Great sounds that go into my ears
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Until recently my hifi setup consisted of the following:
- turntable, amplifier and speakers kindly passed on by a downsizing friend almost a decade ago;
- CD player/tuner that I bought for cheap on Amazon exactly two years ago today (it turns out), precariously (and naffly) balanced on the arm of the settee.
My granny moved into a care home at the start of this year so I’ve inherited her hifi from home – for at least the first twenty-five years of my life I don’t think I ever visited her without hearing it or its predecessor banging out the Radio 3 tunes. It doesn’t have a record player attached, so I’ve kept the turntable, but as for the rest, I’ve been able to replace what I was using with her stuff, which is much more compact than the previous setup: no more five-foot-tall speakers that may fall apart if I look at them the wrong way, yeo. The new lad is a Technics SC-HD301, which apparently dates from 1999. There’s also a built-in tape player so I can play my two obscure cassettes if the mood ever takes me (ask me about Irish novelty tapes from the early 1990s I guess).
There are some pretty crazy cables on this thing; I think they look like printer ribbons, although @adt with his professional audio engineering experience no doubt has a more informed take on this. I discovered that the turntable requires a pre-amp with this setup, so ordered the cheapest one I could find, not because I didn’t want to spend money but because I was sceptical that this would work at all and thought it would be more prudent to waste twenty-five quid than the various other amounts available. But it turned out that it did work, despite the fact that there is no room for the turntable on the table with everything else, so it now has to live on the floor. While I was turning it sideways to get it in there, the plate fell off and the belt came loose, which made this endeavour even more interesting because I then had to work out how to reattach the belt and in doing so gained some very basic knowledge about how record players function. Getting shelves installed in this part of the living room is probably our next longterm house project, so in about three years or whatever I’ll be able to put the turntable on a shelf and operate it in a somewhat normal way instead of having to crouch down and awkwardly slide the records into the smallish space between the plate and the underside of the table.
