8 February 2015

Luxman K-110



Upgraded my secondary stereo (and it is a two speaker set up - two ears = two speakers) with a Luxman K-110 cassette deck. Manufactured in 1987. Has four magic words printed on the back -  Made In Fucking Japan. Original MSRP on it was a couple beers short of $500. Cost me the same as the deck it replaced - $10. Thing does not appear to have been used much. My tapes sound so much brighter now.

Began its new life playing music for me with a Little Country Joe and the Fish. "Gimme an F!"

Put a big smile on my face the Luxman did. Same sort of smile a man gets when he hits a 50-1 shot at the racetrack.

Our buy until you die society is really something else. You buy a machine that would have burned up most of a pay cheque of mine in 1987, hardly use it for nearly thirty years, then give it away to charity where it fetches $10 because our buy until you die society has long since moved on to digital machines. Digital machines that will not fetch even $10 on the used market in 2045 I might add.

5 comments:

ib said...

The mechanics of listening, the moving parts that enable the rush, never fail to fascinate or excite.

Like toy trains for speedheads bent on derailment.

You're right, of course. Give it a few years, and there is built in obsolescence. Digital is wank. But. Whatever happened to the lure of solid state ?

motorcycleguy said...

If you see one of those $10 deals on a Pioneer TX7800 tuner please let me know. That's the last thing I need to complete the garage stereo. Started with a CT-F900 cassette deck I bought used from A&B in 1984 or so....been using it ever since. Silver with lots of blue lights. I stuck with the theme. Almost said LED but they weren't invented yet (blue ones anyways). Yeah...I know....nothing like old LG FM on airwaves now anyways....but it is important to have that stack of matching components as high as possible Yes, two speakers.

Anonymous said...

There is (or was last time I visited) an excellent stereo store in Nanaimo, used records, too. Right downtown, keep walking until things turn a little seedy (may feet always lead me to the seedy parts of town, always the most interesting). Lots of old tape decks, turntables, etc.

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

The only stereo I ever had that was totally matched was my first one which I bought with the assistance of HFC before I learned what a load of swindlers they were. Sansui. 1978. (Guess I prefer my stereos to look like an Anarchist Christmas tree.) The speakers, all that remain of that system, are still hooked up to my old buddy Henrik's basement stereo and still sound like they are new probably because of how much I used my headphones in my old punk rock apartments.

All the lights on stereos are pretty cool but not as cool as what you saw in the guts of a stereo or tv before transistors came along.

Every town as big as Nanaimo used to have at least a few electronic fix 'em up shops that sold discarded or traded in stereo equipment and records. Now a town is lucky to have one such shop.

motorcycleguy said...

yeah I hear you, I'm looking forward to my first matching one (the "good" stereo upstairs is mash of Canadian, English and USA stuff)....you are right on about the lights...as a kid I remember peeking through the holes of the perforated hardboard back cover just to watch the tubes start to glow when Dad turned on the radio...used to make him mad when I got old enough to take them out for no reason and bicycle down to the corner drug store just so I could to put them in that fandangled tube testing machine...but not as mad as when I got the tuning pulley cord tangled up in the ganged rotating pizza cutter looking thing.....I have one tube radio left but the "corner drug store" is a different place now...safer to use the internet to find tubes ...kinda ironic all right...if I get it going maybe Jack Webster and Ted Peck will come through the one speaker just like when Dad used to listen..sure would like to hear them comment on lake draining IPP's and fish farms