AMSTRAD 'Hi-Fi' - the Mug's Eyeful
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 พ.ค. 2024
- An unwise purchase made forty years ago still irks after all these years.
00:00 Intro
01:16 Testing 101
07:43 Patently obvious
08:51 Record player
10:40 So what’s the problem?
13:43 Towers of terror
17:31 Speaker disassembly
19:37 Main unit disassembly
23:01 Wrap up
26:12 Patreon credits
UPDATES
1) A few people have mentioned that the turntable cartridge is a ceramic cart -therefore I was incorrect in giving them the credit for using a MM cart.
LINKS:
The Amstrad commercial was originally uploaded by / @obsoletearchive4201
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I remember sooooo wanting one of those when I was a kid. My parents bought one from Curry’s for my Xmas. I woke up on Xmas morning to find out that Curry’s had sent the wrong system. A Hitachi with a regular record player. I cried my eyes out. When my parents went to the store to complain and I remember the salesman saying “the Amstrad is shite. Keep the other one” and I ended up with a superior hifi by accident!
bless that man
Lucky escape! 😅
Result
Love it.
Now that's value! You got lucky!
My grandfather was a very modest person but he always said that we were too poor for cheap things and this "hi-fi" is the perfect example for that.
My dad had a decent hifi when I was a kid. I got a few hand me downs like this from friends or relatives and I was always shocked at how poor they were. No lows, muffled mids... I took them all apart and tossed them.
That cracked me up... when we would make beans when I was a kid, it was my job to pick out the little rocks and weird or broken beans before they went in the pot. I was always told that my great-grandmother would say "we're not so poor that we eat broken beans."
I dont think I've ever heard the phrase "Too poor for cheap things", a nice turn of phrase
@@TheIkaraCult people seldom realize how expensive being poor can be!
@@TheIkaraCult It makes sense to me as a poor person. When you have to buy something, save your butt off and get one that will last, because you won't be able to afford to replace it for a long time.
The fact you said "who are they?" the moment you heard Accrington Stanley without missing a beat was nostalgic all on its own
Exactly!
I remember that ad.
@@AutPen38 Brilliant
Yep, I chuckled too! One for the older gentleman I think.
Damn you, sir! I'm 44 and know that advert back to front... Now i must accept that I'm ancient. 😂
I remember as a young bloke back in 1983 I walked into a hifi shop with an armful of cash. I desperately wanted one of these big stackable systems with all their flashing LEDs and fancy knobs, but the guy in the shop did me a big favour: he asked me how much I wanted to spend, and then pointed me to a bland and boring looking bunch of parts with no fancy bits and pieces. He had me listen to both, and the difference in sound quality was astonishing. Rega Planar with P77 cartridge, an A&R Cambridge amp, and a pair of Mordaunt Short speakers. That was the last system I ever bought. 40 years on and they still sound awesome. There's probably a lot better out there today, because even back then it was considered a budget system, but I've no desire to buy anything else. Sometimes it's worth paying a bit extra for quality.
Let's all thank in our thoughts this great and honest seller from years ago.
Yes the Rega Planar is quite modest by hi-fi standards but it's a good solid design and still made today. Furthermore, it's British!
@@DeltaJazzUK What do you think it's modest?
Still using my Audiolab 8000a and marantz cd 63 ki signature, still beats most today, trying the modern audiolab next wk
@@abradshaw3398 The Audiolab 8000a is probably the nicest design of an amplifier I've seen.
19:41 "we were quite capable of making our own rubbish back in the day" - made me laugh out loud! 🤣
It's very funny and very true, its also quite useful to use this whole Hi-Fi setup as an example of survivorship bias.
I mean, you still do, watch TV some times.
i think that's what we call "british nationalism"
This is actually a perfect example of what happens when the middle class disappears and all competition becomes price based at the expense of everything else.
@@shodan2958 Survivorship bias however only explains why bad quality items from the past are not around today. What it does not explain is how virtually nothing today is well made at all. A significant portion of the Hi-Fi equipment from the past was well made, but almost nothing today is, and that is a result of a decline in the middle class leading to a race to the bottom on price.
Your message at the end, about trying to help someone avoid buying rubbish because they lack knowledge really hit home for me. My lifelong hobby has been astronomy, and just a few years before you bought this rubbish, I had a similar experience with my first telescope: I bought the most I could afford, and it looked much like better options, but it was unusable junk. I knew SO little, that I didn't understand it was the scope, but figured I must just be doing something wrong. So I abandoned actually looking at the night sky for years, though I never lost interest in the science.
Decades later, I got back into it, only to find that nothing had changed: there are companies still selling absolute garbage, and every year, especially around Holiday gift-giving time, countless people around the world get to be sorely disappointed in crap. The worst part is that much of the crap is made by the same companies that also make and sell some of the best astronomy equipment you can buy. It seems so stupid to me, especially because astronomy is a pursuit where folks continually upgrade, to bigger and better scopes. Why would a company turn people off of the very hobby that is the very reason for the company's existence!
This all bothered me so much that I did what you suggested: I got involved in public outreach, sharing not just views through my telescopes, but information about equipment. I even wrote a book about it, which Cambridge University Press liked enough to actually publish. I also put together telescope packages: scopes, mounts, tripods, etc. for beginners, and either give them away, or sell them for enough to buy what I need to make more. I gave one away at an event before Christmas, and just sold two in the past couple of weeks. It's very rewarding to both share a passion, and to steer people away from having a potential passion, or even just a bit of enjoyment, ruined by misguided corporate greed.
Hi. And thank you for bringing this up. Could you point us to some telescope advice online? Thanks for your efforts!
I went through that exact story with my first telecope, some 3" refractor thing with a barlow lens and it was totally useless except for maybe a hazy image during the daytime. Good binoculars would have been 100x better. Years later in my 20's I acquired a Celestron 8" then later an 11".
Well said!
Hats off and a salute to you! Keep at it. You are making a positive difference in this cruel world.
@@sadnerd397 I replied to this, but accidentally included a link, so my comment got automatically deleted. (1.)
I suggested my book, 'Stargazing Basics: getting started in recreational astronomy', and also a website called 'cloudy nights' (it's just one word, but I don't want to risk accidentally including the link again). They have lots of forums, including some for beginners, and loads of folks there are happy to answer questions.
One difficult thing is that there are so many choices out there, as well as so many ways of observing the night sky, and so much in the night sky to see, and it's changing all the time -- both the stuff in the sky and the stuff to view it with. There is no 'right' telescope for everyone. It depends on lots of things: your budget, where you live (in a big, light-polluted city, or under pristine dark skies?), what you're interested in looking at (the moon, planets, the sun; faint, far 'fuzzies' like galaxies and nebulae; wide swaths of the Milky Way; all of these?) Each choice will help determine what scope you might want, or if you want one at all. As someone else pointed out, binoculars can be a great choice.
Can you tell I'm really into this? 😄
(1. The funny thing is that the reason TH-cam automatically deletes such comments is because their owner, Google, argues that links are usually spam [which is almost certainly true in most cases]. In my answer to you, I complained about how search engines *cough* Google *cough* seem, more and more, to point you toward search results that lead you to links that want you to spend money on things that make money for Google, making finding answers about astronomy harder. Pretty spammy, if you asked me. Now let's see if this comment stays up.)
