Ornoth

Although it didn’t start out that way, I guess this qualifies as a “memorabilia” post, given that it deals with stuff I’ve kept for the past 33 years…

Everyone has their own way of relating to significant purchases like a car, computer, television, camera, or stereo. Some people love buying new stuff when it’s on sale. Others pride themselves on getting a bargain by buying used. My M.O. has always been to buy the absolute best I can find, mostly irrespective of cost, then making it last as long as humanly possible… often long after newer, better things have made it obsolete. I take pride in having top-quality stuff and keeping it forever, and because of that I often form an emotional attachment to the objects I’ve acquired.

I can’t say that my first stereo was one of those things. It wasn’t very noteworthy, but it provided a lot of pleasure during my high school and college days.

But as I graduated college, got married, and moved into the workforce, digital audio arrived in the form of compact discs, and in 1992 my cheap high-school era stereo was decidedly worn out and in need of replacement. And my first job after college provided the necessary cash to splurge on something nice.

As fortune would have it, my then-spouse was working at a local electronics specialty store called Leiser and could get top-quality stereo components at cost. We wound up buying a hand-picked ensemble, spending around $1,500 on equipment that would have retailed for around $3,200 (which translates to about $7,000 in 2024 dollars).

I really loved that system, and was always proud to show it off. I’ll say more about that in a bit, but first let’s follow its history.

The majority of that system stayed with me following our divorce and my half-dozen subsequent moves, although I used it less and less over time, and the remaining components spent the last decade-plus stored away in their boxes…

Until recently. While noodling around YouTube I stumbled onto a tiny product that is essentially nothing more than a Bluetooth audio receiver with stereo outputs that could be hooked up directly to the auxiliary input of a traditional preamp. Such a device would allow Inna & I to stream any audio from our computers or smartphones directly through my audiophile rig. That was enough to spur me to finally dig up my beloved 33 year-old components and set them up for our enjoyment in 2025.

Of course, a couple of the old pieces are gone. The CD player that we received as a group wedding present from several university friends eventually self-destructed, and there wasn’t any point in keeping the old cassette tape player from my high school stereo. And I’d tossed my huge trunk-sized Infinity 7 Kappa speakers when the cones had dry rotted. I’d also discarded my old speaker cable and patch cords, but those were easy to replace.

But the most important three core pieces of my system were still there – my preamp, equalizer, and power amp – which needed little more than a thorough dusting. Lemme do a little show-and-tell about those, because I still hold a lot of affection for these three components.

Let’s start with my graphic equalizer. An EQ is useful to boost or cut specific frequency ranges in an audio signal. Got speakers that sound tinny? Use the sliders to boost bass and midtones. Don’t want to wake the baby on the other side of the house? You might quiet the bass a little while leaving everything else normal. Got a room where one speaker has to be placed in a back corner? Boost the left channel or reduce the right.

My 12-channel Denon DE70 graphic equalizer is a quality and useful piece of equipment. It’s always provided great service, and I find its lit bank of 24 faders visually appealing. It’s a bit unique in that the faders for the left and right channels are interleaved as paired green and yellow LEDS, rather than the more common setup that uses two physically separate banks of sliders. And there’s my little Bluetooth receiver perched at top left:

Next, the crown jewel: my power amplifier. A power amp has just one job: take a microwatt “line level” audio signal and boost it to the tens or hundreds of Watts necessary to drive one’s chosen loudspeakers. It’s the final device in the audio processing sequence, connecting to and controlling the output from your speakers.

My power amp was manufactured by Carver, which comes with a bit of backstory.

Bob Carver was a legendary audiophile engineer, especially known for his innovative and impressively powerful amplifiers. I was first introduced to his work in high school, when my friend Paul showed me his brother’s stereo, which included Carver’s M400 old-school vacuum tube power amp, a radical-looking 7-inch square black cube that could pump out 200 Watts per channel: a ridiculous amount of power for a home system at that time. It made quite an impression on me!

The Carver TFM-4.0 power amp that I bought in 1992 is one of Carver’s followup models, offering a ludicrous 375 Watts per channel. It’s a great amp by a great engineer, but because Carver only produced this model for one year, it’s a rare and collectable component even within Carver’s exclusive lineup. Like the M400 that Paul showed me back in 1981, its only display is six sets of LEDs to show the power level of the signal it’s sending to the speakers; and in all the years I’ve owned it, no matter how high I pumped up the volume, I’ve never been able to light any but the first, lowest power level LEDs. The thing is a 23-pound workhorse!

