Post by Pete Bronlund on Jan 19, 2020 20:32:26 GMT 12
I've been skulking around here for a few weeks since signing up, but felt it time i said hi! With summer in full swing i guess most folks are enjoying the fantastic outdoors NZ offers this time of year rather than being on their Internet-connecting device.
Attended the Kumeu Classic Car & Hot Rod Festival Saturday which shows where some of my interests lie. The fact it's 10mins down the road from home also makes it a great reason to fill in at least one weekend day and see the sorts of stuff NZrs pour loads of $ into as hobby.
I've a 40+yrs background as an electronics career, mostly maintenance side of things with Broadcast studio gear in some form. It doesn't stop though when i finish a days work its home & 'hobby' time doing the DIY thing with all sorts of stuff, repairs of anything electronic, the odd vintage amp restoration (that come my way via word of mouth).
My young days it was nothing but old valve radios that began my interest. I was given one by an elderly lady whereupon i removed the chassis from the ugly old wooden cabinet, cleaned the valves so they sparkled & brushed out all the years of dust, then promptly copped my 1st charged-capacitors shock even though i'd unplugged the thing from the Mains. Soon i was well into DIY, always doing something from the many junked chassis i rescued off the local Tip. I'd so many valves & parts and didn't really understand what i was doing until someone gave me a mountain of old electronics magazines and the learning & experimenting really started with teaching myself how to solder after investing in the huge thing i found at the local hardware store.
Teenage years arrived & i discovered music and being able to play a record so it sounded as good as possible. So started the speaker cabinet building and the odd amplifier (with valves) and an audio cassette machine arrived. Making your own recordings was just fantastic. Being able to buy transistors & other components became accessible by finding some business in an electronics magazine in what was then called Great Britain that would post to NZ and i began spending all my monthly paper round & lawnmowing earnings for a single five quid British Money Order at the NZ Post Office & saved them up for half a year!
Some of the projects i completed (from magazines) worked well but many were a horror show!
So today it's mostly personal audio in the form of hi-def FLAC files loaded on a microSD of the same music i 1st enjoyed way back as a teenager. There's been a big investment in the rush to digital audio, the DACs i've owned and used, the commercial amplifier etc products from Sony, FiiO, Luxman etc.. all gone now to new owners. There remains a sad looking bright yellow colour Pono (the failed Neil Young ban MP3s at all costs project) lying in my pile of tools & test gear stuff of my crowed Lab workbench.
My multiple computers, (a MAC that runs Fidelia) more than one PC loaded with JRiver Media Center & the networked HDD with quite a few 24bit/195k albums plus hundreds of EAC 'backed up' CDs (of the ones that sit in boxes in the spareroom wardrobe) purely for convenience so i can listen to anything anytime.
But in all this my interests have rekindled to valves... (that's what i was trained on when my working career began in the late 1970s). Fashionable now to call them Vacuum Tubes, i am stunned at the re-awakening internationally that began a while back now but keeps growing including the likes of the interest in 'vintage' gear & of course vinyl .... and all this is happening while there's still a market for the extreme end prices on top end special gear to fulfill the needs of the most serious audiophile.
So i guess you'll probably see me asking questions in the vinyl, DIY & especially tubes themes.... eventually.
Apologies the long winded intro...
