watching this in 2020, and yes high spec. product the teardown makes sense,. However, not in case of middle segment and low-end consumer products.
BTW in classic physics won't change in 30 years, but materials will. So maybe you will design around LDPE instead of Teflon or something like that. Or maybe Alumine substrates will be cheaper in future or something else…

How can you possibly know where you are going if you don't know where you came from?
I'm sure that he could calibrate everything with his resistor in a box and repair anything with his DIY eBay oscilloscope and signal generator…. He's so talented that he don't need no stinking fluke 30 year old rubbish…. But I bet that he loves that amazing vacuum tube sound from his amplifier.

I often have people say just use a stamp board I made a a simple timer to using 555 timer chips , I live 555s they can do most things this has 3 chips 2 555 and a5 volt reg chip parts count is 3 active components verses the stamp that has 50 plus, the MTF ( mean time between failure) is set by the component and multiplied by the amount of components,and yes the performance is Much better , so watt ! This timer is used in a hydroponic system so a micro second makes no difference but it fails more often, needs more power plus a Lipton to program it ! This is not progress I am old so when I first started electronics they were only tubes !! And components have dramatically improved but physics has not changed m, electrons do the same they always have and will stay the same so using au
Micro pros-sever is not better just easier but knowing what happens in the chip is what really maters , I love electronics and I am glad that I can understand how they work inside ! This is what it’s all about !

I like the older gear because it's knowable.
Old nail gear.
Here's the input circuit, here's the attenuator system, here's the comparator circuit, here's the mixer etc etc.

New ass gear.
Here's the ASIC, well we're done. Bye

The message in the video is so very true. The designers of 50 years ago – in my opinion – were more often than not better engineers than today's crop – and the simple reason was that they had to be.  Before 1990, Electronics was a horrible and intimidating profession.  In the past I have worked inside some beautiful old test equipment form the 70's – the level of analogue knowledge, mechanical design and materials skills is impressive. I once repaired a vintage 60's-70's (but still incredibly useful) B&K Pico-scale inductance meter – which was crafted from beautiful materials, used every trick in the book to maintain accuracy – and was actually packed internally with sawdust to keep the stray capacitances constant. We should never forget that until the early 90's the majority of designers worked without any mcad and ecad and that an analogue design often meant  designing 20 or so discrete transistors using only spec-sheet graphs plus a pocket calculator – my boss in 1981 still used a slide-rule – "because it was quicker" btw. Spec sheets were in dusty folders on lab shelves. There was very little simulation capability – and what existed  was less than user-friendly, extremely slow and could only accommodate a few nodes at a time. With minimal ic functionality and very little integrated functionality on Silicon, designers needed to do a ton of sleight of hand to get to the outputs they required. If you take the time to look inside a 1950's television set  and really understand what the designers did you will never stop slapping your forehead in surprise at the inspired genius of almost every component layout.  For fit and cost reasons a block of digital functionality – which today we drop into our environment as a few lines of code and configure with a click  was more often than not laboriously crafted one gate at a time from discrete digital components, each with their own timing and power issues. IDEs, if they existed, were not available to most companies for cost reasons – machine code or HEX being the usual route to  program and then debugging tools could cost more than a car. The amount of thought, stress, risk and brilliant inspiration required to do what had to be done back then was mind-bendingly difficult. In short, the profession – from my point of view at least  sucked. I loved the end results, I hated the process – most of all the arrival of prototypes. More than anything else, in the 70's and 80's I stood in awe of the people that trained me. There were far fewer EEs in the 70's, and most I came across were significantly more skilled than I am today – with all my software and tools. Today in contrast things are far more fun, quicker, lower in cost and overall it is so much easier to accomplish  what we want to do.  One of the problems in todays design world is that producing a product that only marginally works is somewhat easier than it was 40 years ago. Because today we can jump from an input to an output so very rapidly, we often neglect some of those hard-learned engineering 101's that our predecessors needed to live by… needed to live by because the tools they had to play with at the time – at best – were only just capable of doing what they required.  Today with our excellent  low-cost highly integrated application-specific Silicon, ESD-accommodated silicon front-ends, noise floors falling away, power consumption falling away and high speed readily available we can get away with bending the rules more than they could in the past. Sometimes today that leads to us creating marginal designs from black boxes with internal workings we cannot see and systems that susceptible to faults that are difficult to locate and understand. The design rules in 1961 are the same as the rules today – we can all learn from looking at old schematics and PCBs – and a good first lesson would be how very lucky we are to have today's tools and systems available to us. Don't even get me started on placing a micro where three discrete components could have done the job at a better price and just as well. Don't get me started on adding shielding where good analogue design knowledge would have made a circuit bullet-proof. Today we do more, we think larger – our designs have greater scope and accomplish greater things, but those designs regularly  rest on a thinner and more unstable foundation. A client recently asked me to make a 20 microsecond timer (in a hurry) for a BOM cost of pennies. I had forgotten how to wire a quick 555 timer sometime in the late 90's – and my quickest route that day was a 40 cent micro. Doing that in 1980 would have got me yelled at for days and days – and why – because doing so lacks thought. The devil is in the details.

I appreciate your vintage tear downs, They're true works of art and its impressive to see the way engineers solved problems in a time before you could simply adjust your firmware. There is always something more that you can learn to add to your skill set, and to just dismiss something's merits because its 30 years old is nothing short of ignorant.

rekt

I hate to say it, Joe Blow your biggest audience will do just fine with a resistance box. None of this resistance calibrator rubbish.

vintage is where it's at for me,nothing like finding goldmines of quality reusable parts for my magic smoke inventions lol.

I agree.

The laws of physics have not changed, engineering principals have not changed,

Looking at older designs gives us an insight into how problems were solved with the available technology at the time. These solutions can be transfered into today's technology. In today's world we barely get a chance to have a scatch let alone pour hours into planning and design like people did years ago.

If you don't understand the solution then you definitely don't understand the problem.

It is called standing on the shoulders of giants 🙂

I've always seen vintage gear as more educational than modern stuff from the start. I learned about sound synthesis from an analog synth with knobs and switches for every function. I don't feel I would have come to that knowledge as fast as I did if I was to try and learn on a digital device with menus and digital value based controls. Same with modern ICs vs discrete components. Vintage designs relied on discrete components more cause the IC's didn't really exist back then. Seeing all the actual constituents of circuit is far more revealing then just having an IC do all the magic behind a curtain.  

One could possibly learn to design a product that would still work after 30 years. It is amazing what is considered acceptable in a new product these days.