Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

It is interesting to recall how audio started in my life. Somebody asked and I was puling out from my memories some unconnected fragments was really enjoying to recall those times…

I do not relay remember how old I was. I was then probably 10, as all those events were developing before Moscow Olympic games so it were probably the second part of 70s…

My father gave me old reel-to-reel machine  - the Russian made “Dnepr-11”. I was recorded some music and played it – I do not even remember what music it was, certainly it was some kind of Russky teenager crap. I remember that over the course of the next couple years I was doing something very wild to this reel-to-reel. I was constricted some kind of absurd mechanisms for semi-automated tension control, designed some kind of barbarian things to push more firmly the tape to the head, tradeing at the Odessa move studio a premium quality magnetic tape (putting it from the 5km pro-reel to the standard .5km reel… manually!!!). Later on I was changing the correction chains in that “magnetophone”, updating the output tubes to the better (it has a little push-pull around EL84). Shortly I was changing the heads in there, made custom outputs and was building a pair of external speakers using drivers that was collecting form any imaginable TV and radios (do not ask me why I bult a pair for this mono reel-to-reel machine). When I was 14-15 I had a quite large collection of tapes using this old “Dnepr-11” with many completely idiotic modifications (actually at that time I own an army of different old reel-to-reel machines). Furthermore I had a pair of completely stupid loudspeakers with many-many-many drivers inside that I constantly “worked on”. (Do not ask me what I did I was completely clueless - first off all because I was clueless and second I was 14 years old). At that time I used tree separate older radios (“Baltica”) as the external amplifiers to drive my speakers, one “Baltica” was used to drive the “LF section” – means the biggest drivers I was able to find ….. :-)

I had no idea what I was doing back there but probably I was getting as the result of those affords better sound or whatever it was. I had some kind of turntable but I do not remember the name. I never collected any LPs and whatever I borrowed from my friends we taped.

Interesting that the most vivid and colorful memories about audio form my childhood did not come form my system but form the radio of my grandmother. When I was visiting her (she lived in another part of city but we visited here once a week) she allowed me to play with my grandfather’s radio (grandfather died form cancer when I was 2 years old). It was something very old, has AM consol and a turntable with exchangeable metal needles. It was not a gramophone as it has amplifier and speakers. My grandmother had little but “interesting” collection of very old records (there were 78s). The most exciting in there were the records of “EvroMol Teatr”. (Might be translated from a Russian abbreviation as “Theater of Jewish Youth”. They where recordings of operettas in Yiddish played with a full-scale orchestra somewhere probably in 20-30s.  (Jews were majorettes in Odessa at that times)  It was absolutely fantastic musk and an enormously spending experience to listen it. I was stated to listen those records when I was 6 or 7 and was listening them unit I was probably 12-13…. I still very vividly remember many verbal and musical phrases form those operettas…

Later on this old grandma’s radios and the records were wasted. The grandma now in Philadelphia… she is 95. She strongly believes that America is a big “shtetl” where no one knows Yiddish…

Rgs,
The Cat

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site