Now introducing..

Well all I can say is it's about time! Procrastination has always gotten the better of me but I've finally decided to journal my adventures in audio preservation and restoration. I've had a love for electronics for as long as I can remember but a few years ago I *stumbled* into the long and windy road of vintage restoration starting with a very humble Marantz 1090 that I had actually sold but was returned to me because the buyer wasn't happy with how scratchy it was.

If he had been happy with the item, I would have never started in vintage audio restoration...

So what are you going to see here? Well pretty much anything and everything I come across. You'll start to see a trend that shows I have a love for Marantz gear, but when it comes to restorations I don't discriminate by brand :) I pretty much fix up anything including amplifiers, receivers, turntables, cassette decks, reel to reel decks- you name it, I restore it!

It may sound like a bit of a smorgasbord, but I really do enjoy it. I find the most joy in working on something I haven't worked on before, the exploration of a new device or a different manufacturer. You start to see trends and patterns in the way things are designed, how they are constructed, and you can almost 'sense' the engineers ideas around how these machines were put together.

Especially with tube amplifiers/receivers and the solid state amplifiers/receivers from the 70's where the integrated circuit was still quite a primitive technology, the way these devices were designed was very unique. Each manufacturer had their own technique and their own style. Without the simplification of the integrated circuit and discrete technologies, each manufacturers designs were so individual that you can quite distinctively hear and appreciate the characteristics that they were striving for. Some reproducing the very warm sounds of tube era, some with the very clean and crisp (sometimes clinical) sounds, and some.. well some that are better left under the pile of junk in the basement where they came from... but that doesn't happen all too often :)

The restorations displayed on this blog are either from what I like to call my 'private collection', items that I am restoring to tell on a certain online auction site that everyone likes to bid on and (with permission) restorations I perform for clients.

Well I hope this introduction is not too long winded. I'll be posting a few previously done jobs so this blog is not too *bare*. I hope that the readers of this blog can enjoy my adventures as much as I love to write and talk about them. Feel free to comment and ask any questions, I promise to try and answer all of them as quick as I can.

Happy listening..

Alex