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A mixture of resigning myself to more time in the home office, a bit of a tidy up and setting up the turbo trainer inside has led me to digging my very old Rotel amp and my not so quite old Gale Mini Monitors out of a dusty box and setting up on my desk.
I have found a jack plug to phonos lead and connected said vinatge hifi to my Iphone and it sounds awful. Now either my rose tinted ears are playing tricks, my hearing has deteriorated significantly over the last five years or something else but I don't recall it being this bad previously. Also my phone keeps cutting out - is this because I am running it in the red to try and increase the output signal?
Have Icarefully stored this precious vintage hifileft this stuff in a dusty box cluttering up valuable space for no good reason or should i experiment with some new fangled blue tooth, wifi dongley thing to provide an input into the amp. Or should i cut my losses and buy a blue tooth speaker? I dont think buying a budget new speaker will not give me the performance I was hoping to achieve and will result in more useless junk being carefully preserved. I mainly play itunes, Radio Player, BBC sounds, Youtube so hopefully any suggestions will be compatible with these and without massive expensive.
many thanks
Ive got a 30 year old NAD amp which sounds great when i stream radio and spotify to it via a £30 Logitech Bluetooth dongle wired into the aux stage. I have to run the amp volume quite high but other than that its all good. id test your amp first though with a cd or other input to see if its still functioning ok before doing anything else
As you seem quite Apple-ey, one option would be to buy an old Airport Express and connect that to the amp. They seem to be about £40 on eBay. That would allow you to cast any audio from the phone to the amp via Airplay. They even have an optical out built into the 3.5 mm output jack if the amp has a suitable input. Apple released a firmware upgrade for these old things to upgrade them to full Airplay 2 so you can do the whole multi-room/speaker thing later if you wanted.
What quality is the phone music? 256 and even 128 sound OK on a phone, and bluetooth speakers are designed with that low quality in mind. Hi-fi is less forgivign though and will benefit from a decent source material (either lossless or 256 plus)
A portable DAC is the way to go - the one in your phone is almost certainly awful.
Something like this: https://www.richersounds.com/cyrus-soundkey-graphite.html
P.S I'm using a streaming Yamaha pre-amp with my ancient Cyrus/ Audiovector set, and it sounds great.
Just a second; something sounds not right here.
The headphone jack on most phones is perfectly capable of working as an input to an amplifier; I use mine quite often on summer days / parties when I drag an amp and speakers out onto the decking.
What input are you using on the amp ? Use Line / CD / Tape depending on what's available. If you've plugged it in to the phono input; then you're going through the RIAA filter and it could be causing the issues you've described...
^^as above, plugged into the phono stage?
given you don't know if its the amp that's borked, I'd be wary of spending much money on a DAC.
how about binning the amp and just getting something like this -> https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yamaha-WXA-50-compatible-streaming-amplifier/dp/B01KIGWU7Q/
good reviews, works with your current speakers, small and fairly power efficient
I use a Logitech bluetooth receiver, a Lepy Amp (£20) and 25 year old Gale2i speakers that still sound perfectly ok to my terrible aging ears. I stream at the highest rate off Deezer. Is it Hi-fi - almost certainly not. Is it good enough, and better than a bluetooth speaker? I think so. There's something really satisfying about using old speakers.
I've used my iPhone plugged directly into a 35 year old NAD amp and it sounded fine, and I've also used it with the same amp streaming via a cheapo Blackberry bluetooth thingy that I picked up for about a tenner, which also works fine, so there should be no issue in principle with signal or DAC etc. Maybe things to check:
Connections are all ok to the speakers, leads the right way round (I don't mean directionally :));
Do you have another source you could put through the amp to check it? The volume control pot might have oxidised a bit or got dusty;
As above, try different input sockets, think I plugged mine into 'Tape';
Is the phone volume turned up high?
Sounds like a simpler option would be to buy a set of decent wireless active desktop speakers, I have these Audioengine A2+ in the kitchen and they sound great, Audioengine A2+
I too have an old 90s NAD amp with my ipad plugged into it and it sounds great (listening to it right now in fact).
I have it connected via its 3.5mm headphone jack to the amps L and R inputs at the back using one of these things..
Have you got something else you can try as a source in order to check if the amp/speakers are actually OK?
I have a 90s denon amp, which, not having been used for a few years, sounded crackly/dull.
I noticed that it altered when i touched the source selector, so i opened it up, had a look, it looked fine so, after a quick google, i bought some wd40 silicone spray (NOT normal wd40)
After a liberal dousing and letting it dry for a few hours, my amp sounds just as good as it always did.
The spray was about £8 or so.
Worth a try.
Has to be silicone, as it doesn’t conduct.
Thanks folks, your experiences above sound similar to the quality I recall from this system. following the comments above I swapped from Aux to phono input (which I believe requires less input signal) and am now getting a louder noise but still sounds pretty awful. I will try squirting everything with switch cleaner and silcone and see if that improves matters and try inputing my old CD player.
I did have a number of early Airport Express but they systematically failed after about 18 months - does anyone have more recent experiences?
I bought a yamaha music cast box that allows me to use bluetooth so i can use phone, computer, tablet with my soundsystem. It works well. sound is good Very happy with it.
I used to use the Aux input on my NAD amp with a heaphone socket on the other end to listen to music on my phone. It worked fine & no issue of output from the phone.
Have you checked that the phone volume is turned up when you are running it through the stereo?
I ended up swapping it for a Chromecast audio & streaming directly to that, but the connection really is the same.
I recently got an old 1970's Sony STR 242L Receiver off Ebay for about £30.
Looks nice and sounds surprising good through some Kef Eggs for use with my PC.
I swapped from Aux to phono input (which I believe requires less input signal) and am now getting a louder noise but still sounds pretty awful.
It will sound awful as the phono input applies frequency response correction (RIAA) which is specific to pickup cartridges. You definitely need to go through Aux or one of the other line level inputs - CD Tape Tuner etc.
Does your phone sound OK through headphones?
What you have should sound ok so it's probably worth a bit of investigation to establish where the problem is.
Try a different source, then different speakers and if you can another amp, all to try establish the cause of the problem. Could be the capacitors in the amp leaking if it is very old, or the crossover in the speakers deteriorated, or the lead you are using to connect phone to amp.
If you're going for something new, I'd look for active speakers with airplay as they will sound a lot better than bluetooth units.