Thankfully Amstrad never became a big brand here in Denmark.
But I do remember once I saw a system like that, from Amstrad market as “1000watt total music power”.
One of my colleagues rightfully said “that must be the total energy of it burning” 😆
😂👍
P.M.P.O. "Program music power output". A total bullshit, meaningless, amplifier power output specification, made up by manufacturers of cheap "Hi-Fi" equipment, that would be theoretically possible, only for a split-second, as the unit was struck by lightning, right before it explodes into a smoking crater on your living room floor. 🌩
Surely the loudest and clearest noise Amstrad units ever made, was the sound of them hitting the ground after being thrown from a first floor window.... that, and the kerching of the cash register as your 'hard earned' cash departed you, and made its way to Alan Sugar's bank account.
@@davelowets and then you turn it around and see the sticker saying power consumption is only 30-40 watts. You cannot produce more than you consume.
@@80s_Boombox_Collector Exactly... That's why I suggested the lightning. 😆
My mother was an agent for Kays Catalogue and it was filled with pages and pages of this shite, Alba, Goodmans, Bush as well as Amstrad. She put me off getting one on 38 weelky terms as she had to arrange returns for quite a few of them just after a couple of months from unhappy customers. Great advice!
Kay’s catolgue as a teenage boy I remembered it well😅
After a month or so those catalogues would always fall open at certain pages...very strange.
Ah, what names. But I think you should have upped your standards and stretched to a Binatone!
Binatone! Matsui!
'kay's catalogues, dial 100, ask the operator for freephone 3158' gaaaaah 45 years and i still have that jingo stuck in my head!!! arrrgh
i loved this hifi . i grew up on a council estate in a one parent household , we had very little money , my mother saved up for a year to buy this for me for my 12th birthday !! it may have been crap but i loved it , all my friends were well jell , this mug has fond memories
I also had one of these in the early 80s. It looks incredible. Probably the best looking stereo system of all time in my opinion!
I almost bought something like this, thankfully I resisted & dug deep in resolve to buy a real component Pioneer Hi-Fi. Sure, not the best yet better than this financial disaster.
What a wonderful mother you were lucky enough to have!
Ultimately, this is all that matters - that you had it and you loved it!
Such a nice story and such a great mom!
Back in the day, I recall being told by a friend who was an electronics expert, that the 'noise reduction' on Amstrad hifi systems worked by *injecting* synthetic noise into the signal when it was in the 'off' position. When you turned 'on' the noise reduction, the noise did reduce, because the noise injection ceased.
I have no idea if this is true. Could be interesting to tear it down and see.
Keep up the good work on your channel.
Getting a child/teenager into HiFi sounds like a great tip. They can never afford drugs and alcohol if they're spending £1000's on Hifi products 😂
But they might get into dealing to fund the oxygen free monocrystalline cables at 50 quid per foot.
@@himoffthequakeroatbox4320 £50 a foot? That's far too cheap to get anything REALLY good.
Those days electronic savvy kids in EU will start black market with solders containing lead. More lead - more profit.
May I suggest ham radio? It has the same effect.
Cameras are where it's at. Lenses are incredibly epensive
I got one as a kid for passing my o levels. I was so thrilled and grateful to my parents until the misery of using it set in
My Grandad was an audiophile and a fleamarket hunter. He swayed me away from cheap hifi with his fleamarket finds. In the early 90s He got me very nice 1970s akai amp and tuner with some wharfdale speakers.
Rumble and Scratch sound like a great mascot duo for a hi-fi manufacturer, even more so once they roll out their friends Wow and Flutter.
Honestly, they'd be great names for video game characters.
🤣🤣
...or a Saturday morning cartoon.
In fact, also high quality hifi components often had a rumble filter. Some manufactures called it subsonic filter. This filter eliminates low frequencies below 30 hz which was indeed useful even with high quality turntables. Those of course did not rumble for they had at least belt drive but those very low frequencies could resonate with the TT, so you needed to cut of those.
Rumble & Scratch sound like one of those speed garage duos from c. 1999.
Having an Amstrad tower system was the equivalent of walking around the town centre with a Netto carrier bag
Snob
@@asensibleyoungman2978 or Lidl /Aldi 😂
@@Bruce-vq7ni I am not sure Lidl and Aldi were in the UK back then but I might be wrong🤔
You were posh if you had a netto bag. Was more like a shitty cardboard box.
Yes I had one, pure utter rubbish, Alan Sugar, your fired!
I remember as a kid going almost weekly to our local discount Walmart-like shop to drool over one of those cabinets with a glass door. I couldn't afford it, but dreamed of owning it. Instead, I bought separate components over time. Didn't look nearly as good but apparently sounded a lot better. Only after watching this video I realized how big the bullet was that I've dodged 😁
I really enjoyed you giving the Amstrad a deserved kicking. Today Lord Sugar seems to enjoy a level of respect that he clearly never earned as he made his money by dishonest trading. Thanks Matt for sharing.
Hear hear! Well said that man. Glad to report I never bought any of the barrow boy’s cheap tat as Dad always bought quality gear. His first major purchase was a Hacker radiogram made in Maidenhead
Sugar's a real piece of work, that's for sure.
He still has the same contempt for other human beings
Anyone remember that OTV guy selling cheap colour TV’s in Hackney? He was similarly crafty. The cheapest TV sets were internally altered to give a less than crisp image, so as to tempt you into buying a more expensive set.
And he insisted on being called Sir Alan and now Lord Sugar on The Apprentice. The man is so up his own backside. If he were genuinely proud of being of humble origins and having worked his way up (as he claims) then he'd say "Just call me Alan".
I loved the "who are they? question on hearing Acrington-Stanley! 🤣🤣 Ian Rush said if I drink enough milk, one day I might get to play for Acrington-Stanley 🤣🤣
Exactly!
I’ve always found the best tool for opening things like is a sledgehammer or an old lawnmower… it’s also the best sound you’ll ever hear coming from one.
That "fluff" you referred to is polyfill sound dampening. It slows the air down to simulate a larger speaker enclosure. It's also good at smoothing out standing waves.
As a teenager, I grew up living next door to a dedicated audiophile. Valve amps, handmade speakers, etc. He played the 1812 Overture for me once, up loud. The cannon blasts made me jump. I never fell for cheap equipment after that.
Had an Amstrad midi system in ‘85. Wanted it desperately as didn’t want to rely on my Dad’s Bang & Olufsen. Could of cried when I got it… chewed my tapes, chassis case was cheap mdf and had 2.5watts RMS. Utter sh**e.
My friend from school days is a real audiophile. I remember him playing Pink Floyd's Final Cut LP really loud and I was literally blown away by the sound. His speaker stands were bolted to the floorboards and his deck was a Linn Sondec and Nadd amplifier. That's it! No cassette deck. Whilst I recognised the brilliance of the sound, I always thought he was missing the actual music?
