Don’t ditch that hi-fi! Marry your digital music collection with your analogue audio gear. – By Mark Wilson

There was a time when we shared music through walls rather than social networks, when we prized the tactility of knobs and dials over the numb stroke of a thumb on a touchscreen. Electronics weren’t disposable, and we understood that newer didn’t always mean better.

The ’70s were important years for the audio world, and they left a lasting legacy. Today, vintage audio equipment is anything but rare. Ageing speakers and receivers fill lofts and garages, or sit decoratively and underutilised in living room corners. They’re fixtures at garage sales and second-hand shops, yet they are also the rare type of tech product that gets passed from generation to generation.

This isn’t just about nostalgia – vintage audio equipment simply ages well. Many older receivers and speakers still produce remarkable sound – often better than the overamplified, undertuned, all-in-one 5.1 surround-sound systems that have come to dominate the home audio aisle – and they’re certainly more attractive than some of their modern counterparts.

One problem: our music collections are increasingly digital – iTunes downloads, MP3s and streaming services – while vintage audio equipment is decidedly, and even proudly, analogue. Here’s how to bridge the gap, bringing your classic audio equipment into the Internet age.

The good old gear
In terms of stereo equipment, the late ’60s and the 1970s were a golden age. As Japan’s tech giants lusted after the American hardware market, companies such as Kenwood/Trio, Pioneer, Yamaha and Sansui overbuilt and underpriced their receivers to get a piece of the action. This is a boon to music lovers today, as it was 40 years ago: if you don’t happen to have a pile of audio equipment in storage, acquiring some is appealingly cheap.

“Those things are phenomenal,” says Stereophile senior contributing editor Michael Fremer. “They sound so good, and you can pick one up for $20 or $30.” South African prices may not be quite as favourable, but there’s no question that these Far Eastern bargains can be had for the audio equivalent of small change – prices as low as a few hundred rand are not unusual. Pitted against today’s home audio gear, a classic Kenwood receiver, for example, fares remarkably well, driving a full, powerful and variously adjustable sound.

And then there’s the design. Vintage audio equipment often looks as beautiful as it sounds; certainly more appealing than the plain plastic and sheet metal aesthetic adopted by so many modern electronics manufacturers (See "Best of British"). Stained wood, brushed aluminum and glass are par for the course in ’60sand ’70sera gear. Control panels glow in soft orange, blue and green hues, and needles bounce with the music. It’s a distinctly highend look, available for a bargainbasement price, if not for free – thanks, Dad!

The way of the wire
Getting this older gear to play your modern music isn’t as hard as you might imagine. The simplest way to bridge the digitaltoanalogue gap is the commonplace analogue connection standard that was popularised in the 1950s – the humble RCA plug. Stereo RCA cables are identified by their red and white connectors, but the basic RCA plug format, with its rounded post and stamped metal sheath, is also the interface for everything from phonograph (turntable) connections to modern component video.

Since RCA has been a standard for more than half a century, virtually every digital plug manifestation has been forced to play nicely with it, so you can buy adapter cables to bridge a 3,5mm mini headphone jack to RCA cheaply at nearly any electronics store. Technically, this is an analoguetoanalogue connection, so it’s virtually foolproof.

If your music source doesn’t have a spare 3,5mm jack, there are adapter options for most common plug types. Online retailers such as Monoprice carry affordable adapters that convert Apple’s 30pin port to RCA (for iPods, iPhones and iPads), USB to RCA digitaltoanalogue converters (for computers) and mini/micro USB to RCA converters (for Android phones and tablets), which will let you plug your digital audio devices into any receiver.

If you’re willing to invest a bit more for a higherquality link between your computer and receiver, a dedicated digitaltoanalogue converter can bypass your computer’s soundcard to produce a cleaner source audio signal. The lowend soundcards included in many computers, especially laptops, are prone to interference and noise. Digital-to-analogue converters skip over your PC’s sound processor by receiving a raw digital audio signal over USB. Products such as the HRT Music Streamer II or NuForce Icon uDAC-2 are good bets.

Over the air
Plugging your digital source directly into your receiver is simple and cheap, but it’s useless if your receiver is far from your music source. There are several wireless technologies that can act as a bridge between, say, a desktop in an office and the receiver in the living room. Wireless interfaces also make it easier to control your music – you can keep your iPod or smartphone in your pocket and play party DJ from any room in the house.

Assuming that you use a lot of Apple iOS devices, the AirPlay standard is likely your best bet. An Apple AirPort Express or AppleTV can serve as a wireless digital-to-analogue converter, receiving a Wi-Fi stream of music directly from your device – be it an iPhone or a laptop – and sending it to your receiver via a 3,5-mm jack. (This will require the aforementioned 3,5-mm-to-RCA adapter.)

You can also send your music from your computer to your iPod, iPad or iPhone by using a clever program called Airfoil (about R175, PC and Mac). This turns your iDevice into the audio interface, while you stream from the endless catalogue of music on your main machine.

If you have a catalogue of tracks on a Windows PC, you can stream music through a Windows Media Extender with analogue output capability, the most popular of which, by a long shot, is the Xbox 360. You can stream to an Xbox from a Mac too, but it will require some third-party software such as Nullriver’s Connect360 (about R150).

Neither the AirPort Express nor the Xbox 360, however, is specifically an audio device. The AirPort is a wireless hotspot first, and a music streamer second; likewise, the Xbox 360 is a game console that just happens to be an excellent music device. If your only goal is to stream music from a computer to a stereo system, and particularly if you would like to connect your digital music collection to multiple receivers, the simplest option is an ingenious little product called the Orb MP-1 (R1 500).

This 8-cm discus-like device serves one purpose: to receive audio via Wi-Fi, and to pass it along to a 3,5-mm audio jack. It’s small enough to hide behind a receiver or speaker, and cheap enough that a house-wide deployment – one for the system in the living room, one for the kitchen and one for the bathroom – won’t break the bank. The Orb comes with software that makes sending tunes from one side of the house to the other as simple as clicking on an icon in the free Orb Caster desktop app (PC or Mac), or using one of the accompanying smartphone apps, available for both iOS and Android.

But none of these solutions will impress true audiophiles, since none of them supports FLAC, the de facto uncompressed digital audio format. FLAC offers greater clarity and quality than most MP3s and downloaded music, and if you’ve amassed a digital collection of lossless music that you’d like to wirelessly connect to your stereo system, you’ll need a streaming device that supports it. The Logitech Squeezebox Touch (typically about R3 000) isn’t cheap, but it builds a sturdy wireless bridge between your FLAC library and your receiver, and includes support for Internet radio, as well as streaming music services.

Understanding audio compression
Lossless audio
The first image represents 10 seconds of Elvis Costello’s “You Belong to Me”, recorded in FLAC lossless audio format, which
audiophiles swear by. The file is completely faithful to the source material, but it takes up 25,6 MB of space.

Typical MP3
The second image represents the same 10 seconds compressed into MP3 format at a quality of 192 kilobits per second – about what
you get from a service such as iTunes. Sound quality is acceptable, and the song takes up just 3,5 MB of space.

The difference
To create the third clip, we’ve subtracted the MP3’s sound data from the lossless fi le’s sound data (directions at jax184.com). The resulting clip is a full representation of what audio was lost to compression. Played back on its own, it sounds hollow and distant,
but still like the song.