Luxman was synonymous with Peak Japan Audio.
Back when Japanese companies were on the top of the world in consumer electronics.

 

The old Peter Max style boards would come alive and tell you what was wrong.

View attachment 356449

To me, the Fillmore West posters were the ultimate in grooviness.

 

To me, the Fillmore West posters were the ultimate in grooviness.

View attachment 356458
View attachment 356459

One of my kids does concert posters (and other stuff) for a printing house in Portland.


She's got's lots of proofs in her workshop.

 

Luxman was synonymous with Peak Japan Audio.
Back when Japanese companies were on the top of the world in consumer electronics.

Denon still makes the top-end audio in Japan.

https://www.denon.com/en-us/

 

i have not seen software that can do "organic" connections like that. those were done by hand.

TopoR maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR
But they are from Russia. So the Ukraine war might have something to do with why certain info does not make it to the US of A.
But "about being done by hand" ... there was CAD and even mechanical templates in the late 70s when the Luxman amp was developed. But some major outfits still wanted the "hand job". Those Luxman traces do look nice and wide, and can widen to fill in the avail real estate as necessary. Nice wide and thick traces are important for high-end audio.

EE's knew what they were doing back then. With or w/o automation.

Indeed, all my high-performance DIY projects are still on Veroboard, with wires and thick solder joints:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/help-identify-diode!/msg1622230/#msg1622230
https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/thr...-with-interesting-claims.307594/#post-5682920

 

TopoR may be? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR

I use TopoR autorouting for paths with normal trace types for modern boards. I don't don't use most of the 'style' features as IMO it's only eye-candy.

99% TopoR path auto-routing.


Early revision of that board.

 

Denon still makes the top-end audio in Japan.
View attachment 356469
https://www.denon.com/en-us/

I count 17 individual speaker channels.
Seventeen.

 

TopoR maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR
But they are from Russia. So the Ukraine war might have something to do with why certain info does not make it to the US of A.
But "about being done by hand" ... there was CAD and even mechanical templates in the late 70s when the Luxman amp was developed. But some major outfits still wanted the "hand job". Those Luxman traces do look nice and wide, and can widen to fill in the avail real estate as necessary. Nice wide and thick traces are important for high-end audio.

EE's knew what they were doing back then. With or w/o automation.

Indeed, all my high-performance DIY projects are still on Veroboard, with wires and thick solder joints:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/help-identify-diode!/msg1622230/#msg1622230
https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/thr...-with-interesting-claims.307594/#post-5682920

EE's know what they are doing today even better. Bling, be it gold or old school design is not about excellence, it's about style.

Style is cool but let's keep it real on the engineering side.

 

Style is cool but let's keep it real on the engineering side.

So elec "engineering" just became massively improved when computers became powerful enough to run Altium, Spice, MatLAB and Wolfram.
Oh, Oh, uh, okay, toots. Whatever ya say!

 

So elec "engineering" just became massively improved when computers became powerful enough to run Altium, Spice, MatLAB and Wolfram.
Oh, Oh, uh, okay, toots. Whatever ya say!

No, it became better when we had better equipment, at affordable prices to analyze the data from the circuits and devices we built and the metrology to keep manufacturing/engineering processes on target. The computers helped to sort that new treasure trove of accurate data into something useful that we used to build better circuits, chips and designs for circuit boards. Those programs just made it easier to apply those principles. their existence as tools came from demand to make things easier, the didn't make things possible that were impossible before.
I've been about in the field for a while, gotten dirty in it, old too and have lived during the advances in technology instead of dreaming out it while wearing rose-colored glasses.


IMO it's like the living on the farm, the 'back to the farm' nostalgia is from people who didn't grow-up working on a farm, they are clueless about the actual process of farming.

 

Even in the late 1980s, when profitable and respected "audiophile" companies, like NAD, likely had access to CAD, some still chose to go the hand-drawn route for the PCB ...

Buy why? If it ain't broke, why fix it? COMMON SENSE. Duh!

 

Buy why? If it ain't broke, why fix it? COMMON SENSE. Duh!

I have come home with tiny pieces of black tape on my shirt and pans. Later we moved to red and blue tape.

I cannot think about placing 3.5mil (0.09mm) tape on 8 layers of film. I am very glad for CAD. It is the only way to connect to a 1000 pin IC.

 

"Meanwhile, back in the Real World..." (Tron, 1982)
In the early and mid 80s, GE and Sony produced millions of AM/FM table radios, including famous GE Super Radio.
Of course, by the 80s, Sony and GE had the resources for CADing . But they continued to use hand-art.
Why?
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/sony_amfm_table_radio_icf_9740.html
https://earmark.net/gesr/sr2.htm
https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/...ation/am_fm_table_radio_icf_9740w_3121278.png
https://earmark.net/gesr/sr2_main_back_small.JPG

 

In the 70/early 80 we used black tape. Most of your analog boards were made "negative" where you put tape where you do not want copper. That sounds backwards to most people.
Here I took the first picture (small part of it) and used "red tape" to cover where I don't want copper. It is really easy to say all copper to copper spacing will be 0.05 inch by using 0.05 inch tape.

