On the radio

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

What I miss and that is mostly gone forever is the stereo equipment from that era. Those stacks of components with their flickering analog meters or later the digital graphs. And it was just cool.

This cool stuff is not gone. You just don’t see it much anymore because it doesn’t pass WAF. (wife acceptance factor) Large speakers normally don’t fit into their décor. My wife said the same thing. “There is no way you are putting that big ugly box in the living room!” The nice thing about DIY is you can easily hide speakers. I have x9 12” woofers under my couch. No one knows they are there until I turn the system on. DIY can be very inexpensive. The 12” were only $30 each.

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How many of you remember Schaak Electronics? We all went there to get the best in car stereo components! They had the display of all the in dash/under dash stuff. The cheaper stuff was Craig or Jensen and then the high end stuff nobody had heard of like Blaupunkt, Kenwwood and Alpine. I can still hear the ad on the TV/radio… “S-C-H-A-A-K…SCHAAK”! Those were stressful times…spend my hard earned dollars on car stereo stuff, new wheels, engine parts or a pair of CCM Tacks!

I remember Dick Schaak. He had a place on a lake in Wisconsin. One spring morning I was way out in front of his place in waders fishing Walleyes. He came out and tried to tell me I was trespassing. I told him to, uh, attempt reproduction by himself. He was unhappy.

SR

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

I sold all my speakers and components. They reached the point where they were considered “vintage” (yikes! You know what that makes me…) and some of it was worth quite a bit of money. I don’t miss the space it took up and with kids there wasn’t (isn’t) much time to sit around and just listen to music, but it was kind of end-of-an-era sad to part with most of it.

In our house the TV doesn’t turn on but the music is always going. Lots of time for tunes with the kiddos. Much better then electronics and TV.

My brother and I bought a system together from Schaak Electronics in the late 70s. If we turned up the bass and the volume for the beginning of “Hotel California” out bedroom windows would vibrate.

I’ll tell you one thing, kids these days are not having the trunk rattling, like two midgets in the backseat ‘rassling, speakerbox vibrate the tag, make it sound like aluminum cans in the bag…. Pretty sure my wife bumps the loudest in our neighborhood 0.

I lived in Minneapolis for two or three years 70 through 73. When my apartment got broken into I got a big insurance settlement, but I could extend those dollars by using it at businesses that they had a deal with. One of them was Schaak electronics. Now for a 19-year-old kid living with three friends what was the neatest thing in the world that you could have? For me it was a monster stereo I got to walk around Schaak electronics and pick out anything I wanted to come up to, I think it was about 3000 or $3500. I picked out an amp, I picked out speakers, turntable, cassette deck, etc. Added it all up and it wasn’t enough. I went around the store and picked out the biggest stereo that Pioneer made and from that day forward the four Plex we lived in and the houses on each side knew when we were having a party. Great times.