Vintage

In the vinyl heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, differences between UK-designed turntables, and those arriving from Japan, were stark. The suspended subchassis belt-drive decks, popular among British audiophiles, showcased increasing refinement of a ‘traditional’ technology. Japanese corporations, on the other hand, were making use of large research departments and development budgets to produce decks that could correct for off-centre records, direct-drive motors with almost unmeasurable wow and flutter, and control systems with huge torque that would revolutionise DJ-ing.

One frustrating aspect of being a vintage audio enthusiast is encountering those companies who love to re-use model names and numbers. If you’re a B&O fan talking about a ‘Beogram 3000’, for example, are you referring to one of the two 1960s variants, the 1970s model or the 1980s version? It’s even becoming an issue all over again with updated recreations of famous designs, like the Mission 770 loudspeaker [HFN Jun ’22] and Quad’s 33/303 pre/power system [HFN Jan ’25].

If you were to attend a classic car show and make a beeline for the enthusiasts exhibiting vehicles made by mass-market manufacturers, it would be easy to predict the kinds of designs you'd see on display. Most space would be given over to the noteworthy models: the big-engined ones, the sporty or luxury variants, the rare limited editions. And yet the bread-and-butter models that carried sales reps up and down the land and took many of us to school as children are largely forgotten. They were workhorses, used until the end of their lives and then replaced.

Imagine the difficulty of designing a high-quality loudspeaker with a radically new appearance. While buyers were happy to accept amplifiers, tuners and cassette decks with fascias that looked like the dashboard of a Concorde, speakers were furniture and so had to blend in - square box, plain grille and nothing more. If anyone could solve this problem it would be Bang & Olufsen, masters of creating designs that are at the same time futuristic-looking, appealing and enduring.

The Philips Motional Feedback (MFB) loudspeaker has been mentioned a number of times in these pages over recent years. The company achieved considerable success with both its first- and second-generation models, including the 22RH544, but in the UK at least, the third generation is less commonly encountered. The AH585 seen here is the smallest of three consumer speakers, the others being the similar but larger AH586 and the three-way AH587.

The story of DPA is not uncommon among small and specialised hi-fi manufacturers. Arriving in 1992, it actually represented the second iteration of a company co-founded by Robert Watts (who has since gone on to be digital design consultant at Chord Electronics). And while Deltec Precision Audio, which debuted in 1984 with its CTA80 preamplifier, had ultimately shut up shop in the early '90s, the ideas behind its original models clearly had some merit – it was soon back with Watts onboard, albeit under a slightly different name.