Audio Aroma Flashback

They do say that our sense of smell is the sense most closely linked to memory, and I can well believe it. I just picked up some more vintage hi-fi bits and pieces that I really don't need (at a price that I couldn't pass up), which give off an aroma that takes me right back to my childhood. I have fond recollections of tagging along with my dad when he would visit the electrical department in Beatties department store in Wolverhampton to demo the latest Pioneer or Trio amplifiers. This would have been back in the early-to-mid 1970s, so the lighting section that we walked through on our way to the hi-fi department was a dizzying display of lurid lava lamps and swaying fibre optic dandelion lamps. They provided the perfect mood-setter for the racks of illuminated dials, UV meters and glowing receivers that awaited us. I could always smell the amps and tape decks before I caught sight of their aluminium facades. The smell seems to be unique to hi-fi components of that era. It is the smell of the air the moment before a thunderstorm, of ozone, of the cooling breeze coming off the sea at the end of a hot day. These days the only time I smell something similar is when I walk past the Kwik-Fit tyre centre, but there, it is tainted with the odours of rubber and oil. My wife thinks I'm insane because I insisted she inhale the air in my man cave, but to me it's more than a smell: it's pure nostalgia. It is for me what the smell of steam trains was to my dad: an olfactory gateway to happy childhood memories. It is, as if I needed one, another reason to own vintage hi-fi.

 

For the miserly sum of £25 I managed to secure a Philips Sound Project TA 12000 receiver, N2537 tape deck, AF 777 automatic turntable and a rather underwhelming modern pair of Acoustic Solutions AV-20 Mk II bookshelf speakers. Amazingly, considering that they must be over 35 years-old, none of these Philips components has lost that distinctive smell. If I close my eyes and breathe deeply, it's 1974 again and Slade are still in the charts. You don't get that with an ipod.

Being from another era, the receiver has those horrible slot and pin speaker inputs and din connectors which make it a challenge to hook up to my Linn Sondek and CD player. So, until I raid Maplins, I have had to content myself with listening to cassettes and that deceptively cheap and cheerful Philips turntable. The fast forward and rewind functions on the tape deck are painfully slow, but playback is good, and the whole unit has a bullet-proof, built-to-last feel to it. It's been fun listening, for the first time in years, to my tapes of Diamond Head and Y&T at the 1982 Reading festival. The backlit tape compartment and dancing level meters just add to the experience. The receiver is similarly tank-like of build with beautifully turned aluminium knobs, satisfyingly smooth and weighted response from the tuning dial and a nice 'n chunky, click-step, incrementally graduated volume control. And this thing weighs a ton. These receivers seemed to sell well and be highly regarded in mainland Europe, but rarely appear for sale in the UK, so information on them, in English at least, is a bit thin on the ground. I'll reserve judgement on the sound quality of the receiver until I've had the chance to hook up my usual sources, but initial impressions are very good. And it kicks out a meaty, for its time, 60 watts per channel.

One huge surprise is just how good that light-weight, fully automatic, Philips turntable sounds. It came fitted with a Philips GP 400 Mk II cartridge with spherical stylus which I was expecting to sound like a dog, particularly as I had no way of knowing how many hours service it had seen, but as it turns out, it punches well above its weight.

Talking of weight, the AF 777 turntable has a nifty, built-in VTF gauge which makes setting up the cartridge completely foolproof. Despite that, the previous owner had it set over the recommended tracking force, so I dialled it down a half gram and got this little deck singing. I've not entrusted anything other than my duplicate LPs to the mercy of that stylus so far, but it tracks wonderfully, without so much as a hint of inner groove distortion or sibilance. I'm planning on keeping this deck to give to my kids when the time is right, as its fully automatic operation and cheap-to-replace stylus will make it a perfect way to introduce them to vinyl. I wish I'd had a first turntable as good as this.

Read more about it here.