That just leaves my preamplifier, which is like the central conductor of a stereo system, orchestrating inputs from various sources (e.g. CD player, radio tuner, turntable, tape deck, microphone, and now even Bluetooth devices), sending a normalized signal out to the EQ and back, and then downstream to the power amp and speakers.

Like my EQ, my preamp is a decent piece of equipment. Being a CT-17 preamp/tuner made by Carver, it matches my power amp, but doesn’t have anywhere near the same cachet as his power amps. But the built-in radio receiver is a convenient combination.

Which brings me to the final, missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that kept me from setting up my stereo over the past decade-plus: the lack of speakers.

A good stereo is worthless without good speakers, and for a long time I wasn’t able to justify spending a lot of money on a set that would do justice to my other components. But I finally found a set of bookshelf speakers with positive reviews, that wasn’t too exorbitant, and which – if I bought them refurbished – would fit neatly within the credit card rewards bucks I was about to liquidate.

So let me introduce you to my one brand-new component: a set of Polk Audio R200 bookshelf loudspeakers. While I haven’t had them long enough to form a strong opinion of them (or bond with them), they seem to be doing a good job so far. They’re noteworthy in having a very flat response, which means considerably less tweaking of the frequency curve on the equalizer than I’m used to. I only wish I could move them a little farther from the wall, to better distribute the bass.

Although this didn’t start out as one of my official “memorabilia” posts, overall I’m delighted to have my old components back in service again. Despite being 33 years old, they still deliver great sound quality, and it’s really nice having a Bluetooth connection to stream music at will from any of Inna’s and my laptops and phones. I’m really glad I lugged this equipment around with me for all these years!

When I was in school, the original IBM PC came out. Anyone who used them will never forget carrying a handful of those black-sleeved 5¼-inch floppy disks around. Talk about data portability! You could fit the entire PC-DOS operating system on one 360 kB floppy and still have room left over for some user files. A blank diskette could hold the equivalent of about 175 pages of text!

But the cool kids never used PCs; we had Big Iron. At that time, most of the disk drives used on the university’s IBM mainframe were 3380s. Each drive was the size of a refrigerator and held 2.5 GB of data (about 7,300 floppies). You could daisy-chain eight of them together into a string that was about the size of one of those moving/storage “pod” containers (see below) and which held 20 GB.

After I graduated from college, I ran a mainframe shop for a company doing statistical analysis of medical records, and I bought a couple strings of used 3380s. Man, those were the days when people knew you were computing hard! Nowadays you can get one of those fingernail-sized MicroSD cards (see below) with 64 GB of storage—the equivalent of three full strings of 3380s!—for less than fifty bucks.

Where is all this going? Today I received shipment of an external hard drive to backup my home laptop. Two freakin’ terabytes. That’s the equivalent of 820 of those refrigerator-sized 3380s, all sitting in the palm of my hand in a box that’s about the size of a paperback novel.

Boggle!

This one is two of my favorite stories. Really!

As far as I can tell, there are only about five Liscomb Streets in the US: one in Los Angeles, two in Texas, one near Detroit, and the only one anywhere near me: a tiny little side street in Worcester, Mass.

Way back when, on January 4 1989, I drove from Maine down to Massachusetts for an interview with a company called MediQual in Westborough. A couple weeks later, they’d given me my very first post-college job offer.

When I next drove down it was to look for apartments. Of course the first thing I did was grab the local paper, the Worcester Telegram, to look for apartment listings (this was way before teh Intarwebs). I picked up the January 27th issue, and on page two, a picture caught my eye: the one you see (badly) reproduced at right. Apparently the driver of the sanding truck was trying to go up a really steep hill in Worcester, when his load shifted and the truck popped a permanent wheelie. It was left on its back, pointing straight up in the air!

Now that’s pretty damned funny in its own right, but if you read the caption, you’ll see that it happened on none other than Liscomb Street! Now, how improbable is it that on the one day that I went down to scout out apartments—the only time I’d ever even seen that newspaper— there’d be a picture of something like that happening on that street? C’est impossible, non?

And now for the rest of the story…

My wife and I lived in Shrewsbury for several years, only two miles from Liscomb Street. Then things started going south. One night I returned from a business trip to find Linda packing. She was off to live with a girl friend of hers. I bet you can’t guess where this friend of hers happened to live…

Yup. Linda, who had of course taken the name “Liscomb” when we married, left me and took shelter with a friend who had an apartment on none other than Liscomb Street! That must have been incredibly bizarre…

So those are my two Liscomb Street stories, both of which seem ludicrously implausible to me. It’s all a bit surreal, but every word of it is true, BIOFO!