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.

Robert in BC

Impressive!

Do you do your own work?

Just saw this, nice collection!! Need any tubes or equipment? Dad is getting out of the hobby and has a ton of stuff!!! Can PM me. Jim

Loved checking out all this wonderful stuff from the past. Thank you for keeping it alive in such an amazing way. Cheers.

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.