VINTAGE GEAR

It’s not every day you come across speakers built around monstrous 15-inch coaxial drivers but New Jersey-based vintage audio specialist Skyfi Audio recently landed a pair of pristine Altec Lansing 604-18 speakers.

New Jersey-based vintage audio specialist Skyfi Audio has something special for AV collectors: a vintage Akai 8-track player/recorder.

Hearkening back to the late ’70s , this gleaming Pioneer SPEC 1 preamp is one of the more striking stereo specimens from New Jersey-based vintage audio specialist SkyFi Audio.

If you were an audiophile in the late 1970s or early 1980s-or just a teenager with a fresh driver's license-the Compact Cassette was integral to your life. While reel-to-reel magnetic tape introduced the concept of the “mixtape” decades earlier, it was not until the cassette's launch by Philips in 1963 and its later adoption in automobile decks and portables in the 1970s that music lovers got the ability to create personal playlists and take them to-go in a convenient, pocket-friendly format.

In the days before the CD arrived in 1982, LPs were the format of choice for music lovers. While the turntable played a significant role in determining sound quality, you also needed a great phono cartridge to get the music out of the grooves.

Jim Winey didn’t set out to design a new type of speaker, just a better electrostatic speaker. He worked evenings, weekends, vacations, whenever he could starting in 1966, while he was still working for 3M as an engineer. His experiments with flexible bar magnets and Mylar led Winey to invent and patent the planar magnetic speaker.