VINTAGE GEAR

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Vintage Gear
Shure V-15 Phono Cartridge
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jul 10, 2012
The original Shure V-15 phono cartridge debuted in 1964 as a "statement" design. The engineering team was headed by Jim Kogen, who later became a Vice President of Engineering, and after that the CEO. The V-15 Type II arrived six years later and it was the first computer-designed cartridge. The Type III was the best selling model in the series, it came along three years later, long before the CD changed the course of audio history.

Shure was huge in the mainstream market, but by the late 1970s and through the 1980s most analog-loving audiophiles had graduated to moving-coil cartridges (the V-15 was a moving-magnet design). I preferred the sound of moving coil cartridges, but conceded the V-15's tracking abilities were well ahead of most of the expensive Japanese moving coil designs of the time.

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Vintage Gear
Monster Cable
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jul 03, 2012
In the beginning there was "lamp cord." Speaker cable was something you bought off a spool at the local hardware store, but Noel Lee had a better idea: audiophile speaker cables. He had a day job at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, where he worked as a laser-fusion engineer. In his spare time he played drums in an all-Asian country-rock band called Asian Wood.
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Vintage Gear
Linn Sondek LP12 Turntable
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jun 26, 2012
The Linn Sondek LP12 was arguably the first modern high-end turntable, with a belt-drive design that was a game changer in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Vintage Gear
Sony D-5 Portable CD Player
Steve Guttenberg  |  May 17, 2012
Sony introduced the world’s first portable CD player, the D-5, in late 1984, just a year after its first home player, the CDP-101, revolutionized the audio market. In the 1970s, Sony Walkman cassette players were as ubiquitous as iPods are now, and the new Discman players were poised to be the next big thing.
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Vintage Gear
Acoustic Research AR-3 Speakers
Steve Guttenberg  |  May 04, 2012
Edgar Villchur didn’t set out to start a speaker company; he just wanted to license his acoustic suspension designs to other speaker companies. In the early ’50s, he shopped the concept to the biggest names in the business, but not a single one was interested. So Villchur started Acoustic Research in 1952, and his very first speaker, the AR-1, was an immediate hit. Villchur’s design strategy used the elasticity of air within a sealed cabinet to provide the restoring force for the driver, which allowed his relatively small speakers to produce deep, low-distortion bass.
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Vintage Gear
Nakamichi Dragon Cassette Deck
Steve Guttenberg  |  Apr 13, 2012
LPs and 45-rpm singles remained the unchallenged music formats throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and well into the 1970s when the Compact Cassette really took off. Cassettes were more portable and didn’t suffer from scratches and surface noise issues (but tape hiss could be a problem). The cassette was also the first recordable format to garner a bona-fide, mass-market foothold.
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Vintage Gear
Vintage Test Report: Nakamichi Dragon Cassette Deck
Craig Stark  |  Oct 02, 2018  |  First Published: Apr 01, 1983
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.
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