs..
Note that with computers you can't do anything in 2018 with 1998 equipment, it won't work or the software and protocols are not designed to be compatible on purpose. However literal research lab grade work in the mid 50s is roughly equivalent to average dude work in the 80s so in the late 80s paying $100 for a file cabinet sized o-scope was reasonable because it was totally useful and practical and I learned a lot using it, if not terribly portable or reliable (burning out tubes, need to realign after replacement, etc)
There was also an interesting aspect to 70s stagflation, everything before 1980 cost ten times as much, so that also excited the depreciation. In the 50s $10K would buy a nice house, but once people got used to paying $100K (and now $1M) a dollar isn't worth what it used to be.
Also the nostalgia of time smooths things over, but a 1950 car was kinda rusted out and worn out by 1959 so people get weird feels about a kid driving a 1950-whatever automobile when that thing was pretty worthless at the time the kid had it in 1959, and this extends to electronics. I'm sure someone saved a lot of money for a long time to buy the very late 60s Sony black and white 7 inch TV I had in the early 80s as a home computer monitor, and to have that as a kid as my computer monitor during the moon landings would imply I was quite rich; but in 1982 or so that TV being used as a monitor would imply a bit of poverty, maybe, and in a nostalgic sense it gets blurred into "70s" and I must have been a rich kid, LOL.
This is already the case with computers. Nobody does anything new or exciting or more productive in nearly a decade. There are tail-fin like style changes. Someday a teen in 2030 will get a 2020 laptop that cost a huge pile of money in 2020, totally handles the workload in 2030, and some dude in 2070 will accuse the teen of having been rich because that laptop cost a boatload of money in 2020. Of course in 2030 with a scratched up screen and dead battery and deeply un-stylish exterior the kid only had to pay $50 inflation adjusted equivalent, so the kid was not necessarily rich.
VHF/UHF repeaters are still around. Problem is things have fractured into about 5 different digital standards, most of which are based on commercial land mobile, which sucks for ham use. Stupid DMR even makes you sign an agreement not to use experimental stuff in their system; fuck that, as it goes against the ethos of ham radio. HF is still fun.
I think back in the 70's there was less resistance to the idea of kids (teenagers) doing chores and having odd jobs as a way of making spendable income .. these days, its kind of resisted as it means you're too poor to be a proper member of middle-class consumption society, or something.
Still, I think its a definite ethical difference - back then, kids developed the skills to survive in capitalistic society pretty early - paper routes, odd jobs, etc. These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it with non-work-required utopia...
Much of my parent's generation thought my entire generation were lazy good for nothings. Thought I spent too much time on these new fangled electronic devices late at night, instead of doing honest-to-god hard work. Careful of your biases.
edit: The data justify this hypothesis. School enrollment in July skyrocketed from 10% in 1984 to 42% in 2016, and enrollment in advanced coursework has a similar curve to it.
Anecdote time: I grew up in an area with a good mix of blue collar and white collar families. Reunion season is coming up so I reconnected with some old friends. There's actually strong INVERSE correlation between "had a typical summer job" and "success in the marketplace". Most of the doctors/lawyers/engineers/software people didn't work typical teenager summer jobs and are now doing very well, both financially and in life (families, houses, health, hobbies). A depressing percentage of the people who did work summer jobs are still working those same jobs.
The people who are doing the best had a summer activity, but not a typical teenage job (or even a job). E.g., freelance programming, prestigious math/science camps/competition prep, volunteering and hospitals and in research labs, etc. Years later, you see the dividends paying on an early investment in increasing the value of one's labor.
IMO the blend of protestant work ethic and capitalism on display in the parent comment can be a dangerous one to teach kids. That fantasy is not how the world works. No one gives a damn how hard you work; what they care about is what you get done for them. Otherwise we'd all be digging trenches with spoons.
These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with
capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed
commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it
with non-work-required utopia
What?
As a capitalist myself here's a book I really recommend:
I suspect you will walk away from it thinking the same thing most people do: Marx's criticisms of capitalism are absolutely vital and relevant to this day... and his solutions are even worse, and that capitalism is still probably the least terrible solution we've got. :)
But more to the point: there is no definition of socialism or communism that even remotely advocates this a "non-work-required utopia." It's all about work and workers!
(Now, in practice, socialist/communist societies wound up stratifying anyway, and elites often didn't exactly have to spend their days in a coal mine or shoveling pig shit like the commonfolk. But that's been pretty much true of every economic system under the sun since the beginning of mankind. So, even a cursory glance at history tells us that this is not a problem unique to socialism or communism.)
I'm not looking for a pro-/anti- discussion. Dialectic materialism never solved a thing.
What I do want to point out though, is that teens don't work like they used to. Some think thats a good thing; others do not. Alas, only the prosperity of future generations can really provide a valid indicator ..
