Manufacturers past their heyday

I haven't heard much from Ayre ......

Acoustic Research - made great speakers back in the day and turntables too. Now they make outdoor speakers last I looked. 

Much of the 'old line' of manufacturers have slouched into somewhat blah offerings....and,spread thinner, most lose the coherency that created their name & rep....

MBL?  Probably lovely, but selling the family into slavery and you may have the down on it/them....

Spouse wouldn't be thrilled about the slavery thing, no cute kids to please the peds....end up in EMERG will multiple ice knife wounds....

I'll stick with what appears to be 'junk'.....;)

In resent years I have ventured into the Linn camp and very happy I did. Both my dealer and Linn have been great.

One of my all time favorites, which I was not able to buy at the time as I was still in collage, was a few stack Cello system. I had an opportunity to speak with Mark Levinson a few times and that was quite the conversation. There are some great offerings out on the market right now, but very expensive and if it broke it would be difficult to repair.

Some other brands that were big in the day were Phase Linear, Threshold, Magnepan, Dual, Nakamichi and Revox. All cool stuff. 

I really like audio companies with good heritage and stay true to their vision. Their products always seem to sound best to me.