VCR....its maddness

Acampingwewillgo wrote:
Just a quick update and back to my original idea....I did locate a VCR/DVD combo at a Thrift Store, as is! Got it home and it must be my lucky day, works perfectly, all for 7 bucks.

Just remember the old adage - Be Kind! Rewind!

Acampingwewillgo wrote:
Just a quick update and back to my original idea....I did locate a VCR/DVD combo at a Thrift Store, as is! Got it home and it must be my lucky day, works perfectly, all for 7 bucks.

Enjoy your new world of portable and inexpensive movies for a buck or less each at thrift stores ... including the great classics that still cost 3 dollars-on-up per play from the streaming services ... if you can even afford or get access to streaming services when boondock or campground camping!!

Just a quick update and back to my original idea....I did locate a VCR/DVD combo at a Thrift Store, as is! Got it home and it must be my lucky day, works perfectly, all for 7 bucks.

Bought a used Sherwood RV-5050 years ago for $50 with (so-so) speakers. This box is impressive. No DVD in, only CD - it was made before DVD. This thing can be used as a space heater :).
Huge, too big for most RVs. Though modern Sony receivers @ $200 are same big.

The issue I always had with LPs was the production quality. I’ve mostly been a classical music person and the best quality vinyl discs were made by the classical recoding folks (Telarc). Out of the sleeve there was no warping, and no out of round due to a miss drilled center hole. Of course the more it was played, the more small particles resulted in ticks and pops no matter how much I tried to clean using vinyl cleaner. Other manufacturers or note were Original Master Recordings and Half Speed Mastered recordings. My friends and I praised the day CD’s came on the market. No more tick and pop and hiss free recordings. Note I could never part with these vinyls and still have them packed away with the Sony turntable. But, I still use my Advent speakers to this day.

I also note in the thrift stores the plethora of CDs, DVDs, Vinyl, and VHS on the rack. I pick up Telarc, Philips, DG,etc. CDs that run $15 new for 2 bucks. I even look at the hardware and bought a 1970s Sherwood receiver for $15. What a find.

Boy have times changed...

myredracer wrote:
No VCRs for me, thank you. I really don't miss having to run down to the local VCR rental store to get a movie to keep the kids entertained on a weekend or having to return it before getting stuck with a late charge, having to make sure it was rewound or having to rent a machine. I don't miss those stupid 8-tracks either.

Acampingwewillgo wrote:
I still have two turntables....one, an Audio Technic's Direct drive with a Shure V15 type III cartridge and the other a Pioneer with what I believe is still my Quadraphonic cartridge on that.

Hey! I have the same Shure cartridge in my Thorens turntable. It plays through a tube Dynakit pre-amp and amp. I built 3-way speakers 2'x2'x 4'tall like the ones I built back in high school. Amazing sound!! Except now I can't hear high freq. sounds and have to wear hearing aids. Not the same anymore. :( I miss hearing the tinkling glass sound Santana's Singing Winds.

Here's me back in the good ol' days in high school with a tube amp I built and "lissajous" patterns on a color TV I modified. Got on the front cover of the Teacher's Assoc. magazine. Used to listen to my collection of Procul Harem, Moody Blues, ELP, King Crimson and others for hours on end with that amp. Wish I still had it (threw it away at some point). A neighbor a few houses down the street came over one day when my parents were out and told me to turn the gawd dam flippin' thing off!! Ah, memories... :)

1971 was about when those new-fangled high tech discreet transistors came out. I remember looking at one and wondering how the heck it worked and wasn't sure what to do with one. Tubes I got...

If ya'll find a nice black and white TV somewhere, let me know. Especially if it's an old honkin' big console type. I miss watching Bonanza, Gomer Pyle, Walter Cronkite, etc. in full glorious b&w and having to fiddle with the rabbit ears.

Hmmm ... remember that renting of VHS movies is not necessary nowadays because you can own them for 50 cents to 100 cents each by grazing at secondhand stores in between the changing of camping spots. :B

Yep ... weren't the good old days wonderful way back when we were in our good young days! When I was building my own tube amp in my early teens, I got shocked on the end of my nose with ~450 DC volts from a stray strand of wire sticking-up from the power supply section of the amp's chassis. That amp worked well - with it's negative feedback for elimination of distortion and positive feedback to raise the signal level back up from the attenuation introduced by the negative feedback. I believe it was called a negative-positive feedback Class A audio tupe amp. Also, the big drawback with transistors and integrated circuits versus tubes is ... with tubes you can visually see if they're working by looking for a small wire glowing orange color. ;)

On into my late twenties, I built the DW's and my first color TV. I believe that TV's screen was at the high-end bleeding edge size of 25 diagonal inches. Amazingly, it worked the first time I switched it on and went on to serve us well for years ... if and only if I kept the three beams converged on a regular basis ... what a hassle that was!