As a young teen around 1980 I saved all year and bought HIFI separates in the Xmas sales every year. It took about four years and I owned a mix of bits from Hitachi, Pioneer, Marantz, Aiwa but it was worth the wait, it sounded great. To me, makes like AMSTRAD, SILVER, BINATONE, WALTHAM etc were to be avoided all all costs.
@@npr1300A8 no doubt that led to lots of hearing loss.
@JC Well 40 years on, he seems okay. Me however, I have tinnitus! 😒
The sad thing was for kids in the 80s who were into music, this was probably a rare purchase and probably a main Christmas present. I hope Sugar enjoyed the sweet young tears the complete succubus.
I can confirm. Back in the late 80's, when I asked for a stereo for Christmas, I received a brand new...wait for it...Emerson boom box, SMH.
@@pervertedalchemist9944 exactly, I'm 50 and know the pain brother
I don't know about succubus, but that charlatan should suck a bus, swallow the damn thing whole and be forced to crap it out coming out sideways.
Having said that though, he did have some good ideas, like stepping down as chairman and allowing his company to die, just a shame it took so long. 🤣
"main Christmas present."? At that price this would be the kind of thing that would be a combined Christmas /and/ Birthday present!
Remember when I was a kid in the 80.s. I got a pioneer sx-4 reciever for xmas. Then for b'day a turntable. Then the following xmas a cassette deck. Ct-5. Then following bday some speakers. Took awhile. still have my original reciever which I'll never get rid of
Thankfully, I never owned one of these, but I watched this video with feelings of increasing horror. I'm no audiophile, but I do like a good quality system. This thing is almost a criminal offence. Thank you so much for this video.
I had the same discoveries when I curiously took my twin deck Amstrad apart as a 14 year old. It does still sit with a bit of nostalgia in my heart though as every weekday night I would put it on quietly to listen to John Peel on the radio with the pause button waiting to record and discover wonderful new music I had never heard before.
In America we had Sounddesign and now we have GPX as basically the same idea. I was lucky enough to realize as a kid they weren't worth the money you spent on them. Speaking of helping someone out, my cousin in the past few years has gotten into records. Last Christmas I saw his "record" player, one of those 50's replica models that aren't worth a damn. Made me want to cry. This year I gave him an 80's Sansui DD linear table, a 90's Denon AVR and a pair of Cambridge Audio Aero 2's to listen through. His smile was well worth it.
Yes I rem sound design they made cheap 8 track machines as well.
I’m lucky enough to have an independent record store just He road from me, but was disappointed to see them selling Crossley and GPO suitcase record players in there to people that “wanted to get back into vinyl” - I thought it was a crime against music. And just imagine being that record shop trying to convince someone that the re-press of that classic album they have in their hand is going to sound great on something like that?
You forgot about Fisher…
Morse too. Their 'electrophonic' jukebox-style console systems look the part but are basically cheap chipboard cabinets full of low-end components.
@@defaultdriftco00 At one time Fisher were good. I used to repair them.
I can't be the only one that paused the video on the brochure scans to have a good look at all the stereos from back then! 1983 my parents bought a "Binatone Studio 5", tower "hifi", cheap n nasty. I remember it had a massive sticker on the cabinet door saying "Buy British, Buy Binatone"... so anyway the next stereo we bought was a Sharp from Japan 😂
My mate had the Binatone with the record drawer, absolute piece of sh1t. As we werer 12 - 13, after a year he hated it and we usedto say it was powered by mice on treadmills and the LED's had mice running behind them with candles etc.... :P The surprsing thing was, when we stuck his Dads old Bang and Olufsen 70s speakers on it, the radio and record player c0uld produce a hald decent sound!!! :o Tape decks were always junk though. But Sugar actually started out making half decent sold state amps at one point, probably the 70s, I dont know who made them for him or how much they cost, so I am curious if he turned a profit up until he made the plastic junk boxes.
Yes Friday.....I think Binatone was latin for bollocks.
@@Habu2
Pronounced 'Beena-tone-a' - Italian for 'Utter cobblers and crap' 😁
Well funnily enough one of my best friends bought a Sharp stack system which was absolutely garbage! Britain has several excellent audio companies, but they are all high end...
I always thought binatone meant that it belonged in the bin. I had a few binatone “Walkmans” which were awful of course
I remember being a secondary schoolboy in Chelsea back in the early '80s, and at lunchtime we often piled round the Peter Jones electrical floor that had all the high end component systems. We marvelled at such things as horizontal powered slide-out cassette decks, dedicated graphic equalizers separates, speakers on spikes etc. One thing that struck us was the button and volume control quality on this kit, the stuff you actually touched. Beautifully turned metal, well weighted. Amstrad NEVER got that right, so we knew to stay away. 🙂
I bought all my components across the water in Richer Sounds. Pretty good quality, not too much dosh.
You can feel Matt's resentment towards Amstrad in this video. You can tell how personal it is. It is not just about cheap stereo, but one that affected him personally.
I remember being a kid in the 80s and thinking these were attainable when looking at them in catalogs. Luckily, my mother used to read consumer reports religiously and knew that they were crap and stopped me from wasting money on them. For a period of a couple of years she'd buy me a proper componant for birthdays and Christmas until I had a full JVC tuner/amp, dual cassette and finally a CD player. I think the JVC was the decent budget buy at the time. I believe I had some of those old metal radio shack bookshelf speakers to round it out. I was pretty proud of having a "proper" hifi
she sounds like an awesome mom
JVC was highly underrated. This probably explains why they abandoned home stereo for the car stereo market fifteen years ago.
JVC was a decent budget brand, yes. They got killed by the koreans, and then chinese, seemed unable to compete.
my JVC JA S10 amp I bought second hand in the late 80s only gave up the ghost "Flames involved so fubar" 3 years ago. And it was used pretty much every day. Great bits of kit.
@@zata1197 I probably didn't appreciate her enough at the time or now
This brought back memories.
My mate who lived in the scruffiest bedsit in the city, had a battered Amstrad music centre like this. It was so battered it didn't have any back or sides on, it was hung on a nail on the wall.
He used to turn it on full blast and stick a screwdriver in the back wiggling it around on the circuit board. It sparked, it smoked, but it kept on going, and never broke down.
Ah another fan of the ole healing screwdriver of sparks.
A mate of mine, back in the 80's, went by the general rule of thumb that the more flashing lights a stereo had, the better it was. He bought one that lit up like a Christmas tree the moment you switched it on and, in operation, had so many flashing lights that it should've come with an epilepsy warning. To be fair it sounded pretty good so I'm pretty sure it wasn't an Amstrad. No idea what it actually was though.
I grew up in an audiophile family, with my dad an me being the most 'normal' of the bunch. However, it did teach me the difference between quality audio and crap such as Amstrad and B&O. My dad always used to say if you want style you buy B&O, but if you have the means to buy B&O, you might as well buy Quad: same price range, but actual quality.
B&O kit has always been the definition of style over substance.
Those old tube b&o amplifiers though. Absolutely beautiful.
