Gucci Rush

Gucci Rush, I went through this bottle so fast but when I went out to find a new one - it was discontinued.

Anyone know of a suitable replacement?


Nakamichi Sound Space 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, and 21 Pamphlet

I save and collect anything that crosses my path. It killed me to leave VW pamphlets behind when we moved back from Germany in 1980 but I had a stack of them that weighed several pounds and even I admitted that there were too many to carry home with me. So I saved the ones for cars available in NA at the time - the Passat, the Kafer (Bug) and the new body VW bus. But this isn't about those - I'm not throwing them out yet. This is about a Nakamichi pamphlet, no date but the Internet reviews date to late 1990s early 2000s.


Vaccination passports, Canada

Technically, I still have these.

I don't know why the Canadian Government didn't go back to these. Apparently vaccination passports are not a new thing. If the dates in the parenthesis are in fact a publication date, then these are from 1968:

Canadian Document: Q3 2006 (5-68)

These are unused - none of the pages are filled in. They contain pages for the biggies: yellow fever, Smallpox, Cholera... and the last page is dedicated to vaccinations they hadn't made up yet.

Pioneer, NAD, Onkyo

THIS

was my turntable in high school. Connected to a buzzy RadioShack preamp and my Pioneer SK-31 boom box. I knew nothing at the time, and my music probably sounded like crap until I got an amp with a Phono input when I moved to the big city in 1988. I got rid of this (I shouldn't have) because the speed control couldn't maintain consistent speed. I didn't know about Deoxit at the time. I replaced that 20 years later because I wanted to listen to my records again. I bought a cheap AT-LP60, realized how horrible it was, bought a NAD C556, which was made by REGA and was basically a Rega P1, and when I got tired of its severe lack of features, upgraded again to a Fluance RT-85. No pics because I still have these.   

This was my first amp with a phono input:


And I can't for the life of me remember how or why I don't have it anymore. It must have been stolen. The house that I had this in WAS broken into, but the guys were caught, and my amp by then was the Onkyo TX-82:
This one's power supply blew up in 2020. Maybe it was the pandemic. 


And somewhere along the line I picked up one of these Pioneer SA-6700s:

Which is also gone. I don't know why I don't just build a room in the basement to archive my old equipment. I have no vision.

First intro to the audiophile world: age 5?

I grew up with my parents record players, first a homemade console with one full range driver in the box and a Garrard turntable on the inside, and then an stylish Clairtone with DUAL turntable.

home made console


Clairtone (I'd set up the orb speakers on the ground facing each other, and put my head in between them.)


Pioneer. (My college sound machine paired with the turntable below.)


Pioneer


I used my parents equipment and LPs to death but my own foray into the audio hobby was with  the purchase of a Pioneer PT4 turntable and a Pioneer boombox with a cheap Radioshack Phono preamp to go in between. 

After high school - after college actually, I bought my first set of external speakers.Koss isn't generally known as an AUDIOPHILE speaker company, though some of their headphones are held in surprisingly high regard. And SEARS was not known as a place audiophiles would look for equipment. And yet people are still asking, in 2021, whether these KOSS M/90's are worth re-coning, or a viable speaker for the cabin or whatever.

I loved mine until one day in 1988, when I was out of town for the weekend, one (or both) of my room mates played the music a little too loud, and blew the paper cones to smithereens.



After we got married we spent some of out gift money on new speakers... the Boston Acoustics A-60 bookshelf speakers.
They sounded good enough for us, and lasted until about 1995. Six years is not long for a pair of speakers, but that they broke down is not their fault:
Our Onkyo TX-82 had a fatal flaw: When the power tripped and the receiver restarted it always reverted back to Radio mode. The levels of radio were a magnitude or three higher than the levels coming from the CD player. So if we were last playing CDs, and the power turned off and back on, the radio would start playing at insane levels. More than once did I have to jump out of bed in the middle of the night and run downstairs to turn off the stereo. One day we were not home when this happened. The Electric company turned off the neighborhoods power to do some work. It was a Sunday and we were out of town. When we got back, all I heard coming from the stereo was a bunch of buzzing. The woofer cones on both speakers were tattered, and one voice coil was seized up. We replaced those speakers (insurance actually paid) with some Boston Acoustics CR-9s which were bigger and better. Those are still going strong now in 2021+, and I think they are audiophile grade speakers (no matter what you say).
Boston Acoustic A60


Boston Acoustic CR9 (still going strong but not my main speakers)

Pioneer SK-31

My Pioneer SK-31 finally sent to a goodwill store. One like this served my music needs from 1983 until the tape drive mechanism failed around 10 years later... The tape buttons big feature was that with the slightest touch, the buttons/levers would suck themselves all the way down. There was a servo mechanism that required the slightest trigger push to take over the job. I guess I rewound and FFd far too often for the mechanism and the steel on steel action wore grooves in the parts. Tolerances slipped and eventually they stopped working altogether. 

Then it was relegated to garage duty for another 20 years for the radio. Should have kept it for that, but that's another story. There's an identical machine at work, used in one of the labs as their radio source, so once in a while I go in there and give it a pat on the the head. I think it's my favorite piece of gear I've ever had. It served me well.

(img source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aka_peabody/3423308480/in/photostream/)


1995 — My First Website

In the beginning Tim Berners-Lee created the internet. Now the Internet was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the servers, and the content creators were hovering over the keyboards. And Tim Berners-Lee said, “Let there be content,” and there was content. Tim saw that the content was good, and he separated the content from the darkness. 


But, I asked, where do I display my Photo albums? As a content creator it was up to me to create, and so I did.

I wish now that I had patented them.

The handwritten text on the albums are my own handwriting, but come from a font I made with Fontographer 4.
The photo albums are scans of some of our real photo albums.
Many changes were made to this site over the next 5 years until Blogger, Flickr, and other Web 2.0 services came along.