[Crash course] Downgrading in HiFi - theory and applications

Please bear with me. I have a point to make, but it will take me a bit to get to it.

“Oh, so what else is new?” I hear a sarcastic voice mutter out in the hinterlands.

Declining to dignify that remark with a reply, I continue: a few months ago, in a most uncharacteristic burst of self-improvement, I dusted off an exercycle that for years had been doing the usual duty of such things as a tie rack and started a (for the most part) daily regimen of pedaling it for 25 minutes or so. As I attacked my flab, the family ghast was flabbered.

The key to making a go of any such program, as I'm sure anyone who has tried it will tell you, is to find distractions so you forget your resemblance to a human hamster, mindlessly running your legs around and around while going nowhere. Now that I think of it, that's exactly like the typical audiophile upgrade routine--but I digress. My unoriginal solution was to set up an antiquated VHS VCR/DVD combo player and early-ish flat screen 21" “dumb” TV with Roku adapter on an old, slightly wobbly, and more than slightly dusty you-assemble-it TV cart, with genuine walnut vinyl veneer, that my parents got with S&H Green Stamps sometime in the 1970s. The cart perfectly fits the space available in front of the exercycle, and with the TV I can let a single episode of this or that serve as a handy 25-minute timer for a cycling session. Now, naturally, because I'm a member of the audio fraternity, if a peculiar branch of it, I could hardly live with the tinny sound from the TV set's built-in speakers. Therefore, having raided my spare equipment closet, I proceeded to assemble a rudimentary add-on audio system.

The system. This is not in any way an “audiophile” system, and it never would have been. Rather, it's something a buyer with some appreciation of audio quality but a tight budget might have assembled in the early 1980s for an office, modest apartment, or maybe dorm room. Remember, the cart-cum-TV exactly fits the space available, so everything was constrained by what I could fit on it.

To start, I chose a pair of aging Radio Shack Minimus 7 microspeakers, which featured ca. 4" woofers and 1" tweeters. They're actually heavy little things, housed in sealed black metal cabinets with perforated metal grilles. My long-time fans--fan--anyhow, you may remember my taking them as a point of comparison when I reviewed AudioEngine A2+ powered speakers here on TNT back in 2019. Radio Shack claimed frequency response from 50 Hz to 20 kHz but was suspiciously mum about a tolerance. Cable connection is by spring-loaded pushbuttons that, when the aged springs actually deign to do their job, clamp bare wire inserted into little holes. When introduced in 1977, these speakers listed for $50 per pair, and during their roughly three-decade life in the catalogue Radio Shack usually put them on sale each spring for around $20 off. I bought mine for a few dollars at a thrift store probably 20 years ago, and they would have been maybe 20 years old then. In their day they were considered pretty decent, and they still have something of a following; I always thought of them as the best gear Radio Shack had to offer. If not exactly “high end,” they certainly are a huge cut above the speakers built into my TV!

To drive them, I selected a roughly contemporary silver-face Technics SA-110 receiver. When this compact, bottom-end model hit the market for $160 in 1983, it was rated at 20 watts per channel, but with a fudge: like many inexpensive models of its day, it was specified from 40 Hz, not the standard 20 Hz, to 20 kHz, and at a fairly high .5% total harmonic distortion. Thus, in practice, as such things are properly measured, it almost certainly develops a good bit less than the stated 20 watts! Still, it has more “oomph” than whatever little flea amp is built into the TV, and in fact I've always thought these things actually sounded surprisingly decent. Yes, things: I have two of them. At least a quarter century ago, spotting one in a used audio shop, I expressed just that opinion, whereupon the shop owner picked his up, handed it to me, and said, “Here, you can have this if you promise never to bring it back!”

As far as features, the SA-110 is pretty spartan. Probably its most posh is the AM/FM section's large Marantz-style tuning wheel. There is no power indicator light, but before the bulb in mine burned out the tuner's slide-rule scale would light up, albeit without an illuminated pointer, when the power was on. Aside from the tuner, the SA-110 has a phono section and a combined “tape/aux” external input, which, if dim memory serves, does not act as a true tape loop. This last is the sole section I'm actually using here. Connection for a single set of speakers is by ghastly, balky rotating plastic contraptions that, when turned, clamp bare wire ends inserted into them--if you're lucky. (See photo, right.) Volume, bass, treble, and balance controls are all sliders; pushbuttons control source selection, AM/FM band selection, and the wonky FM mute system that makes this component's sole provision for mono playback.

Back when this equipment was new, conventional wisdom about cables was that standard lamp cord (“zip cord”) was perfect for connecting speakers to amps, and who am I to argue? Especially considering that with the SA-110's dubious connectors, anything approximating heavy-gauge audiophile-grade supercables is right out of the question, even supposing I were inclined to employ such things. In practice, I connected the Minimus 7s with two short pieces of brown lamp cord that I had at hand, already cut to length. Naturally, the SA-110 has no remote control, and with only the single auxiliary input, connecting and selecting between both the VCR/DVD player and the TV/Roku was impossible. Instead, I connected the VCR/DVD player and Roku adapter to the TV via its composite inputs and HDMI input, respectively, and, digging out a 1/8" miniphone plug to RCA plug patch cable that had come with some piece of cheap gear or other, I then connected the TV's headphone miniplug jack to the receiver's auxiliary input. After disabling the TV's own speakers in the settings menu, I now could select inputs and control the volume of everything via the TV with its remote. Not “audiophile” but adequate to the purpose.