@@googleuser2571 Up to the early 80's they made excellent stuff , sadly they became a lifestyle brand c 85 and i agree totally their stuff now is utter overpriced crap. an 18k tv without dolby atmos LOL
B & O portable fm/am radios from the 70’s had a beautiful sound.
1970's B&O was quality and sleek, but not over-the-top design, and it was never design over quality. That changed in the 1980s'. Visually very interesting, but quality-wise... well, I still wouldn't call it "crap", but it was basic quality similar to much cheaper systems in an overpriced design package.
Looking at that Dixons page took me back almost 40 years too. I was absolutely skint in the 80s, my only way to buy anything was to go full 'trailer' and buy from a catalogue. This video has lifted a huge weight from my shoulders as I bought a JVC E22L from said catalogue, spending all my available cash and putting me into debt for 2 years. The delivery lady was my cause of this burden as she said to me as I eagerly accepted it, 'you're a mug, I got the Amstrad from the same page, it sounds awesome and it's twice as big as this puny thing and it was almost half the price'. I'd done my homework and thought I'd made a shrewd choice, but her words have reverberated in my head ever since. My E22L sits in the kitchen today, still fully functional, but mainly used for the radio, but everything still works. It still sounds great. The subsequent 5 CD multi player system, bought 10 years later at a much greater cost has been in landfill for at least 10 years.
Ha ha....great story.
JVC had one was awful. Went pop had to smash it to try and get CDs out. Pioneer Kenward much better. Car hifi this was.
@@andywrollo2915 The E22L was pre CD. My system has worked faultlessly for almost 40 years. The Pioneer system I replaced it with - just for the 5CD player - lasted 20ish years. I'm so glad I never sold my JVC, the radio reception was always better than the Pioneer and the system was less than half the size - probably heavier though.
Try and hang on to life for another 40 years otherwise the amount of time the delivery lady's words reverberated in your head will still be more than Techmoan's.
I bet the delivery lady carried on spreading ignorance based misery for the rest of her life. Hopefully she didn't go into politics, the press, or religion.
Around the time these things were selling in the thousands I was working at my local Electricity Board central warehouse and we were getting wagonloads of these things every week. I remember the delivery driver telling us that the place he picked them up from was “full of YTS kids assembling container loads of rubbish from China into cabinets” . It would seem that was how they were able to claim that they were Made in The UK.
Great video btw.
Yep, ‘Made in England’ should’ve said ‘Assembled in England’. They were just putting a bunch of cheap Chinese components into a box.
@@crunchinjelly
They hadn't really opened up their market yet at that point. Most of the cheapest electronics came from South Korea, Hong Kong etc. at the time.
@@westelaudio943 and Taiwan
@@crunchinjelly Chinese weren't even on the radar of electronic manufactur back then ....
@@lathedog1 A huge amount of Amstrad products including computers were coming from Korea. I'm guessing the main electronics here are Korean and then assembled into lo-fi equipment in England. Some of the Amstrad stuff was really good at the time and competitively priced but not these tower systems. A lot of it I think was designed in Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan and merely rebranded Amstrad. From the sound of it these tower systems were a concept by Alan Sugar himself but for a lot of Amstrad products they were just the importer. I thought the Amstrad CPC was a brilliant computer for the time, great value and performance.
AMSTRAD 'Hi-Fi' - the Mug's Eyeful - this is the most apt and utterly perfect description of Amstrad.....
I was fortunate that I never fell for the 'eyeful' of these nasty things. When I had began earning money from working I bought an expensive (for then) Hitachi 'Music Centre' from a Great Universal catalogue it was glorious. Those things deserve a few episodes don't you think? I ended up replacing that with a SANYO one, and then a SHARP one, before I went into separates with my first 'National Panasonic' system. Then, one day I saw in the window a black separates system and went in to ask about it, and then I put a deposit on it - it was Technics, and I've had Technics ever since.
This was a brilliant! upload, I loved this video. Thank you.
mine also. technics is quality gear.
I was in the television repair trade in the eighties and nineties. I used to have these things along with the Fidelity equivalent models. They were usually not worth repairing unless it was a broken mains lead. There was a load of cheap low end brands in this period that appealed to those on a budget but unfortunately meant that the better brands tried to lower costs and therefore quality to compete. I can remember seeing these Amstrad and similar cheap junk units sitting next to the bins when they barely three years old. Does anyone remember the fidelity t.v.hifi combination unit? I haven't seen one of these for many years and for that I'm very grateful!
I use to work in a HiFi shop in the mid to late 80s(Southport HIFi and Wigan HiFi) we had one of these on display to show the customers how CRAP they were they left the shop with a Technics rack system, and after that they would come back to the shop and thank us!!. Many stayed loyal customers. How Lord Sugar walks the streets i don't know.
😆😆😆😆
he doesn't walk he has a chauffeur (or is that for tv?)
@@DJRickDawson Definitely a show for TV, but also extremely likely that uptight arrogant, words can't explain excuse of a human hardly does much now that he can't pay someone pennies to do
Let's be honest he spotted a gap in the market (cheap systems) and knowing that most consumers don't do any real research, exploited it ruthlessly. Was anyone really reviewing this sort of gear back then? I do remember reading some hi-fi magazines back in the day, but my recollection of them is they came across as quite snobby, mainly focussing on expensive high end stuff from obscure manufacturers. There were few reviews of affordable hifi, IIRC.
@@jonedwards7019 : The newsrack review magazines always write with an eye for where the advertising income is coming from, so don’t expect too much objective warts-and-all commentary.
It’s the same whether it’s hi-fi, cars, cameras, …
Amstrad sums up Alan Sugar to perfection.
This is from my era and I remember all the names and rumours about the quality, but thankfully never had to find out first hand. Looking at this, its actually shocking at how terrible it is. It was the cheap option, but given how awful it was it should have been half the price. I feel really sorry for people that saved hard and ended up bitterly disappointed. Sugar knew he was selling garbage too, which doesn't say too much about his character.
In Australia, we had stuff like this. Names like Thorn, A.W.A. (which used to be decent until the mid 70s) and Pye.
Very few people in affluent areas bought them. It was definitely stuff for the 'ooh look at the shiny knobs and lights' buyers.
I found a Thorn radio/cassette/phono ont the rubbish and took it home. It was worse than the Amstrad. The speakers also had no tweeters but the grilles were moulded into the plastic fronts. Awful beyond belief.
This takes me back. I remember buying one like this in 1980 from my mum's catalogue not Amstrad but Fidelity. Paying it up every week from my first full time job and utterly hating the sound quality. It sounded a little better with headphones so I joined Britannia music and started to buy some records in their mugs deals. Ahh memories. It lasted two years and then fell apart. I replaced it with a Sharp system and immediately could tell it was much better.
Alan Sugar bought up the remains of Fidelity, - an ironically named firm if ever there was one.
Back in the day, a friend asked me to fix one of these things. I was horrified to discover how 'bargain basement' it was on the inside.
Yeah it's a box of air. Like something you'd find at Peckham market.
