Sunday March 9, 2008
It’s quite clear that Graham has caught the hi-fi bug again. When audio CD and digital radio came along it all slipped away and I confess that I heaved a quiet sigh of relief. I like listening to good quality music on hi-fi. So does Graham but in addition he likes the hi-fi for its own sake.
And talking about it. Endlessly. In great technical detail. And, since I was most often the only one around, I was his captive audience, and somewhat reluctant with it. This time round, though, we have the Internet and he has signed up with a number of vintage hi-fi discussion groups, and spends much of his free time discussing esoteric hi-fi issues with them. Happy as a pig in swill, as they almost say.
So, recent weeks have seen the arrival of ‘new’ vinyl LPs along with sundry bits of connectors and cables and such to get our ‘new’ living room system up to speed for playing LPs. And, most recently of all, the arrival of a ‘new’ Thorens TD126 Mk III record deck and, separately, a ‘new’ SME 3009 Mk II unimproved version tone arm. They are destined to replace the old Thorens TD166 Mk II/Lynn LVX BasikPlus tone arm we stored away when we stop using vinyl years back.
Don’t worry if you can’t follow the technical stuff–I’m repeating it verbatim, and can keep up only because I was an enthusiast myself, back in the days of Noah.
So, anyway, after much research and discussion, yesterday was the day he decided to start putting all the new bits together. The deck was easy enough but the arm took almost six hours to assemble, balance and fine tune. I observed with some reverent admiration, not only for his quiet application to a fiddlesome task but also in remembrance of the time when we all had to do the same kind of thing. Nowadays it comes in a cardboard box from Japan or some such place and all you need do is unpack it and plug it in.
It wasn’t always like that.
Hey ho. The long and short of it is that we now have a new member of our hi-fi family and the old one is to be cast aside and auctioned off on eBay. There’s still some tidying and cleaning work to be done but the thing works, and it produces sound quality as close to heaven as you can get.
All good stuff. The real long and short of it was that we didn’t get our dinner until almost midnight yesterday, we both slept poorly, and Dolly, having slept happily right through both the works and the night, is much amused to witness her two tame monkey-faces moping about the house in an exhausted and defenceless condition.
“We don’t have to go out anywhere today, do we?” I asked in an advanced state of whine.
“No. If the weather forecast is to be believed we don’t have to go out until Wednesday.”
“Oh? What are they saying about the weather, then?”
“Something about a great gale.”
“Oh. What a joy.”
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