Did the Old Receivers Sound Good?

I have a Fisher 400 and 500 tube receivers which are very warm and tubey sounding.  I keep them as souvenirs.   I also have Sherwood 7100 which is also very good and cheap.  My two Yamaha CR620s are used for my big screen TVs and provide excellent low cost sound (Tom Port of Better Records uses them to audition hot stampers with Legacy Focuses).  

Back in the late 70's, I assembled what for the times was a pretty decent system.

Not state of the art but it was what I could afford at the time. I had a Yamaha CR2020 receiver, ADS L810 ii speakers and a Denon DP790 turntable.

The turntable and some Stax headphones were acquired at a fire sale. Later added a Sony 3 head tape deck and put a Grace cartridge on the Denon since the Yamaha had a MC input. It was a very satisfying system at the time but as some have mentioned, relying on hearing memory is not reliable.

I still have the CR2020 in storage and gave the speakers to my little brother. currently live with a very modest system, Yamaha, KEF ,Technics TT and a Sony CD/DVD player. For "serious" listening, I Run Amazon Ultra hd from a Dell precision desktop through a JDS DAC and amp to HiFi man Ananda or Sennheiser 600 series headphones. Now living in an Audiophile dealer desert, I can't really compare to newer high end stuff. Probably wouldn't matter as my mid 70 yo ears no longer discern the difference.  

If we look at it from a nostalgic point of view, yes. Oh that smooth, velvety sound of the 70’s.  Just plug in an old system and it’s often not what we remember. I think there was excellent gear back then but not at common man prices. Today, you can get some quality gear for relatively cheap. 

I have fond memories of my old Pioneer when it was new- it sounded very good and the biggest point is that it never sounded offensive.  

I do not believe you can say that about lots of contemporary amplifiers.  

Another thing is that listening to vintage receivers today is not a valid impression.  

I would love to hear a vintage amplifier design made ground up all new parts.  I bet it would surprise....

I picked up a near-mint (in appearance) Sansui AU-517 integrated to go with the TU-717 I've owned for almost 30 years. It's teamed with a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 7s and the sound is unexpectedly good. Clarity and dynamics are there in spades. IMO, for lack of a better term, vintage amps seem to produce music with more 'body' to it. A Sony CDP XA20ES CD player and an Adcom GCD-700 carousel player, both running through an older MSB Gold Link DAC/Powerbase, make CDs sound the best I can recall in a long time. This little system was playing last weekend when two fellows came by to pick up a PS Audio HCA-2/Cary SL-100 combo I was selling. I retired a couple of years ago and have been selling off most of my higher-end (for me) components to beef up my savings. They seemed to be as impressed with the vintage gear's sound as with the newer amp's/preamp's sound through a pair of ADS L-810s (which was pretty sweet). My condo has a very open floor-plan in the area where both of those systems are located, and I think that was a big positive in the equation.