the other day I saw a cheap ($300) Nakamichi soundbar somewhere and i can only assume that the name is now licensed by another company and not actual Nakamichi product.

I started thinking about old brands/products i loved years ago that are now gone.
one of my favorites from the 80's were the big PROTON stereo amps with the huge VU sweep meters on front and glowed green. Soundcraftsman amps as well were awesome. Carver amps too...

What are some pieces/brands that you loved back in the day that are now long gone? I just saw that Thiel Speakers finally folded as well..

The best thing Microsoft ever made.  Ultimate TV.     It still beats the crap out of any dvr I've ran across including all of the TIVOs.

Phase Linear amps. Realistic speakers growing up.

A friend has a Nikko amp from the early 70s. I recognized the industrial design of the brand from thirty feet away when I saw it at his house! The hi fi stuff they made was crap, unfortunately. We sold it as a cheap alternative to Marantz (remember them, made in Sun Valley, California?) at the first stereo place where I worked.

I visited Apex Electronics in Sun Valley, CA yesterday. I saw a couple of brands I haven't thought of in years, Knight Kit and Heathkit. A friend built a Heathkit audio signal generator in the late 60s. Heathkit had actual TV set kits you could assemble. Imagine building tube equipment meant to work with UHF signals in the 1960s! And having them work!

I built a Dynaco Stereo 120 (60 watts times two channels, transistorized) in 1967. I built a Harman-Kardon Citation 12 in the early 70s. I still have it.

E H Scott and, as I understand it, his son H H Scott, built the most incredible radios and amplifiers. E H started in the 30s. Here's a photo of the 48- tube Quaranta, likely the biggest set every made:



The story of the restoral of the radio in the picture, which was done between 1987 and 2000, is at [Link: campx.ca].

Yes, it has a chrome-plated chassis.

For a time in the early 70s I had an 18" subwoofer that came out of a mid-30s behemoth that included a turntable, an AM, FM and shortwave receiver (tuning FM frequencies different from what we use today). This sub's magnet was an electromagnet that was part of the power supply of the radio. DC voltage went through a coil, that, since it was an inductor, filtered 60 Hz hum out of the output. I"ll share the name of the brand once I remember it!

In record players, look up Rek-O-Kut on ebay. You'll see turntables (sometimes unkindly referred to as Rumble-Kut) large enough to play 16" transcription discs. Look up Webcor, short for Webster Corporation (of Chicago, I think). Hammarlund, too, but that's short-wave stuff. In the mid sixties, the school tape recorders were by Wollensak, though I saw another product by Wollensak yesterday at Apex: a 35 mm camera.

And once I ran across this photo, I had to share it:



Lastly, I had a Philco AM radio in the early 60s from around 1930. (One of the tubes had a paper label on it indicating that the labeled tube had been installed in 1937!) This was a TRF radio, meaning four separate RF amplifiers completely tracked one another tuning while tuning across the octave and a half that is the AM band!

I lived in the Los Angeles area, and that receiver pulled in KOA and KOB, WLS in Chicago, WWL in New Orleans, a station in Nebraska, and various other distant AM stations. All this was with about a 20 foot long piece of wire that went up over the roof where I lived.

Bohlender-Graebener speakers were a mainstay for me.

VERY power hungry but, did they ever sound good....

B&K!

SAE. Great quality USA made. Still have some of their gear.

+1

SAE is still in business and shipping new products. [Link: hear-sae.com]

Not great sound, but pretty looking.

I'll never forget back in the mid 80's I bought this huge SAE integrated amp with those big blue VU meters. An audiophile friend of mine came over and asked how I liked my SAE amp. I told him it was great. He said "I'll be back tomorrow."

So, the next day he brought over this little 20 wpc stereo amp -- the NAD 3020. He hooked it up and instantly there was this clear and warm sound that had been missing from the brawny and brassy-sounding SAE. I was blown away, and immediately ordered my very own NAD 3020 from my friend Peter Tribeman -- then President of NAD America. Peter had said he wanted me to try it out for months but I never got around to it. I should have listened to him.

The first truly “high end” music system I ever heard used Thiel Loudspeakers. It was the first time I ever encountered that incredible 3-dimensional spatial imaging that a great system can deliver when set up properly.

I thought I read something recently about Thiel coming back to life, but none of the links I found are active.

You may be thinking about the service dept. living on. A former employee started a business to continue on with servicing the speakers at a shop down the road from where Thiel was.

[Link: stereophile.com]

The speaker may have been a Jensen, Rola (which eventually merged with Celestion), Magnavox (Peter Jensen's first company).... that type is called 'field coil' because of the power supply coil creating the magnetic field used by the speaker's voice coil to move when the signal passes through. The coil was used as the power supply choke coil, most often in the second node of filtering. It's a very effective way to do two things with one component and considering the short time between tubes being made to work for much of anything to mass-production of radios with this kind of speaker, I think it's a very innovative design.

Not my amp, but you can see the field coil speaker-

[Link: cdn.shopify.com]

Saw quite a few Rek-O-Kut tables come through the stereo store, along with several QRK- both were used mostly for broadcast and the rumble wasn't much of an issue, since FM produced 30-15KHz and AM was even worse.

Webster produced a wide variety of products under many brands, including PA amplifiers, guitar amps, phonographs....I had a guitar practice amp in the '60s with no name, but on the front, it showed something about being made in Chicago and my dad got it from John Koss, who I'm sure had some kind of relationship with them over the years. We had Wollensak, Rheem and other now gone brands of equipment in school- that stuff was made to last.

I converted a Stromberg-Carlson PA amp to use as a guitar amp- push-pull 6L6, had three of the 1/2" Astatic=type mic inputs (round collar to lock the cable in place with a single contact in the center), a single RCA jack marked 'Phono' and two octal sockets for the output, which could be 4,8,16 ohm or 25V, 50V, 70V or 100V speakers. I replaced one octal socket with a stainless plate that holds two 1/4" jacks and installed an impedance selector in the other.

Also not my amp (my security settings won't let me share photos)

[Link: midcenturyaudio.com]

I have a pair of monster sized Thiel speakers in my warehouse. I think the tweeters are out.

When I was a teen getting into audio I dreamed of owning a big M&K Subwoofer.