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Old 09-28-2015, 02:30 AM
fsjonsey's Avatar
fsjonsey fsjonsey is offline
Living The Draper Ethos
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Northeast Ohio
Posts: 539
I'm 25. By the time I was 8 years old I became enamored with vintage radios. I blame my grandparents Depression era radio stories, dad telling me he had the first color TV on his street, and Ken Burns' Empire of The Air for that. By age 10 I had 20 tube radios ranging from the 1930's to 1960's that neighbors gave me, and my parents bought during our trips to the local antique malls. By age 12 I learned to solder and do basic troubleshooting using what I learned from the internet (Phils Old Radios). Since most of what I collected were basic AA5 radios, I got pretty good at recapping. That same year I flipped from radios to tube HiFi (I was getting into classic rock and Jazz) and fell in with a couple of guys who ran a vintage audio shop in Lakewood, OH that no longer exists. They sold my dad a restored Fisher 500B for $120 as a Christmas present, to get me into the hobby. That Fisher gave way to ever more complex tube hifi setups that evolved into the McIntosh/Leak/Altec system I run today. I bought my first vintage TV, a 1956 Zenith Bugeye, at an antique mall in Columbus, OH in 2007 with lawn mowing money. I recapped the set and it worked well, and later a fellow VK member sent me a new CRT for it some years later. College came, I got my first tube color set, a 1966 Zenith in 2011, and I still use it to this day. Now I own a recording studio that uses vintage analog audio equipment wherever possible, in a building filled with my collection of vintage TV's and Radios.

Basically, my attraction to vintage electronics is rooted in the fact that they were something totally different, that I never actually got to experience growing up in the 1990's and early 2K's. Tube electronics felt more real to me. Also the history- That we, as a nation, were able to do so much with technology that everyone today sees as completely archaic. The brilliant industrial design was also a factor. Seeing beautiful old radios and TV's when I was surrounded in a sea of black plastic electronics pulled me in.

Last edited by fsjonsey; 09-28-2015 at 02:54 AM.
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