Sunday 30 October 2011

Vinyl - 1978 Style

In 1978 my elder brother Greg and I worked hard during the summer holidays, I had just finished my O levels and was waiting to begin my A levels. We saved as much money as we could and at the end of the the summer we went and bought the best Hi-Fi we could afford. Naturally we needed the biggest speakers we could get, in our case this was a pair of Goodmans RB 65's (even then these were about £130) and a Rotel Amp. But the heart of the system was a Rotel RP-1500 deck, complete with a tone-arm and cartridge. This deck was to me a technological marvel. I  had been fascinated with tone-arms - the SME 3009 was incredible to look at and was (and is) an example of incredible high precision engineering. I had even built one myself using the lathe that my Dad had in the garage. 


The Rotel RP1500 wasn't anywhere near state of the art (SME arms with Shure cartridges and Garrard decks were more like it). But it was ours and it lasted for years.