Amstrad VCRs could be worth having, though. Ours was the VCR4700 model in 1987. And while it does appear pretty garish, looking back, it was solidly made (enough) and it did quite a few high-grade tapes of the time a lot of justice. Even in Long Play, picture and sound were crisp and clear and I never saw any bleed or fakeness to the definition or colour..... even playing the tapes back on way higher-end gear today than we could ever have afforded 30 years ago.
Who dropped the ball at the VCR department? They were good. Better than some Panasonics I'd used in my time too.
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@@SionynJones You wally :D
Sounded ok till you turned them up
@@MrDustpile I spent a number of years as an engineering manager for one of the major U.K. electrical retailers. I used to repair the Amstrad double decker video recorders, they were abysmal.. occasionally a customer would get a reliable one, but those were few and far between. That said their early satellite receivers were OK (but they used to suffer with a problem where they could only receive either horizontal or vertical polarised channels due to a power fault, if people disconnected the the dish cable whilst the receiver was powered up.
The frequency response curve printed on the speakers is an especially nice touch! I wonder how accurately the decal represents the actual response of the unit, LOL!
There are no scales on either the x or y axis. You assume it's a frequency response curve, but its actually a random collection of silver lines on a blue background.....
It was vaguely accurate, in that it indicates a steep dropoff at the bass and treble ends.
Thank you. Very good points. The "Mug's Eyeful" is still around with many modern products of all types.
Was funny to see how little was inside the cabinet of that unit!
Yep, think Beats headphones by Dr. Dre absolute rubbish, but nicely packaged and pretty colours.
I sold a friend an extra laptop I had for like $100 a few years ago. It was a good computer and (I still use one today occasionally and it's fine). Well about less than a year later she asks for help with her computer, says it's slow.... So she brings it over and it's a thin MacBook looking thing from wal mart with the absolute lowest end stuff in it. Pretty much a Chromebook with windows on it.
I say where is the one I sold you? She says she gave it to a friend when she got the new one a few weeks ago. I looked up the hardware in this nearly $300 computer and had to break it to her that the one you got rid of was much more powerful than the new one, only difference that it's big and heavy.
It's pretty amazing that you can buy stuff today that is slower than 4 year old off lease corporate laptops you can get on ebay for less.
I had another friend get bit by that too, buying a new computer that was legitimately slower than the one it replaced.
I'm actually going to buck the trend here, I got my ts33 for my 18th birthday in 1982 and I loved it! Having only a fidelity turntable and radio table top set up previously, this to me was a big step up. Sure, looking back now it WAS rubbish but it looked good, never let me down and it got me into hi fi. After a couple of years, I wanted better so I invested in a JVC midi system and towards the late 80s early 90s, I got myself JVC separates that cost me a couple of grand. So yes, amstrad was to the purists cheap and nasty but it awakened me to the world of Hifi....
My parents brought that Pioneer stack shown at 10:58 (slightly different cassette deck on ours) and I remember it actually sounded really good and got me interested in decent hi-fi over the years. So glad they found the few extra quid for that one and didn't get an Amstrad!
Brought?
Pioneer have always made very good stuff as far back as I can remember. Didn't charge an arm and a leg for their stuff either.
I had that exact model & despite years of use lasted at least 20yrs.
I had the Amstrad in the video, it lasted 3 days & went back to the shop who let me exchange it for the Pioneer.
The Amstrad was such rubbish compared.
@@TheDigitalAura my dyslexia strikes again 😞. Bought 👍
Talking of them being rubbish, we used to call them Amsturds at the time 😆 This reminds me of an old Smith & Jones sketch about "Hi-Fi" salesmen, with the last line being "I don't need so many buttons! The customer don't need so many buttons! The machine don't need so many bloody buttons, but if we don't have buttons on stereos we don't sell 'em do we!?"
‘Excuse me, what does ‘Mic Vol’ mean?’😂
Smith & Jones sketch is superb! I had one of these, I completely forgot about it until I saw the thumbnail here.
AM for listening in the morning, and FM… well that should read PM but someone’s scratched the paint…
A gra mo phone?
Full of contempt for the 'mugs' who made him rich. Classy guy. Why exactly was he knighted??? Oh yeah, donations. My poor dad was one of those mugs who fell for his pitch, he got rid of a perfectly decent Ferguson Studio (can't remember the number) music centre to buy one of Mr Sugars poor sounding cabinet things with the smoked glass door! I was happy though as I got the Ferguson! I think he made the Amstrad last a good 10 years before it went in the bin where it belonged! Thanks for posting, brought back some happy memories of his god awful products! Coincidentaly, as an early teen I was mad about computers round that time with the boom in home computers starting, another pie Mr Sugar had a slice of, so after I'd seen and heard how bad his music centres were I made damn sure I never asked for or got one. Happy days! Thank you for posting and every credit to you for wasting good money re-buying this junk for our entertainment!
Fascinating video, thank you. I'm very pleased that my first music system when I was 18 in 1989 was a Technics Class AAA seperates HiFi with B&W speakers; And I still use it today. I remember saving up for it for a whole year, but my God it was worth it. It blows my mind that even today it sounds incredible, and certainly better than the modern tat many youngsters are content with these days. I wonder if it'll still be working in another 30+ years; That would be one HiFi for a whole lifetime.
Your lucky its still working now...
Those STK all in one amplifier packages inside those things were garbage, and famous for going out in smoke and flames early on in the products life.
My parents' old stereo system was an Amstrad - I think it was the TS88 featured in the comparison between the three competing systems. The tape transport controls in particular are very familiar (I guess that's all I would have really known how to use at the time). I was too young to notice whether it was any good, and I don't know what my parents thought of it, but once we eventually upgraded to a newer system with a CD player (a JVC CA-E33L I think, with separate record player), Dad hacked the TS88's cabinet apart and threw it on a bonfire, which I suspect may have been theraputic.
Love it! Points to Made in England label. “we were quite a able of making our own rubbish, back in the day”
My biggest dream when I was young (1980s) was adding a linear tracking turntable to my component stereo system. It was the "evolution" of turntable design. ... Luckily I kept my direct drive technics and got over the dream.
This reminds me of so many products, typically marketed towards teenagers or young adults in a time where you just couldn't go online and see if it was rubbish. It was really gut wrenching moment, when you had been saving money and could finally afford one, only to realise just how much of junk the product was. Then there was the whole aspect of understanding it being trash, but pretending it was really good when the others who still thought it was cool were around.
Growing up in the US in the 80s, you saw a lot of stuff like this. Value stores such as Kmart, Roses, and Zayrer. You would see brand names such as Emerson, Fisher, Sound Design, Yorx, GPX I think, etc. A mini tower speaker cabinet but it only has a single 6.5 inch full range speaker in it. This type of gear was everywhere. Radio Shack even sold it.
Shame that happened to Fisher. I have one of their receivers from the mid 70s and it's awesome.
True, but they weren't blatant ripoffs like this. They were less than a third the price.
I remember Fisher being midrange, and Emerson was more lower-midrange. As for those other brands, they were definitely total crap. I felt sorry for my sister when she got a Yorx for Xmas.
Sad, but true. I had many friends who had systems like these. However, I only had components. I still have many of these today and they are so much better.
