Thank you very much. Most everything runs. Electronics is my career and vintage stuff a life long hobby. I am able to do all repairs/restoration and can refinish which has come in handy The Graetz works fine and sounds lovely. It's all a big mess as we had to make room for 25 year old youngster as she returned to nest. Thank you for your hard work on the site.
'64 Parisienne CS "barn find" - last on the road in '86 ... Owner Protection Plan booklet, original paint, original near-mint aqua interior, original aqua GM floor mats, original 283, factory posi, and original rust.
They sure had some cool looking tubes back in the day. Have some on display....most ask what they are! The second pic is a NOS 4 pin tube (still have original box) that dad figures is one of the earliest tubes made.
Fifty years ago, every friend I had was buying "hi-fi" systems (I'm still lucky enough to have most of those friends).
The names to get - here in the UK - were Quad, Cambridge, Nad etc and if you didn't have a Thorens belt drive deck and Kef speakers you were a nobody.
I just couldn't afford any of that top end stuff so selected a Rotel 610 amp, a Garrard 401 with idler wheel drive and an SME arm with a Shure VN35E. Trouble is, I'd still spent too much and had nothing left for a tuner or speakers.
Luckily, one of my mates was moving and his wife said his speakers were too big for their new house. I welcomed two beautiful hardly used Kef Concertos to our first real home. During the late seventies and early eighties the amp started playing up and I would lose one channel more and more often. We moved to our forever home in '84 and it was only later on, when my son came back to live at home that - thanks mainly to him - we slowly started getting it back together.
At the very beginning of the lurgy upheaval I searched for someone I could trust to fix the amp. I found an honest guy on line with his home made website. I held my breath looking to see where he was in the country, praying he wasn't 300 miles away, only to find he was less than five miles away. When I went to see him, his little shop was crammed with all that high end old stuff that I couldn't afford. "So Mike, seeing what you've got here, would you even consider looking at my lowly Rotel?" He said he would but that I wouldn't want him to because he was so busy I'd have to wait a year to get it back. Thankfully he has a very small network of similarly trustworthy old friends and said; "Phil loves Rotel 610s, I sold him his first one thirty years ago". How about if my Garrard needs work in the future says I. "Phil's your man, he loves them too." Turns out Phil is only a few more miles away living in a road where one of my mates grew up. Another mate from the same area said, when I related the story, "That must be Phil Good, I used to play table tennis with his brother Pete, he lived at 26 and Keith West used to live at 54." When checking that Keith was ok a couple of weeks ago I told him the story too.
If I can work out how to insert my pics a bit smaller than I normally do I'll post some. I realised forty years ago that size does matter, but it can work both ways depending what the speaker dictates...........
Hey, it sounds as of you made some good choices back then. There is nothing wrong with any of that equipment. There was so much good, well built stuff from Britain, the USA and Japan back in the day it really was a golden age. However it was also like the old story with cars; diminishing returns. You get about 90 percent of all the performance you are going to get for a fairly basic price and then you can spend the rest of your life and all your money chasing new tech and the other 10%.
My problem was trying to get really good sound when my income didn't support it but buying the expensive stuff anyway and living like a pauper for many years. I've been wanting to chip in on this thread for a while as I have a long term addiction to music and music equipment as well. I also was unfortunate enough to get be at a very impressionable age right at the time when Quadraphonic sound was introduced so I was having to try to get 4 of everything instead of two.
My first stuff was 4 homebuilt three way speakers made from the old Philips build-you-own-speakers book. Still have em.
I bought a Kenwood cement block belt drive turntable and a Kenwood 55 watt amp so I was set for a while. Sold the turntable to a buddy and I'm sorry I did as they are sort of sought after today. The amp ended up back with me after a lot of years but does not seem to work.
I also made the mistake a reading too many stereo maganizes that made me lust for the really high end stuff so as soon as I had enough wages in my pocket I bought a Bang and Olufson 4002 turntable. Mu rationale ws that it would treat my lps so well they would never wear out. Still have it too but the tonearm sensor light burned out about 5 years ago and I'm too klutzy to try and fix it.
The next stage in my craziness was to acquire a set of 2 Klipsch Lascala's
And so on....
Over the years I have spent more than I would ever want admit on music and the means to reproduce it. Since I have always lived in fairly remote places it seemed to make sense at the time to have a good library of music to keep me happy. Now it seems a bit pointless especially since my hearing is definitely not what is was.
Still with a lot of people dumping perfectly good and desirable equipment in garage sales, pawn shops and actual dump yards I have accumulated (saved) quite a collection of stuff. I just hate to see well built, well engineered and perfectly functional stuff wasted just because it doesn fit somebody's new decor. Luckily I have a garage/mancave up top but it is getting quite stuffed. My big shortcoming is that I still don't have enough actual electronic knowledge to really get in and fix some of the deep issues with some of this stuff, so it sits.
What does work I try to use. Right now in my mancave I have two turntables working, one a good old direct drive Technics 1200 and an old Lenco idler wheel type that can play 78's very well, a Teac Quadraphonic tape deck for the reel-to-reel stuff, a couple of 8 track decks, one a quad player, and the other a stereo recorder so I can record new tunes from cds for the eight track equipped Beaumont.
I also have a quite nice Sansui Quadraphonic receiver that has so many ins and outs it will play whatever equipment you want, and for the CDs, SACDs and dvds/blurays I have a state of the art OPPO 205 that has analog outputs so I can really control the 5.1 and 4.0 stuff I have.
I am finding that I am going backwards in my tastes in tech now though, as I have fairly recently picked up a nice unrestored working Edison Amberola 75 cylinder player with about 100 cylinders included, none of which are newer than about 1918. To play the 78s I have properly, I have also found a really neat 1920's Brunswick acoustic windup console player that plays amazingly loud considering there is no electricity involved.
The one purchase I really would like to play with but am kind of afraid to mess with is a 1932 Victor (Canadian version of RCA) Biacoustic record changer, radio and self-recorder that I picked a few years ago. Yes it actually was engineered to do everything a sound reproducer would do at the time from playing up to ten records automatically in both speeds, 78 and 33 rpm (of which there were only a few record made for that speed at the time), to recording your own records either from the microphone or from the built in high quality AM radio.
It is pretty compete but needs work that I don't know how to do. Very complex piece of machinery with brass gears and lever all over the place. The original cost in 1932 was $310.00 American so you can imagine very few were sold in the states and even fewer in Canada. The serial number on this is in the 200's so I somehow doubt there were many more than that built.
Anyway sorry to go on like this but my wife just rolls her lovely eyes when I get going so I had to get it out of my system somehow.
Here are a few pics of this stuff, for your curiosity.
Also here is a youtube link to a working RCA record changer of a lesser model just to see how cool the engineering was.
-- Edited by 66 Grande guy on Sunday 17th of May 2020 01:48:12 PM