These days young folks can't even do things like that if Amazon doesn't carry the parts ... or if they don't reside anywhere near one of the few remaining Radio Shack stores. :(

myredracer wrote:
I really don't miss having to run down to the local VCR rental store to get a movie to keep the kids entertained on a weekend or having to return it before getting stuck with a late charge, having to make sure it was rewound or having to rent a machine.

When DVD first came up, it was like a magic to be able to jump to any chapter with a click of a button. Without rewinding the tape back or forward. And nice artwork in the background when you open the main menu.

Now with MP4 I can jump to any timestamp within any episode, all the episode thumbs for a season are on one screen, can choose my own background artwork ("fanart") - or to have none at all. Last time I tried DVD, it felt odd with a slow response when you stop/play/pause or go to another chapter - disc spinning, machine whirring for a second or two.

I'm missing DVD simplicity though. Had to do minor fixes to video library recently when the primary HDD began to fail without me knowing. DVD player either works or doesn't. Though disc can get physically damaged/scratched. The biggest problem with DVD/CD library in RV is that it takes too much space.

Soundbar... if I find one that is not too big and doesn't sound too bad, given it's small size, I might do this. My impression had been that many soundbars are not better than $150 2.0 receiver paired with $30 Dayton 652 speakers, only cost more. Maybe I'm wrong.

It's funny about the amps I have especially the Phrase Linear which were Carver's first entry into Stereo amp's. Heck, I've had them for over 45 years, not tubes, but very heavy power supplies. Anyways...make a long story short, over the years I've chatted with specialized repair shops(they still work) about doing once overs on them. Of course over the years, many upgrades in tolerance's in the actual components of the amps(capacitors, resistors...etc etc)have been made available so now the upgrades cost more than the amps did in the first place. I realize in todays world 400.00 isn't a lot for an amp but 45+ years ago on a super market clerk salary, 400 bucks was a small fortune!!! :-) :-)

No VCRs for me, thank you. I really don't miss having to run down to the local VCR rental store to get a movie to keep the kids entertained on a weekend or having to return it before getting stuck with a late charge, having to make sure it was rewound or having to rent a machine. I don't miss those stupid 8-tracks either.

Acampingwewillgo wrote:
I still have two turntables....one, an Audio Technic's Direct drive with a Shure V15 type III cartridge and the other a Pioneer with what I believe is still my Quadraphonic cartridge on that.

Hey! I have the same Shure cartridge in my Thorens turntable. It plays through a tube Dynakit pre-amp and amp. I built 3-way speakers 2'x2'x 4'tall like the ones I built back in high school. Amazing sound!! Except now I can't hear high freq. sounds and have to wear hearing aids. Not the same anymore. :( I miss hearing the tinkling glass sound Santana's Singing Winds.

Here's me back in the good ol' days in high school with a tube amp I built and "lissajous" patterns on a color TV I modified. Got on the front cover of the Teacher's Assoc. magazine. Used to listen to my collection of Procul Harem, Moody Blues, ELP, King Crimson and others for hours on end with that amp. Wish I still had it (threw it away at some point). A neighbor a few houses down the street came over one day when my parents were out and told me to turn the gawd dam flippin' thing off!! Ah, memories... :)

1971 was about when those new-fangled high tech discreet transistors came out. I remember looking at one and wondering how the heck it worked and wasn't sure what to do with one. Tubes I got...

If ya'll find a nice black and white TV somewhere, let me know. Especially if it's an old honkin' big console type. I miss watching Bonanza, Gomer Pyle, Walter Cronkite, etc. in full glorious b&w and having to fiddle with the rabbit ears.

Almot wrote:
TV speakers suck, all of them. Sound worse than in $4 earbuds. I tried to find half-decent compact speakers for RV, something smaller than B652, to hang on the wall. Polk S10 at 6"x5" front looks small enough. Now need to convince myself that 6 times the cost is worth it.

I'm struggling with do I want to put in a sound bar of sorts. May take the 2.1 out of the park model and put it into the TT, and get a small speaker 5.1 for the park model.