@@endoresu I also have a wonderful Fisher receiver, not sure exactly when it was made, but it's hooked up to a 26/2A3 tube amp in my shop. Sounds great and has been going for years. I also have a Pioneer and an Airline of the same era, the Pioneer feeds an EF37A/Cheap 300B tube amp and the Airline feeds a 12AX7/6CL6 tube amp. Both of those also sound good. All were found at the dump, and the beautiful 12AX7/6CL6 tube amp had almost made it into the recycle bin at Staples when the guy gave it to me along with an awesome Tektronix oscilloscope containing 38 tubes. Amazing the quality equipment people will just throw out. I know people who have found McIntosh amps at the dump even. It's absolutely insane. People really have no clue what they have.
I remember saving up to buy a quality Sansui separate amp (AU9500), and turntable in the early 70s before Sansui turned to rubbish. My friends at the time laughed at me for spending so much cash when I could have a half price “integrated component system”. I’m still using the same Sansui amp 40 years later 😂.
I still am using a technics amp from 1982, sounds wonderful, and is loud as f***
I was a young 'Mugs Eyeful' ! loved the cassette decks though as i could pirate games ! , but your brilliant post takes me right back !
Good video, enjoyed. I have to say though, I remember starting work at age 16 in the 70s. My elder brother who had left home had often let me use his hifi, which I think was a Garrard turntable, Eagle Amp and Leak loudspeakers, it was my introduction to hifi and I was hooked.
My brother left home just about when I started working and I couldnt stand the sound from my parents Decca music centre.
I went to Comet and had limited funds.
I purchased an amstrad ex220 amplifier and solovox loudspeakers, they were cheap but in all fairness the amp sounded okay, it was a bargain of an amp, what I will say is the actual engineering of the casing was hazardous, the times I cut my finger on the lip of the front fascia, it was sharp as a razor and I ended up bizarrely having to use some emery cloth to remove the sharp edge.
I used that amp daily for about 2 years, it did okay, I replaced it with a Rotel Integrated and the Solovox were replaced by a pair or Rogers loudspeakers, the difference was night and day, but the price was too. I cant comment on the rack type systems but the amp I had was a fair old 6/10. Great days.
Sat here watching this around 2 miles from where the BSR factory used to be. I remember the record player my dad put together. It had a valve amp with a BSR Monarch turntable with 16, 33, 45 and 78 speeds and it was a pleasure to watch it doing it's thing. So smooth and gentle when it came to resting the needle on a record. It was probably from the early 1960's and was probably mono only, but worked from well before I was born in 1974 until it was replaced, still working though, in the late 1980's. The sound was so nice and "rounded". Back in 1991 I purchased a Pioneer separate system for £900 from Curry's, which was something when I was only on £103.30 a week.. The heavily used CD changer died in the first 10 years or so, but was replaced with a Kenwood changer from Cash Converters for £25 and all I had to do was just plug a few wires in. It all still works and it's still a great sound, albeit it gets little use now. Perhaps I should revisit the 32 year old more often. That all said, the Pioneer's turntable is no where near as smooth as the old BSR of my dad's. Thanks for the video. Great to look back at the weird, wonderful and not so wonderful.
This was a fantastic trip down memory lane thank you. My parents got me an Amstrad Midi Hi-Fi in about 1987 from Lasky’s (record deck, tape deck, tuner and graphic equaliser - but no CD player or aux input). It looked the part, but was of course fairly rubbish. I’ve got fond memories of it tbh it got me into a lifelong love of listening to music. I prob had it about 2 years before I liberated my dad’s 1970s Rotel separates system and shortly after added a Kenwood CD player - and never looked back!
@@christo930 yes it’s amazing how these things go in cycles really isn’t it? my dad had a great stereo in the late 70s and even made his own speakers from a Seas Professional Sound kit and then about 10 years later it all just sat unused and I took ownership of it. My parents had a couple of really cheap crappy mini hi-fi systems after that. I blew the Rotel amp up a few years later, but I still have his old Sansui SR-222 MkII record deck from around 1978 that I recently gave a little service and fitted a new belt. It cost my dad £70 in 1978 (equivalent of £514 in 2023 so a decent budget deck) and it’s now sitting in my 2nd system - and it sounds great! Take care
Thanks for sharing the details of past memories!
In the late 50's around the time I was in the 1st grade my parents gave me a transistor radio on Christmas. I remember the box proudly boasting the radio had 3 transistors. I was super-impressed. Today my 1st grade grandson "plays" on an iPad Pro and thinks it's no big deal
I love your channel so much. Always makes me happy. I grew up in the 70's/80's. Thank you my friend.
14:56 - I recently rescued the Sharp system in the top right from my parents' attic. Still haven't got round to seeing if it still works. Watching the stylus travel across the record and then turn upside-down to play the other side automatically was actually very cool.
Had the same system, was pretty good for the time
Was an engineer at Rumbelows in the 80s. The sharp was actually a good sounding system. Most common fault was a knocking sound from the turntable as the arm moved across. The cure was to unscrew the plastic top above the arm and re apply grease along the groove that the arm slides across. From a technical viewpoint it was one of the few systems that has a magnetic cartridge and also a superb frequency response on the cassette deck (up to 16Khz)
Love those things
Sharps were good, the optonica was amazing.
I had the same one with the Linear tracking turntable! I had the separate CD player as well but it was excellent for what it was and it really got me into music. Cool mechanics in how it all worked for that turntable!
My dad used to work at Rumbelows and told me about his curiosity when the Amstrad machines came in and decided to open one up to see why they were so cheap, to be greeted with that site of a bunch of wires on a cheap plastic front. He and my uncle were pretty into their HiFi so they had a good laugh about it but seeing the price and "features" it's easy to see why people fell for it.
£200 in those days was far from cheap. It was 2 weeks wages for many people. The advert showed a £240 Pioneer system, which was _far_ better quality.
I had one of those - bought it new in 1982 and was perfectly happy with it. I spent many many hours listening to it and recording radio to tape. Happy days
I dragged one of these out of a skip many years ago and fixed the amplifier. It sounded OK-ish running a pair of decent bookshelf speakers in my bedroom for background music, but the components gradually failed from the bottom upwards, so I took a hacksaw to it every few months and removed a section.
The turntable failed first, then the cassette deck. I was left with just the amplifier and a rather flaky tuner in the end, although I did manage to bring the cassette deck record and playback connections to a pair of RCA sockets on the back to connect a proper external hi-fi cassette deck to it.
Of course, I wouldn't have needed the hacksaw if the tight-fisted git had housed them all separately. The fondest memory I have of it is that I didn't pay for it.
Wow, this takes me back. I had the twin tape version when I was about 12. I had no idea about auto recording levels and thought to get a good recording you had to turn the volume right to the max. My parents must have loved that. The turntable mechanism was absolutely James Bond and certainly not Accrington Stanley
Whaaat Graeme Norgate watches Techmoan and comments on a video! Sorry for fanboying but mind=blown 😁
@@Skellotronix I'm an old audio nerd, I;m surely his target audience 😉
Used to spend hours trying to copy Spectrum games on the tape decks then 5mins loading it only to get "Error" at the end😵. Try again😫. Kids these days will never know the struggle.😅
@@carlphillipson9887 Same here, I mean, ahem, I was backing them up in case the originals got damaged. Playing those tapes at full blast made me really unpopular and it was all unnecessary 😀
In 1980, aged 17, I really, really wanted an Amstrad tower system as shown in my gran's catalogues. Luckily I just didn't have the money to buy one, and equally luckily, I also had some friends who bought separates and read Hifi mags. I had to wait several years for my first proper system, but it was worth it. I was just lucky I think...
