Is there no limit to what we want communications wise?

No need to worry, what you lack for in age you make up in experience, knowledge and attitude. Or so I tell my self @37 years of age!

Cheers all.

False advertising.

Heh... just pulling your chain, OB! I don't get a chance to do that to folks often on places like this.

-Chris

Thanks for the compliments

My inner-unabashed sci-fi geek urges me to quote classic 1960's Star Trek;

Spock (to Captain Kirk); "Captain, computers make excellent servants, but I have no desire to serve under them."

Hey OB, like ranger42c, I also thought you were an older guy, maybe in his 60's or so, with a young wife OFCOURSE (seriously Belle, we can tell you are a lot younger than the old man AND that he is punching above his weight...)
If you are "older" at 44, then a few of us are in trouble. Might have to change my handle to Ancient Mariner!

Or maybe some of us might even need to use "pre-historic"...

-Chris

The black boxes are B&O 7000 series stereo and the white video is a B&O VHS, all from the 80:s and the loudspeakers are Sonab 2212 from the 70:s...

In a storage I have at least seven complete stereo systems, including reel tape recorders, turntables, equalizers, echomaker and loads of loudspeakers. As well as probably 20 portable radios and cassette recorders and ghetto blasters. Unfortunately, there are many rubber belts and such that dries out so I will probably never use all of them again. But some are getting collectable I guess...

As a kid I loved to service these systems, still have a small collection and lots of parts here and there. One turn table, I guess it was JVC, had a synthetic fibre belt instead of those rubber rings, when it dries out it is so brittle and crushes like fibre glass, it was like a strand that is glued to a circle with apparent use of heat on the weld which was brown rather than the strand's beige. I used to use a drop of olive oil and rub the hole thing then wipe it off, put it back, work it a bit till it stops slipping, this extended its life and smelled like garlic bread, sans the garlic!, when the system worked for a long time and had built some heat. Fun days and a great technology that one can interact with it physically, now we are just generating mounds of trash of lightly used electronics, I really don't like the "replacement" mentality of this time and age, it was an interesting and educational joy fixing or adjusting things, all replaced by "update" and "angry birds"!

B&O, oh my God, I'll get o graphic if I started talking about this brand! Anyone here remember a German brand called "Telefonken", not sure of the spelling, but I remember it died early 80's. Those were war machines, very heavy TV's, used to heat a lot and stop, so the back cover had to stay off, but a dead Motorola full tower computer was a doner of a frame fan that increased the up time with a couple of extra drilled wholes in the back cover. Oh boy, fun days that will never return.

Telefunken is the name, from "rundfunk" I guess (radio). I have a Crystal Receiver from Telefunken, 100 years old, and I also had a big radio with the green "magic eye" from them, good heavy sound! I too was repairing all of this myself in those days, got numerous electric shocks of course, you could not see what was wrong if you turned the set off...

And here is a B&O for Alfred to dream of, my bedroom radio. It is from the 60:s and has a very warm and nice sound through a couple of Canton speakers...

Oh yeah! That is the real way to go about it, when you are not shocked then that bit is faulty!

Someone made a mistake back when I was a cub scout, and mentioned that a crystal valve like the one in those radio receivers with two bulb valves "can" be used to build a Morse code tx/rx unit! This was the end of that old wooden radio with straw face and yellow lit thermometer-like channel dial! Mind you, the Morse unit wasn't achieved because I only had the valve, some copper wire wound up on a left over toilet roll tube, a 9 volt battery, an I/O switch that I won't confess where I got it from and a piece of bent copper with a spring in between, all neatly placed on the backboard of the radio, a nice thick MDF board, other than that... I didn't know the other parts needed or how to connect them! Continued the Morse coding training on the piano!

"Those were the days my friend..."

You reminded me of my military service, communicating with Morse code and lamps! We had almost antique lamps, with gas instead of electricity! I could do about 100 letters per minute, today probably 10...

I managed to find a picture of the lamp now, would be nice to get one for real!

The hissing of Aldis lamps! The one I trained on was a Kerosene light, after a sentence it would become more of a smoke signal rather than light signal, and cleaning the glass was not fun. I had a small program that let you practice Morse code, both ways, sending and receiving, didn't use it for years now, donno if I still have it. We'll need that for the next Apocalypse or Zombie attack! hahahaha

This was acetylene, no smoke, but hot! The lamp pictured is probably from the Army, I was in the Marines and the brass was polished instead of painted, really beautiful piece! Morse code was useful between us guys sometimes, we could knock on the restaurant table and discuss who should have the blonde....

hahahahaha That is one of the better uses of Morse code. Nothing is like polished Brass or Bronze, it does get real hot real quick, and cools down quickly too. The Kerosene lamp was painted tin, got hot and smokey and smelly and easily spilled over when trying to fill through that stupid small illfully placed port... You name it, it had it all. I used to write my journal, (for the very brief time I did), using Morse code, my first "love" letter was coded too!! hahahahaha I still wonder why I was dumped!

Polished brass is better than painted because the shutters will get sticky when the paint is hot and a bit malleable, which will slow the message sending process, ask me about working the biceps trying to send a message fast when the paint caked on the pins and the black smelly smoke is running straight to the nostrils!

What a fun topic this has become!
AMG, ofcourse it's B&O!!!
You are Swedish!
Is there any other make that you would buy off the shelf, unless you had a special built?
A good Hi Fi was very important in our day.
As for the lamps, I remember we always had Primus kerosene lamps ready for the regular power outages in Zambia/Northern Rhodesia. The smell and sound was something very much a part of being in the bush.

Yeah! Start one and 5 minutes later you are in the bush even if you were in downtown Manhattan! Ummmmm, the after taste has jut got back to my mouth.

Speaking of B&O and Hi-Fi's, I think you see how much of the listening experience one would be loosing with the tiny sound from those tiny preset toys. Come o... they don't even have those tricky track equalizers that you work for each track played. You had to work for your pleasure, that is why I guess it was more warming and had a feeling of self contempt. Funny, maybe we are talking jibrish here in the eyes of any of the young population, a story line worthy of a guided tour around a museum!