Steve,Steve wrote:You have no idea how much I'm kicking myself over the Pugh gramophone! If only I had the space for that....arghhh!
That’s the problem with collecting these machines (as opposed to say collecting coins or mp3s). At the moment, I have 63,704 mp3s¹, not counting all of the the .zip archives that I’ve gotten and not uncompressed (mostly Japanese pop). With everything else in my apartment, there’s no way I could fit 63,705 records in it. And with that many phonographs...I’d need a very big warehouse. Although, if enough of them were unique types, it’d be a great museum collection.
This is a really good point, and one on which I’d agree with Steve. If you’re collecting the machines to be able to play records on them, as I imagine that most of our members are, doing simple things like replacing gaskets (because the rubber tends to harden with age) is important and is not very difficult. Like Steve commented as I was writing this²:Steve wrote:One response which is missing would be "rebuild reproducer and lightly dust the case". That would possibly most accurately describe what I do to MOST machines I get (but not all). I ALWAYS rebuild any soundboxes as a matter of course because getting the best sound out of each machine is what is most important to me. There have been a few exceptions where I couldn't do this with cast soundboxes which are sealed etc but otherwise, they all get rebuilt.
And in a lot of cases, to be in optimal working condition, I don’t think that a lot of these machines take a lot of work, unless you buy ‘parts’ machines or ones that have been sorely neglected.Steve wrote:There would be no satisfaction in owning anything for me.
And actually, that gives me another (entirely separate) poll idea...
But from my limited experience, it’s amazing how much difference a soundbox rebuild can do.
— MordEth
[hr][/hr]¹ If anyone running Mac OS X is interested in seeing this, open Terminal and run:
Code: Select all
mdfind "kMDItemContentTypeTree == 'public.audio'" | grep [Mm][Pp]3$ | wc -l
Code: Select all
find -name "*.[Mm][Pp]3" | wc -l
² If you click ‘Preview’ while you are composing a post, the forum will show you any replies that were made to a thread while you were writing.