They were sold in scammish "rent to own" shops in the southern US when I was a kid. My sister's husband paid 8 HUNDRED DOLLARS for one on 20$ payments so he could listen to Styx. He was also the one and only Styx superfan I have ever encountered in the wild.
03:09 the Accrington Stanley joke 😁😁😁
Techmoan on Wednesday? What a midweek treat!
Can't wait to watch it properly after work. Was gutted there was no upload on Saturday. Saturday morning is techmoan time!
I work 40 hours over Monday to Thursday so normally Thursday night is my chill time with my favourite Techmoan reviews and humour. I'm up at 5am tomorrow but nevertheless still really enjoyed Mats take on this crappy "Lo-Fi" brings back so many memories of my dad's early 1980's tower system nearly identical to this mounted in a wooden case to put your records and tapes underneath, it was the same poor quality made by a company called "Fidelity" and from Rumberlows, this video has brought back so many memories of that cheap system that flooded our front room with god awful sound for 15 odd years untill we upgraded to a CD kenwood system. Thanks Mat, love your videos, this has made my week 👍
Is that legal?
Amstrad and Hi-Fi are three words which really don't go together
Our family was taken in by the amstrad tower thing in the laminate 'wood' cabinet with smoke glass door in the 1980s, prior to that we had an older, late 1970s teak 'radiogram'.
That was almost like a 'modern' for the time, sideboard type piece of furniture with a lid that lifted up, showing the radio and record deck inside and storage for records and brushed aluminium control panel, dials and knobs!
The Amstrad unit looked much more modern and 'on trend', my uncle, who was a Hifi nut, who had a seperates system, advised against us getting it, he obviously knew the score!
The unit itself 'looks' the business and 'seems' to have a plethora of features, over and above it's price point BUT on closer inspection and actual use, it's just a dressed up, very basic, bog standard cheap stereo which sounds no better than the usual portable radio.
The many switches, rotary dials and knobs are really just a bunch of pointless controls that do very little in terms of adjusting sound quality.
I guess build quality was reasonable for the price, our unit lasted many years and nothing broke, my parents still used the unit many years after I left home.
I think one of the reasons it lasted so well was because it was protected in a wooden cabinet, off the floor and behind a smoke glass door, so it didn't get as exposed to dust or UV damage or general wear and tear from things around it.
The cabinet wasn't really wood, it was just plastic 'wood' effect laminated chip board, the smoke glass door was probably the nicest feature of the whole unit, the 'aluminium' front panel was just silver painted plastic, it did have quite a well featured remote control for the time though.
No wonder Mr Sugar made so much money, I guess these were knocked out of China very cheaply and they weren't all that 'cheap' over here compared to other more quality Hifi brands.
My Dad was a bit of a hi-fi buff, and I remember him telling my Uncle that the Amstrad wasn’t a good buy. He was considering buying one and enquired with my Dad. He ended up getting a nice Technics separates stack from a local independent store.
I bought an amscrap stereo tuner, one channel dropped out, the needle got stuck in the middle of the tuning gauge, fingerprints were impossible to remove from the tuning knob. I had it less than a week so I took it back and replaced it with a Technics ST 7300 tuner which I still have to this day some 40yrs on. As always, great vid Matt!👍
Good choice. My Technics system is as good as new after 40 years as are my Mordaunt Short speakers.
Amscrap - love it!! 😆😆😆😆
It’s almost impossible for any English person of our age to hear ‘Accrington Stanley’ and not respond ‘who are they.’ As always, you didn’t disappoint 😂
Exactly!
Was wondering if anyone else would pick up on that one. You definitely need to be a Brit of a certain age to understand the joke.
@@GryphLane Give us some...nah...give us some haha!
That was an impressive piece of editing - or a crazy coincidence!
th-cam.com/video/zPFrTBppRfw/w-d-xo.html
Best ad ever.
You're lucky, I had to attempt to repair the damn things under warranty. If their was ever an appt description, it would have been 'you get what you pay for'... And to make matters worse, they progressed to flood the market with nasty 22'' TV's, which had power supplies that gradually increased the HT & LT rails, until the set self destructed! The model was the 2210, memory serves me right
Oh so true. I worked for Goldring. The Amstrad factory was in Dalton. They were in a dump of a site. However, a guy in their service department was so helpful when I took my Amstrad Integra to them for a repair. I remember my boss phoning Alan S to see if he would arrange a repair for me, a young lab assistant. He unfortunately told my boss to F off. I was so embarrassed for him. What a Bxxxrd. Anyway that was the last Amstrad product I ever bought thank goodness. Thanks for an interesting video. Cheers C.
As soon as these Amstrad things came onto the market, I remember my dad saying 'dont touch that rubbish!' While we were looking around Dixons!
A few Years later I bought a Toshiba tower system, which was actually pretty decent, it had aux input, so I was able to connect a CD player, the cassette deck performed extremely well, made very good quality recordings, I still have most of the mixtapes I recorded on that & they still sound excellent today, 35 years later!
I always loved that scientific looking frequency-diagram-curve-graph-things printed on 80ies audio gear. Like on all synthesizers from that time. Everybody knows what an "ADSR" envelope means. But nevertheless - "There's some space left? Let's print a fancy curve there!" =D
The curve is totally fake of course.
Haha, it was the equivalent to printing 'Turbo' on anything at the time. Turbo Sunglasses. Turbo jandels.
Don't forget the LED's... LED's everywhere
You just took me straight back to my top floor bedsit in Paignton in 1982! I had the tower system with the smoked glass door!
Nostalgia overload! 😃
I bought an Amstrad (Alan M Sugar Trading) amplifier with top mounted sliding controls in Norwich in 1973. It was so bad that out of the box it was coarse and moving the sliders sounded like bacon frying through the speakers. I took it straight back to the shop and told them it was not fit for purpose then swapped it for a Rotel amplifier, which amazingly, still works well today for an elderly relation.
Oh my! That Pioneer system you briefly showed was my first decent Hi Fi. What a massive blast of nostalgia!
Same here eamonn....crackin system and believe it or not I think my older brother still uses it.
Pioneer was decent. My uncle was into his sounds and he put me wide to all this. He told me Amstrad was complete shit
Late 80s and early 90s Pioneer Elite stuff still goes for a fair pretty penny on eBay these days, still great solid state amps.
The Stones always listened to their stuff on Pioneer equipment.
We never got Amstrad branded stereo gear in Australia. That said, I find it mildly amusing that the original Australian importer of Amstrad's computer line was AWA (not to be confused with Aiwa). The reason being is that AWA's audio gear at the time was also a mug's eyeful. My sister had one of their tower systems, and the difference between her stereo and our old man's Pioneer was like night and day (though I did enjoy watching the VU meter with the LEDs that looks almost the same as the one on this Amstrad unit).
