AMSTRAD 'Hi-Fi' - the Mug's Eyeful

An unwise purchase made forty years ago still irks after all these years.

00:00 Intro
01:16 Testing 101
07:43 Patently obvious
08:51 Record player
10:40 So what’s the problem?
13:43 Towers of terror
17:31 Speaker disassembly
19:37 Main unit disassembly
23:01 Wrap up
26:12 Patreon credits

UPDATES
1) A few people have mentioned that the turntable cartridge is a ceramic cart -therefore I was incorrect in giving them the credit for using a MM cart.

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OUTRO MUSIC

OUTRO SOUND EFFECT

Regularly asked question
Q) Why are there comments from days ago when this video has just gone live today?

[Bergkatse]

I remember wanting one of those when I was a kid. My parents bought one from Curry’s for my Xmas. I woke up on Xmas morning to find out that Curry’s had sent the wrong system. A Hitachi with a regular record player. I cried my eyes out. When my parents went to the store to complain and I remember the salesman saying “the Amstrad is shite. Keep the other one” and I ended up with a superior hifi by accident!

[AtomicShrimp]

Back in the day, I recall being told by a friend who was an electronics expert, that the 'noise reduction' on Amstrad hifi systems worked by *injecting* synthetic noise into the signal when it was in the 'off' position. When you turned 'on' the noise reduction, the noise did reduce, because the noise injection ceased.
I have no idea if this is true. Could be interesting to tear it down and see.

[keobii]

i loved this hifi . i grew up on a council estate in a one parent household, we had very little money, my mother saved up for a year to buy this for me for my 12th birthday !! it may have been crap but i loved it, all my friends were well jell, this mug has fond memories

[Spiderwebsider]

I remember as a young bloke back in 1983 I walked into a hifi shop with an armful of cash. I desperately wanted one of these big stackable systems with all their flashing LEDs and fancy knobs, but the guy in the shop did me a big favour: he asked me how much I wanted to spend, and then pointed me to a bland and boring looking bunch of parts with no fancy bits and pieces. He had me listen to both, and the difference in sound quality was astonishing. Rega Planar with P77 cartridge, an A&R Cambridge amp, and a pair of Mordaunt Short speakers. That was the last system I ever bought. 40 years on and they still sound awesome. There's probably a lot better out there today, because even back then it was considered a budget system, but I've no desire to buy anything else. Sometimes it's worth paying a bit extra for quality.

[paulkinzer]

Your message at the end, about trying to help someone avoid buying rubbish because they lack knowledge really hit home for me. My lifelong hobby has been astronomy, and just a few years before you bought this rubbish, I had a similar experience with my first telescope: I bought the most I could afford, and it looked much like better options, but it was unusable junk. I knew SO little, that I didn't understand it was the scope, but figured I must just be doing something wrong. So I abandoned actually looking at the night sky for years, though I never lost interest in the science.

Decades later, I got back into it, only to find that nothing had changed: there are companies still selling absolute garbage, and every year, especially around Holiday gift-giving time, countless people around the world get to be sorely disappointed in crap. The worst part is that much of the crap is made by the same companies that also make and sell some of the best astronomy equipment you can buy. It seems so stupid to me, especially because astronomy is a pursuit where folks continually upgrade, to bigger and better scopes. Why would a company turn people off of the very hobby that is the very reason for the company's existence!

This all bothered me so much that I did what you suggested: I got involved in public outreach, sharing not just views through my telescopes, but information about equipment. I even wrote a book about it, which Cambridge University Press liked enough to actually publish. I also put together telescope packages: scopes, mounts, tripods, etc. for beginners, and either give them away, or sell them for enough to buy what I need to make more. I gave one away at an event before Christmas, and just sold two in the past couple of weeks. It's very rewarding to both share a passion, and to steer people away from having a potential passion, or even just a bit of enjoyment, ruined by misguided corporate greed.

[madninro]

My grandfather was a very modest person but he always said that we were too poor for cheap things and this "hi-fi" is the perfect example for that.

[MisterCreamyDude]

Full of contempt for the 'mugs' who made him rich. Classy guy. Why exactly was he knighted??? Oh yeah, donations. My poor dad was one of those mugs who fell for his pitch, he got rid of a perfectly decent Ferguson Studio (can't remember the number) music centre to buy one of Mr Sugars poor sounding cabinet things with the smoked glass door! I was happy though as I got the Ferguson! I think he made the Amstrad last a good 10 years before it went in the bin where it belonged! Thanks for posting, brought back some happy memories of his god awful products! Coincidentaly, as an early teen I was mad about computers round that time with the boom in home computers starting, another pie Mr Sugar had a slice of, so after I'd seen and heard how bad his music centres were I made damn sure I never asked for or got one. Happy days! Thank you for posting and every credit to you for wasting good money re-buying this junk for our entertainment!

