Audiophile Gear
Vintage and Budget HiFi Equipment
Nadir Audio
Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always been fascinated with stereo equipment. I love listening to music, so any electrical devices that reproduce music are super cool in my book. The first systems I remember were my parents’ Fisher 150 receiver with matching Model 5 bookshelf speakers and the giant Magnavox console in my grandparents’ basement where my sisters and I could play records and listen to the radio. When I got a little older in the 80s, I subscribed to Stereo Review magazine, joined a classical music record club, and started collecting my own stereo gear with money I made mowing lawns. In recent years, I’ve begun to refurbish older components on a small electronics bench I’ve set up in one of our spare bedrooms. Below is a list of some of the equipment I’ve had over the years that I’ve really enjoyed.
I also regularly post videos to my YouTube channel for budget and vintage audiophile gear. I’m a big CD, vinyl, and cassette collector going all the way back to the early 80s, with a broad range of genres including ambient, alternative, electronic, rock. jazz, classical, and more. To view some of my collection, please visit my Discogs and Bandcamp pages.
A few years ago, my parents sent me their old Fisher 150 stereo system which they bought new in the late sixties. I spent many hours sitting in front of it listening to music when I was a kid. The 150 is a combination of a small receiver and two Fisher 5 speakers designed to be paired with this receiver only. While the speakers are definitely the weakest link, they’re really not bad for sixties era bookshelf units. It has a pleasant A-curve sound and can even image a little bit when the speakers are fairly close together. The audio sources I used back in the day were a Garrard turntable, a Sears 8-track player, and a Technics cassette deck. The first two are long gone, but I still have the cassette deck.
These days, I use this system in my electronics room to listen to the radio or my iPhone. The receiver still works well after 50 years, although I recently ordered some replacement capacitors and a new stereo beacon bulb online. A quick refurb, and it should be good for another 50 years. Watch my video below for more info on this cool vintage system.
I bought this receiver new in 1983 with money I had earned mowing lawns. There was a stereo store that I used to go with my friends to buy blank cassette tapes and drool over the expensive stereo gear, and for decades I thought it was called J&R Music World located on 95th Street in Overland Park KS near Oak Park Mall. When I finally did some research for a YouTube video I made on this receiver (see below), I discovered that it was actually called CMC Stereo located on Metcalf Avenue, which was also very close to where I grew up in Overland Park. My friend’s Dad had an older Kenwood receiver that I always thought was cool, so when the KR-820 went on sale one week for $220 — still a lot of money for me at the time — I just had to pick one up.
I couldn’t afford speakers right away, so for the first few months I just listened to the FM tuner using my Dad’s Pioneer headphones. Finally, a set of 2-way Kenwood LD-40 speakers with passive radiators went on sale for $50 each at another stereo store off of 95th Street in the Nall Hills Shopping Center. I’m pretty sure they were from one of those cheap all-in-one stereo systems that were popular back then, but they were the only decent sounding speakers I could find in my price range, so I bought them with some money I had made over the summer break. I finally had a fully working stereo! I ended up selling them in the early 90s before moving to California. You don’t see passive radiators too often anymore, but I think they basically served the same purpose as ports.
I still have this receiver, having held on to it after the tuner section stopped working intermittently sometime in the early 90s. I was finally able to get it running again a few years ago after it sat in its box for over twenty years. We used it for a while in our living room paired with some Boston Acoustics VR-6 floor standing speakers, and it actually was not bad for a solid state unit from the 80s. And while I still prefer the older analog tuning displays, the blue flourescent digits on this one are cooler looking than most. Definitely a nostalgia piece that I’m going to keep for the long haul.
