Just like cars, a new turntable model has to be introduced every year or two to keep consumers' interest and convince them that newer is better.😊
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| from page 37 of the 1960 Radio Shack Catalog |
The Realistic Mark 8 improved upon the similar looking "motor unit-stye" Mark 7 in Part 4 of this series by adding a 16 rpm speed and supplying a half pound heavier cast aluminum platter.
During my visit to the OJAS listening room late last year, Devon asked me to evaluate a pair of horns OJAS developed in collaboration with Lycan R&R. The OJAS 529B is a 500 Hz horn rescaled from the large format Altec 329A for use with 1" format Altec/GPA compression drivers.
My dad would've turned 97 today. To celebrate his birthday, the video clip above features a recording of his favorite violinist, Nathan Milstein, playing Presto from Bach's Sonata No. 1 in G minor for unaccompanied violin. While he was doing post-graduate studies at The Juilliard School in the mid 50s, he was fortunate to have attended concerts of the great violin virtuosos of that era - Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milstein, etc.
He would later recount that Nathan Milstein's performance of the Glazunov violin concerto was the most unforgettable! Even if he never got a chance to add this violin concerto to his repertoire, he conducted the Manila Chamber Orchestra with me playing the Glazunov violin concerto in 1987. The music of the slide clip above is the middle movement from our performance.
Before I bore everyone reminiscing about my dad and our life as musicians, let's get on with the subject at hand. The amp featured in this upload uses a directly heated triode power tube that was introduced around the time my dad was born.
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| Altec 15356 + UTC A20 |
While browsing at Books Kinokuniya in NYC in the 90's, this Noguchi ad from the November 1994 MJ Audio Technology issue inspired me to experiment with line transformers as digital sound enhancers. Since I was living on a post-grad assistantship budget back then, importing this pair from Japan was out of the question.