That cable did present one further issue: it was too short if the receiver was sitting on the bottom shelf of the cart. Accordingly, another improvised solution: I dug out an acrylic “lift” my wife had originally purchased to display some statuette or the like in a long-supplanted home decorating scheme. Placed under the SA-110, voila--problem solved!

In action...But wait! There's more! For the following weeks, I was suprised and pleased with how well this little system of cast-offs did what I'd set it up to do. The SA-110 turned out to be ample to drive the Minimus 7s. As I'd remembered, despite its having been absolutely at the bottom of the Technics barrel when new, it really is a decent sounding little amp. As to the speakers, their sound was more than pleasing as background fed from TV programs. They may be small, but they offer well-balanced sound quality--dare I say it? even “musical” sound quality when reproducing opening and closing themes and such. Naturally, they don't offer thunderous bass, but what they do yield is clean and clear and, taken on its own terms, leaves no impression anything is seriously lacking. I could have been quite happy to go on with this arrangement forever.

And then it happened. One night a couple of weeks ago, I was going to my 78 storage room, and for reasons I can't explain something that had been sitting in the entry, in the way, for so long it had become an unnoticed part of the landscape managed to register in my consciousness: a disused Advent passive subwoofer purchased long ago at some thrift shop. Eureka! An enhancement to the exercise cycle system! And just the right size to sit on an old laundry hamper tucked in between the TV cart and the wall. The thing carries no model name or number; its label simply denotes it an Advent Subwoofer. The small print referring to International Jensen pegs it as post-Henry-Kloss, around 1990. I've been able to find very little about it on line, but as best I can tell it's a Subwoofer III and was sold to convert a speaker model called Mini Advent into a satellite-and-sub arrangement. If that's correct, the sub retailed for $299, had frequency response of 40 to 180 Hz +/- 3 dB, and featured a pair of 5.25 inch drivers in a high density fiberboard cabinet. Speaker connections, inset into the side of the otherwise featureless ported box, are flimsy little spring clips set too closely together in the typical “two-sets-of-four” arrangement, one set going to the amp and the other serving as pass-throughs to the main speakers.

That again raises the issue of cables. I'm sure I have a spool of speaker wire around here somewhere--and from that, I'm also sure you know the rest. Luck was with me, though: in a junk drawer, I found an electric power cord, complete with its molded-in two-prong plug, amputated from some long-gone clock radio, electric can opener, or the like. In short order I cut off the plug; halved the cord; stripped the ends; and moved on to the hardest part, getting those ends securely latched into the sub's cheesy little spring clips and the SA-110's awful rotary things. It may not be elegant, it may not be “audiophile,” but it's a good match for the zip cord already in service (it's even brown!), and it works.

The upshot. This is where you may expect raptures about how addition of the sub took this system to the next level, elevated soundstaging and imaging and PRaT and God knows what else to etherial heights, took characters off the TV screen and put them right in my lap (OK if it's, say, Emilia Clarke; maybe not so much if it's Patrick Stewart), etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. In a word: no. This is a cheap, old sub supplementing cheap, old microspeakers, driven by a cheap, old amp connected to a cheap, old TV's headphone jack. The sub does make an improvement, offering up some real bass that the little Radio Shack mains were only suggesting, and I think it supports the received wisdom that relieving little speakers of low bass duty frees them to do better with the higher parts of the spectrum, where they are strongest. It does not, however, plumb any subterranean depths or punch any guts, and it can bonk a bit depending on what it's being fed. In short, this system is nothing for “critical listening.”

For all that it will never supplant my main system (my pride and joy, but admittedly itself pretty modest by many audiophiles' standards), I'll confess this motley assortment has given me more plain old fun than I've had from any stereo gear in a long, long time. As I sit there with the TV playing, pedaling merrily, merrily, merrily on my way to nowhere at all, I keep catching myself getting a big, dopey (but not Dopey--that sly reference just now notwithstanding, I don't get the Disney Channel) grin as I think about taking that sub, long a kicking/tripping hazard, and making it a useful part of my life. Then there was the pure satisfaction of solving minor issues with an old electric cord and a surplus acrylic stand, not to mention of setting up a daily pleasure without spending a dime.

Four years ago, our redoubtable editor, Lucio, offered us a series of editorials on Downgrading a system for greater pleasure (the three parts are here, here, and here). The gist of his suggestions was that one road to achieving better results involves abandoning the “newer and more expensive is always better” mindset and paying more attention to the actual, often equal or superior performance to be had from more modest gear, even gear one already owns. What I've done with my little system described above isn't exactly on point--it's a secondary system for an exercise room, and Lucio was talking about the main listening rig--but it's at least in the same line. Sometimes, you don't need to have the latest and greatest to have enjoyable audio. Sometimes all you need is something humble that punches a bit above its weight and gives you the sound you need, not the sound you think you want. I expect we'd all do ourselves, our wallets, and our sanity a big favor by keeping that idea in mind.

Sorry--can't talk now. I'm late for a very important date, but if I just pedal a little faster maybe I can still get there on time!

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Crash course on downgrading - Part IV - an application

How to make your HiFi system worse and live happy