Xam

[kvflyer]

Originally Posted by Username1

Korvettes had a very large audio department, their photography department was second to none in our area. But remember competition back then. There were actual photography stores, and there were high end stereo stores, so they had to come close to the quality others were offering in the area, or they would have been laughed out of business..... In the area where our Korvettes was, there was 3 stereo stores, and 4 stereo stores devoted to quality car audio....

I remember going into these stores when I was a kid, (already driving so '1981+) and a stereo guru would be waiting, and lets say you wanted to look at speakers.... I remember several times going in and the store sales people would ask you what you were interested in today...? One time I wanted to look at speakers and they took me over to the speaker room, asked what record I wanted to hear... "Blondie Parallel Lines" I said... He put on the record, and he had this large hand held switching thing and we went through about 9 single speaker sets, 10 2-way speaker sets, then 10 more 3-way speaker sets..... An amazing shopping day.... Same experience could be had for receivers, turn tables, and tape decks..... So that was what Korvettes had for competition, so you know they had to be on top of it....... Before driving I use to get records at the store, they were the best! After they closed, second choice was Caldor, they always had lines of kids buying 45's and LP's each weekend when the sales fliers came out..... Caldor also had photography but not what Korvettes had, and after the competition went away, they dropped most of their chemicals and paper.... They pretty much went to film and processing.....

Photography with developing your own prints, another thing kids today will never experience...

When I post with a quote, I usually snip it. But there is so much information above that is spot on albeit at a later date.

When I worked at Korvette, we had a patch panel with connecting cables and could connect any amplifier or receiver to any speaker. When customers came in, we could close the door and "let it rip". We had Empire speakers, Wharfedale, AR, etc. I only wish that I had gotten one of those huge Empire turntables. I have several Garrard Lab 80 MKII turntables, to include my original. Long range plan is to setup my old original system.

We would also get out a record that was in the customer's liking to demonstrate the equipment. We were not allowed to swipe records from the record department (right next to us ) but shall we say, it did happen.

The "best" reel-to-reel that we had at the time was a Sony TC-660. I also remember HH Scott had come out with their compact systems. And Harman Kardon had compacts that included the new cassette player. You talk about rubbish! The high frequency response rolled off at no more than about 6-8K CPS. And it had lots of background tape hiss.

But it was fun times. I looked forward to going to work, being a teenager with an ear for good audio. As they say, had I been able to see into the future and purchased those HH Scott ScottKit and Fisher Stratakit amplifiers, and squirreled them away unassembled, I would have quite a collection. I did love to build kits but my only audio was Knight-Kit amplifiers (KG-870) and one Scott LT-112B-1 transistor tuner.

Sorry, I have strayed way too far off topic.