Childhood hifi setting up

Beyond this photography thing I have other interests one of which is music and over the years I have had various reproducers from portable stereo radio record players to hifi equipment and in th course of which I read a good number of magazines and inded still do

One I read in the late 1970's and early 1980's was Hifi For Pleasure and in November of 1981 as I was still in the sixth form I bought that months copy  and in it was a most useful freebee, a test record.

Test records and today test cds are designed to help you set up your stereo by providing signals designed to check various aspects of it such as getting the left and right channels correct, setting up tone arms to track records the best your cartridge can.

These were the printed instructions which are quite comprehensive setting what is on the disc and how you use each test (and what to adjust) although when it comes to the highest levels very few set ups can manage that and you're just trying to get it to do it the best it can.

I've found this 7 inch/ 18 cm disc very handy over the years.

70-150 moderate Telezoom

Given the issue of the hand holding the 80-210mm and its weight I acquired a shorter  telezoom having many of the qualities of it in a more reasonable 460gram form. Serial #112984

Instead of opting for Minolta's own, I got Tamron's 70-150 F3.5  type 20A mounted to Minolta MD which offers excellent image quality across the focal lengths and very good close focussing that doesn't need engaging first to use in that mode.
Introduced in 1980, it was a very popular model although amateurs were looking for bigger zoom ranges and lighter construction in that period before auto focus cameras became prevalent so it only remained in production upto 1984.
Actually this lens is really an F4 as Modern Photography magazine tests alluded to without spelling it out but it has a bright enough image and uses a 49mm filter thread which is the same as the wide angles and 135mm F3.5
I find it a perfect compromise for when I may need something I can fine tune just beyond the 50mm standard lens, in the knowledge the upper range can be complemented by either the 200 or 300mm lenses.

The Lubitel 2B

At the start of this blog I mentioned the cameras I had as a boy and how that fed into my passion for photography, the majority of which were compact cameras of one sort or another such as Kodak "Instamatic" 126 cartridge  models and a 120 boxy shaped one.
Like many boys I did have  fascination with older equipment especially if it was of better quality than what I had and at that time older Kodak box cameras could be had a few pounds from school or church fair sales unlike today.

One improvement was the quality of the lens and another is 120 roll film known today as 'medium format' has a bigger negative that can capture more detail and has less grain and so it was in 1979 for Christmas I had a brand new camera.
The Lubitel 2B is part of a fairly unique species of camera that uses two lenses, one for the view finder which is the smaller one on the top your peer down to view and another much bigger one that includes the shutter for taking the picture.
Mamiya in Japan made some which had interchangable pairs of lenses such as the C330 but my Lubitel made do with just one of 75mm focal length which is roughly 45mm in regular 35mm film terms.
It was a copy made in what was the Soviet Union of the Voightlander Brillaint German prewar Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) from the 1930's which meant  the shutter speed range was restricted from 1/15 thru 1/250 with Bulb which was set around the lens mouth as were the aperture settings.
It also lacked a light meter so unless you were prepared to guess, you needed to carry a separate lightmeter with you to set the shutter speed and aperture with.
Provided you knew what you were doing, always checked on the back of the camera for how many frames you had wound on and kept to suitable subjects (never airplanes in the sky) you could as I did get some lovely photos from it.