Our first CAD software was the price of a car. You needed a dedicated person that only worked on that computer. The cost was insane. No one had a CAD workstation at home.

 

"Meanwhile, back in the Real World..." (Tron, 1982)
In the early and mid 80s, GE and Sony produced millions of AM/FM table radios, including famous GE Super Radio.
Of course, by the 80s, Sony and GE had the resources for CADing . But they continued to use hand-art.
Why?
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/sony_amfm_table_radio_icf_9740.html
https://earmark.net/gesr/sr2.htm
https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/...ation/am_fm_table_radio_icf_9740w_3121278.png
https://earmark.net/gesr/sr2_main_back_small.JPG

As others have said and based on my own research, it wasn't until really the mid-80s that electronic design automation tools (EDA tools) even became available at all. And then they were ridiculously expensive. The presumption that "Sony and GE had the resources for CADing" may be correct, but from a business perspective they likely weren't inclined to invest a bunch of money into extremely expensive and relatively unproven tools that could only run on particularly powerful machines operated by just a single person and change the entire design and workflow quite yet. Doing hand-drawn PCBs wasn't because they were "better" - it was entirely a business and workflow decision based entirely on money and efficiency.

The entire motivation behind the organic curves, as best as I can tell (because I was born well after these kinds of boards no longer were in common practice), is entirely due to the hand-drawn nature of them. It's a lot easier to have curves and whatnot when you're hand-drawing, and if you don't want to have to sit there with a straightedge and carefully measure out lines and miter corners, then you just manually draw a path, avoiding everything thing else in the way.

For performance perspective, unless you're hitting RF applications where your traces are on the same scale as your wavelengths (100s of MHz at absolute minimum, but really closer to several GHz or 10s of GHz for all practical purposes with modern PCBs), or dealing with extremely high voltages, then straight lines vs organic-looking paths and mitered corners vs curved paths don't really matter terribly much.

With all that said, there's supposedly ways to emulate this behavior, though not quite perfectly, in various EDA tools. It just depends on how much effort you want to put into it. This Reddit post asks the same question you did here 5 years ago. Whether or not the answers are correct (then or now) I do not know.

 

As mentioned, i am not aware of product that would get that exact look and feel. But if i had to do it this is one possible workflow:
1. Capture schematic and annotate components.
2. Assign footprints to all components
3. Open design in PCB and do layout as usual - keep it 2 layer only and only route bottom layer. It is likely that you will also need some jumpers. In that case, set the grid to 0.1" and route it as top layer. Top layer will not really be used byt this will still allow making proper and functional layout that can be validated.
4. Once you have design complete, it is time to do the artwork manually. Export design of the bottom layer into software of your choice (image editor). Draw areas free style around existing tracks. You can use blobs or splines or whatever your software supports. Then fill the areas to make them solid.
5. Import design back into PCB editor and set it as one of layers. Optionally swap that with back layer (if you want to do DRC again)
6. Export PCb as gerber. Optionally edit drill file an make all holes NPTH
7. Order PCBs... Or... Etch your own...

If ordering PCBs, remove unwanted layers. The only layers you want are back Cu, edge cuts, drill file(s), and front silkscreen.

 

Moderator: I was informed some of my posts were deleted. Here is the message:

----
Your post in the thread Is older manual PCB layout possible with modern softwarewas deleted. Reason: Welcome to AAC. Unfortunately, your post has been removed. You are free to repost it without the comments about other members. Please use the Report option at the bottom of a post, or on a member's information if you feel something needs to be addressed by the moderators. Reports are taken seriously by the moderation team.
Sunday at 4:48 PM
----

But I have no clue as to what was deleted. No carbon copy. No nothing. Can you send me copy of the deleted content?

 

 

My recollection of seeing a board layout CAD program for the first time, was the second half of the 1980s but it was very constrained.
The first decent CAD program, one that companies would actually invest into, appeared a little later, but that one required a workstation to run, and the draftsman who actually operated it was a well-paid specialist.
I know about the well-paid bit because that specialist was a friend of mine, and he could afford a boat.

 

Personally using a high end CAD system, (Xpedition 2504) and looking at the original posters boards, etc. I could create shapes that look like the boards shown, but as many have mentioned, why? As also stated, back then when signal speeds were "slow" and edges were slow by today's standards, you could get away with just about anything on a layout and it worked. Audio signals were no where near digital signal speeds and all you needed to do is make sure you met voltage and current requirements on your designs. Back then, there was a reason thy called it "artwork" and I remember many of the boards shown as a kid taking apart old radios and the like. What's interesting though, is working in a modern CAD tool and if I were to use the RF module available to me, I can make the nice curves and shapes, but the main reason we don't do things like that today is simply because it's not needed and in most CAD tools, it would take longer to recreate that style of routing than doing it with the built in capabilities of todays tools, even the free or low cost versions. That time needed is money and most companies just don't want to spend $$ like that for no practical reason. Those designs were cool from a WOW stand point as a kid and such, but today after 35 years designing boards, I have other things I would like to do in the time it would take to make it look "cool". ;-) I'm sure you got more than enough replies to your question and the why's, so just look at this as another vote in the cost and doesn't matter category. Have a great Day!