Oh my. I'm somehow reminded of the AWA DVD player a friend gave me a few years back.
Amstrad's PC range was even worse than their stereos. Got a couple to evaluate, what utter pieces of crap. I remember the BIOS battery being 4xAA cells in the lid of the PC (plastic, of course). Handily accessible when you lifted the monitor up, and the curious would pull them out "What are these for?".
Utter shite.
@@j.f.christ8421 Yep... Amstrad became as well regarded for PCs down here as they were for stereo gear in the UK. The CPC and PCW were OK, but things went downhill once the IBM-compatibles started rolling out (even though I won't hear a bad word said about the PPC lol).
You'd remember Thorn and Pye as well. Total crap. I had an Astor KF021 radio cassette that was actually Japanese from about 1972. My gosh...it's hard to describe how inferior that thing was to every other unit. AM and shortwave only. Cassette door was a flap that fell open and dropped the tape on the desk when you hit eject. Look it up. It's worse than it appears.
Your message about teaching the youth about “quality” vs “new n shiny but garbage” sorta resonates with me; a quarter of a century ago, I wanted to get into photography, so I was eyeing point and shoot cameras with the fancy APS systems and all that, but my parents, who couldn’t even really afford that, asked that I just work with the camera they had as I was growing up. I protested, but gave in because what choice did I have? Well, their camera was a Minolta SRT-101; sure, it was no Canon AE series or a Nikon, but it was a damn sight better than anything I was interested in, far more complex and offered so much more in functionality than a simple point and shoot. Had I gone all-in with what I wanted in the first place, my interest in photography would most certainly have waned, just as you say, but instead, I got into it far deeper than anyone would have expected for years to come.
Alas, I am no longer in the hobby, partially because I have a digital SLR that feels quite outdated (read: abnormally slow in its operation) and may need some revitalization if that’s possible, but even moreso due to lifelong crippling depression that requires my own, even more intense revitalization.
I remember have one myself back in the 80 s for Christmas
I'm so happy that my dad was clever enough to buy good quality Hi-Fi and I noticed that it was better, gave me a sense for quality. I'm still using his record player: a Sanyo Q50 direct drive player, fully automatic and quartz stabilised.
Same here my dad passed on his turntable and speaker's he had from the early seventies to me in 1988. I managed to obtain a new NAD amplifier.
My parents had that Fisher M21 shown at 13:25 in the early-mid 80s, I totally forgot about it until I saw a picture of it. As a kid I used to love moving all the sliders and pressing the buttons pretending I was manning a spaceship or something. I think they actually kept it around collecting dust until the late 90s/early 2000s.
I got a black Sanyo deck in the late 80's with speakers - same form factor as this Amstrad, but with an additional loose cd-player in the same width and design. Double cassette-deck and all... that deck worked all the way through the 90's too, before i scrapped it all. I'm quite impressed today, on how much more quality the Sanyo were, as it just worked and played great in over 10 years without problems. It was cheap(ish - though a bit more expensive than the Amstrad, but with less LED's etc.), but played loud and relatively great with the three way speakers that came with the unit.
I remember being at a party and one channel of the Amstrad blew, so as I was a young electronics enthusiast it was suggested that I look at it. Anyway to mw amazement when i got to the back of it there was just a single panel for all of the units. Once removed all I could see initially was an empty box, until I discovered a PCB about 2 by three inches driving everything. Needless to say I told the owner that there was little hope in repairing it or in fact little point. Its amazing how many people Alan Sugar shafted to get to the top.
I'd say Amstrad did you a service. A valuable lesson was learned early on about the relationship between low price and quality. To mount a small defence about this sort of equipment; my first stereo was cheap and sounded rubbish. However it was mine and I could play my music, that was such a tremendous boon that the poor quality was forgiven.
We had the double cassette deck version of this. One thing I remember is the tape dubbing mechanism had almost zero drop out when punching-in on a recording. I used to use it for making low-quality breakbeat tapes.
Nice! Hope you and your mates also used the mic inputs to record your rap battles!
I used to repair these in the 80s along with the TS80, 88, 90 and 99.
To improve the record deck drawer operation we used to change the motor pulley ratio.
The record deck speed, on/off issue was common, the switch wipers used to wear through the pcb.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Binatone! Amstrad! Alba! There should be a museum for them...
Love the Belt Drive logo...it reminds me of £4.99 earphones I used to sell with 'Dynamic' listed as a feature, or 1980s Lada Riva cars with 5 Speed emblazoned on the side. 😄
Like a coach described as "Executive" or "Royal" class. I feel certain there's the making of a Divine Comedy song here...
Or sunglasses with "TURBO" on the sides 😁
Good on the patent office for properly exercising their due diligence!
I mean, they have eyes like the rest of us. :D
Imagine having your patent rejected in the late 19th century by a Mr. A Einstein.
you've nailed it. Big empty box. A friend of mine finished Uni and the only job he could get was as a security guard in the Arndale Centre, Manchester on £3.09p a hour. He got sacked after a few days when somebody nicked an Amstrad HIFI and speakers out of Dixons! A Frisco Disco sounded better
I worked for Trident Superstores in the 1980's and I can confirm that the few Amstrad products we sold were mutton dressed as lamb. The sales staff did their best not to sell them because they were so poor and those that were sold were usually returned faulty! Considering consumer protection regulations had been in force for over ten years at the time I'm amazed Amstrad got away with it. Remember as well £200 for a pile of rubbish was a couple of weeks average weekly wage at the time!
Brings back memories. I owned a later Amstrad (micro 1000), bought for my birthday in 1994 (I think) from Dixons. Got lured in by the funky backlights on the LCD screen and it looked the part. I recall being amazed that my Panasonic Walkman being better quality when plugged in through the aux when compared to the built on tape deck 😂.
OMG my parents still have a JCPenny's branded mugs eyeful style tower that had our first ever family CD player in it (which broke), they got it in the late 80s when JCPenny's stopped selling rebranded consumer electronics and dumped it all on clearance. Its still sitting in the living room acting as a photo frame shelf. I remember as a teen taking the back off and realizing it was made to look like discrete components but its all one unit inside, and the CD player was just tacked on the bottom.
There was a point in history where most 80s houses had some form of these - The "hi-fi" that sat on top of an LP cupboard. Some more upmarket houses had a smoked glass front with real wood (lol). Then as the 80s progressed everyone seemed to go nuts for graphic equalisers and the lights and black fronts. I had a decent one around 87, can't remember the make but it did sound reasonable. The tape to tape was great for pirating.
As recently as the mid - late 1970's, Amstrad amps were being assembled by teams of workers on a cottage industry basis. I bought my Amstrad 8000 Mk3 off the chap who made it. There were a couple of guys in Maidenhead (Barry and Jim) operating from a little workshop known as "The Stables". Weekends and evenings, they would even rope their kids in, and have them manually assembling PCBs with soldering irons - no flow soldering or automatic placement machines.