If you don’t have several hundred million in the bank, and a massive company to lord over, it’s hard for us normal folk to emulate Steve Jobs.
But you could build a sound system like Steve’s.
Based on an iconic portrait of Jobs in his almost empty Woodside, California home in 1982, Wired pieced together the various stereo components needed to build a hi-fi system, endorsed by the man with a taste for nothing less than excellence.
The setup includes an MK1 GyroDec turntable, Denon TU-750s digital tuner, 200 Watt per channel STASIS-1 power amp, FET-One preamp, and massive Acoustat Monitor 3s speakers. (The albums, if you’re interested, include the Bach Brandenberg Concertos, Ella Fitzgerald: The Cole Porter Songbook, and Steely Dan’s Aja.)
You can check out Wired for a gallery featuring details and images of all of the above, but the whole ensemble will set you back around $8,200 — not including the records. As Wired notes:
“[The items] embodied everything [Jobs] held dear in high-end industrial design: clean lines, quality materials and workmanship, outstanding performance–price be damned. Although he would eventually upgrade to far more exotic equipment, like six-figure Wilson Audio speakers, this old school rig is still considered serious audio porn today.”
Or you could just buy an iPod Shuffle for $49.
Source: Wired
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
One response to “How to build Steve Jobs’ stereo system, circa 1982”
Back in the day, if you had an amp by Stasis and a Pre-amp by FET, this was considered audiophile equipment. In 2014, anyone with a pair of $100 Polk speakers or Beats headphones is an audiophile. It’s ridiculous how the word ‘audiophile’ has completely lost it’s meaning.