You must meet very different teenagers than I do. Every store that has trash work to do here (for which they want to pay as little as possible) has teenagers working for them. The service industry employs them where they can get away with it too.
Adults always seems to believe teens don't work like they did.
Those adults are almost always wrong - although not necessarily in the obvious ways. A small minority of teens run successful YT/Instagram/WA/Etsy channels, and some of them make surprisingly good money from them.
Mid 80s I started out with 2 giant Sansui floor speakers encased in wood (like these: https://www.bonanza.com/listings/Rare-Vintage-Pair-Of-Sansui...) that my father had gotten at the PX while stationed overseas, along with a discarded Yamaha AM/FM receiver. Those speakers were awesome, but after one of the woofers blew the no-name replacement I put in was not able to do the original sound justice.
Tape players were always a challenge. I never had enough money for good ones (reel to reel or cassette), so I just repurposed my base model Walkman. The Yamaha receiver/Walkman combo was the source of many mix tapes of stuff I liked on FM radio, usually classic rock and Dr. Demento.
One issue with 80s-era LPs was a lot of major labels started using the cheapest possible materials in the pressings and those horrible plastic bag sleeves instead of heavy paper. Indies were better when it came to quality, but when CDs started picking up steam I was happy to switch.
Lots of weird stuff could be found in people's trash. Once I got an old 50s or 60s era waveform monitor, another time I picked up a vintage typewriter from the 20s that after a little restoration kind of worked (but it was torture pounding those keys, frankly).
I wish it would not stop at 1980 but continue with more pictures into the 90's!
What are those round things that are slightly slanted downward at the top shelf? In the first picture there are three of them, in the third pic (late 1976) still three with the middle one having a blue frame and brown circular lines on the white circle, in the fourth pic (January 1977) only one remaining
This reminds of two photogrpahs shown in the book "Ham Radio's Technical Culture" [1]. The photos show two ham shacks separated by 50 years and how they basically look the same.
It almost looks like my bedroom, but I grew up in the 90s. I didn't have the financial resources so I had to gather a lot of my components from trash day or flea markets. But hey I got CS degree out of it so there is that.
Replace the audio gear with ham radio and CB gear, his room doesn't look too different from mine during that same period. I had a combination of donor gear, graciously offered by some older hams, a couple pieces of home brew, and wires. Lots and lots of wires. CB was hot at the time so I had to have that as well. Fortunately, radios weren't terribly expensive. Dad wasn't really happy about another antenna on the roof, though. In any case, all that served me really well when getting my EE degree.
This is pretty much what my room looked like, except the speaker boxes and hi-fi equipment were instead stacks of Pentium 2/3 mini towers, monitors, motherboards, hard disks, etc. I used to go around the loca streets on council hard junk pickup night and salvage desktops etc that people had thrown out due to maybe one broken component. Fix them up, build a working machine and give them away to people, while at the same time, souping up my own collection :-)
FTA: "An old Revere reel to reel recorder (salvaged from the town dump by my father) is now mounted on the wall. This unit was from 1957 and despite having no cabinet, worked quite well. It was only mono, but at 7 1/2 ips the sound was actually pretty good. I had this recorder up until around 1999 when I finally retired it permanently. 40+ years of service out of a piece of gear... most of the junk sold today would be lucky to last 1/3 that long."
I just retrieved my father's 1965-ish Akai stereo reel-to-reel, along with two dozen commercially recorded reels. One of them is the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. It sounds nearly identical to my CD - just a little wobble from the very very old tape stored in garages for decades.
That's a lovely post. I've moved around a lot when I was a kid so I always ended up tearing things apart and putting them back together in new configurations. I'd feel right at home in that room. A couple of weeks ago I spotted someone selling their Quad stereo set on the local Ebay equivalent for an amount that was almost embarrassing. Top of the line kit back in the day, still sounds great today.
Holy shit, never thought I'd see Rocket Roberts on the front page of HN. I loved loved loved following him. Him and October Sky were two things that gave me a final push to take up engineering at uni. His backyard observatory is still my favourite page on the internet.
My bedroom started looking like that somewhat later in the mid 1980s, kicked off by the winning of some car speakers in a primary school raffle. This inevitably raised the question of what to plug them into. Collecting discarded junk from the 1960s-1970s at jumble sales and car boot sales solved that problem and I learned a lot.
I think that I was privileged to have had a childhood in the age of ubiquitous junk availability. It kept me off the streets and lead to a technical profession and some life long interests. It’s actually more difficult to get hold of stuff now thanks to electrical safety regulations, skips being locked, eBay pushing the prices of trash up and general lack of repairability of anything.
A footnote: 30 years later my bedroom is a radio shack and just as messy and I’m blessed that I found someone understanding enough to put up with it :)