On the plus side, those legacy devices are orders of magnitude better than anything that a beginner could build and can be bought relatively cheap through surplus stores.
Not sure if anyone in here subscribes to The Signal Path [1] on YouTube, but he does tons of teardowns (and repairs!) of RF/signal processing hardware new and old. You'll see precisely what jaquesm is talking about. The marquee specs might not look so great on paper, but you'll find absurd levels of craft and attention to detail in some of that older equipment.
