longjnsilver
New Member
LongJnSilver - Johnny Long here from Western NC. I'm a 75 year-old audiophile (lover of audio - not an expert) who has been messing around with hi-fi since college days. Here's my audio-sojourn in a nutshell: First love: in college, a Wollensak reel-to-reel with fold-out speakers! (anybody remember those?), then, in '69, first job out of seminary, bought a super-duper AR (Acoustic Research) setup - AR-XA turntable, AR speakers an AR Amp and added a little AR FM receiver. Then, working in Kenya from '73-77 as a missionary & famine relief worker for the UN, took along a Roberts 770X-SS and bought a nifty German wonder - a UHER 4400 portable (5") reel-to-reel for language learning and recording indigenous tribal songs (still have the tapes!) than back to the US, and got a TEAC 3300-SX and built a whopping home stereo setup using DYNACO kits - 70 (or was it 125?) watts per channel amp, preamp, graphic equalizer and tuner (tedious work, soldering every resister, capacitor, diode, transister, etc. to circuit boards!) - speakers were a pair of incredible ESS AMT-1b - 12" sub, 12" passive radiator and the exquisite Heil Air-Motion Transformer tweeter - folded teflon ("Sound as Clear as Light). LIKE A FOOL, in the mid-80s, sold the DYNACO analog stuff and ESS speakers and got a Yamaha R-9 and Yamaha CD player with a Bose Acoustimass system - which I took back to Kenya. Now running two Yamaha sytems - Great Room an RX A-770BL with 4 Elac B6's, a B5 center and a pair of Speedwoofer S10s (one of which just failed!). Basement office - Yamaha RX-V582 with an Energy 5+1 speaker system surrounding my desk. FUN! ALL THAT TO SAY, I'm buying all my OLD REEL-TO-REEL stuff again used - UHER reel-to-reels (super German engineering!
), a TEAC 3300-SX (nothing quite like 10.5" NAB reels and a pair of VU-meters swinging away to put the virtually invisible digital stuff to visual shame!), and, am CONSIDERING a Roberts 770X-SS - which a lot of you guys have dissed. Heck, back in the 1970s, I used to take that thing to High-School church retreats with a pair of mikes, my AR speakers, a pair of MICs, my Martin guitar and do one-man folk concerts! The amps worked GREAT! (Yeah, now, aged, that machine may become a doorstop, but hey, nostalgia calls old men to try foolish things!) Oh, I also have two antique Victor 78 rpm record players - internal & external horn.YouTube:
PICs in the link. Thanks for bearing with my journey through the past! - Johnny - LongJnSilver - (Rev.Dr. John Wade Long, Jr.) - Hendersonville, NC