[richardodonoghue]

i bought separates, one piece per month, Grundig amp and tuner, fisher turntable, bang & olafsson tape to tape deck and speakers and a 64 band technics equalizer.
the grundig tuner had a timer on it and with a little rewiring of a krupps coffee percolator i could wake up to my favourite music and the coffee started filtering into the flask at the same time
it was 1983, and the average working man took home around £225 a month, most of my separates cost around £200 a piece, so yes it did take you a year to get a good system together, but back then we had music WORTH LISTENIING TO !!

[carcj]

My Grandad was an audiophile and a fleamarket hunter. He swayed me away from cheap hifi with his fleamarket finds. In the early 90s He got me very nice 1970s akai amp and tuner with some wharfdale speakers.

[tubaman]

19:41 "we were quite capable of making our own rubbish back in the day" - made me laugh out loud! 🤣

[robertjpayne]

I really enjoyed you giving the Amstrad a deserved kicking. Today Lord Sugar seems to enjoy a level of respect that he clearly never earned as he made his money by dishonest trading. Thanks Matt for sharing.

[ageary]

Sir Alan Sugar was a genius conman and still is. Thank god I never fell for his cheap tricks and purchased a Pioneer 3in 1.

[burner]

In America we had Sounddesign and now we have GPX as basically the same idea. I was lucky enough to realize as a kid they weren't worth the money you spent on them. Speaking of helping someone out, my cousin in the past few years has gotten into records. Last Christmas I saw his "record" player, one of those 50's replica models that aren't worth a damn. Made me want to cry. This year I gave him an 80's Sansui DD linear table, a 90's Denon AVR and a pair of Cambridge Audio Aero 2's to listen through. His smile was well worth it.

[garypoole]

I use to work in a HiFi shop in the mid to late 80s(Southport HIFi and Wigan HiFi) we had one of these on display to show the customers how CRAP they were they left the shop with a Technics rack system, and after that they would come back to the shop and thank us!!. Many stayed loyal customers. How Lord Sugar walks the streets i don't know.

[mortenvinding]

Thankfully Amstrad never became a big brand here in Denmark.
But I do remember once I saw a system like that, from Amstrad market as “1000watt total music power”.
One of my colleagues rightfully said “that must be the total energy of it burning” 😆

[jimkrb]

I remember being a secondary schoolboy in Chelsea back in the early '80s, and at lunchtime we often piled round the Peter Jones electrical floor that had all the high end component systems. We marvelled at such things as horizontal powered slide-out cassette decks, dedicated graphic equalizers separates, speakers on spikes etc. One thing that struck us was the button and volume control quality on this kit, the stuff you actually touched. Beautifully turned metal, well weighted. Amstrad NEVER got that right, so we knew to stay away. 🙂
I bought all my components across the water in Richer Sounds. Pretty good quality, not too much dosh.

[mattwuk]

The sad thing was for kids in the 80s who were into music, this was probably a rare purchase and probably a main Christmas present. I hope Sugar enjoyed the sweet young tears the complete succubus.

[peterwilliams]

Looking at that Dixons page took me back almost 40 years too. I was absolutely skint in the 80s, my only way to buy anything was to go full 'trailer' and buy from a catalogue. This video has lifted a huge weight from my shoulders as I bought a JVC E22L from said catalogue, spending all my available cash and putting me into debt for 2 years. The delivery lady was my cause of this burden as she said to me as I eagerly accepted it, 'you're a mug, I got the Amstrad from the same page, it sounds awesome and it's twice as big as this puny thing and it was almost half the price'. I'd done my homework and thought I'd made a shrewd choice, but her words have reverberated in my head ever since. My E22L sits in the kitchen today, still fully functional, but mainly used for the radio, but everything still works. It still sounds great. The subsequent 5 CD multi player system, bought 10 years later at a much greater cost has been in landfill for at least 10 years.

[johnblack]

Around the time these things were selling in the thousands I was working at my local Electricity Board central warehouse and we were getting wagonloads of these things every week. I remember the delivery driver telling us that the place he picked them up from was “full of YTS kids assembling container loads of rubbish from China into cabinets” . It would seem that was how they were able to claim that they were Made in The UK.
Great video btw.

[erwintimmerman]

I remember as a kid going almost weekly to our local discount Walmart-like shop to drool over one of those cabinets with a glass door. I couldn't afford it, but dreamed of owning it. Instead, I bought separate components over time. Didn't look nearly as good but apparently sounded a lot better. Only after watching this video I realized how big the bullet was that I've dodged 😁