Friday, January 26

The start point of the current stereo

Rolling back the years as I've been playing a couple of records that took me back to when the forerunner of the present stereo system came in ending the classic tubed equipment made its way to the original shed in 1989.

Reasons included limited use with inputs that didn't work well with modern sources requiring many boxes and input expanders to get somewhere plus at least one needed some serous work in its control unit with component failures and the like.


This, the Rotel RA313 circa 1978 was found at a Ham Radio rally on a bring and buy stereo in good condition with the original manual that I thought would do the trick.

Apart from having inputs for my record deck with its Stanton 500EE moving magnet cartridge and tuner, there was The Great Aux which I could easily use with my first cd player a small Toshiba.

I also was running a cassette deck and Tandberg series 6 open reel deck and this had built in switching for both including copying both ways without having to unplug things.

One of first jobs was playing my cds of Now 15 and 15 blasting out Queen's I Want It All and Neneh Cherry's Kisses On The Wind and playing I Want That Man by Deborah Harry from vinyl single and frequent playing of Belinda Carlisle's Runaway Horses album.

It sounded great and was a whole lot more fun to just listen to things aided when I eventually got the matching Tuner for Radios 1,2 and 3 in stereo as by that point Radio One had gone to full time stereo rather than fading low fi medium wave only the summer before.

And the records played were the lp versions of those cds that rounded off my Now lp collection ready for the release of Now Yearbook 1990 next month on vinyl that had so many of my favourites of that year.

While the present system has better sounding sources I remain intrigued just how it might of handled them although like my current amplifier the record input was a bit noisy and had I of kept it I might of bypassed it with an external unit.

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