Vignettes on Youth Series

We had a big valve radio.  At some stage it sat in the dining room on a side table.  We must have listened to it many times as a family as Dad and radios were a single organism.  However, I only remember one occasion.

Picture idyllic the scene:  It’s a cold winter’s night with Dad and Mom sitting in chairs on either side of the table and a single bar heater in the front.  Dean and Cheryl are on the carpet reading and drawing and I am also drawing – copying a picture from a Noddy book.  It’s the one on the inside cover that shows Noddy and Big Ears in his car with Toyland in the background.  I consider myself to be an excellent artist and this is my best work yet, in fact it’s a perfect facsimile.  I rush over to my parents to show them and it slips out of my hand and onto the element.  Spoof.  My masterpiece is bursts into flames without the world, as least my parents, having seen what I’m capable of.

Needless to say I was devastated and bawled my ears out.  I was eventually pacified and encouraged to draw another one.  I eventually did but my heart wasn’t in it.  The more they ohh-ed and ahh-ed, the more I tried to tell them that the other had been much better and they had missed my artistic debut.

That radio fell into disuse when Dad got his portable transistor radio.  Now he could get his fix 24 hours a day and those idyll days around the valve radio were irrevocably over.

That radio lay around gathering dust.  Dad was not unaware of the passion of the modern child and promised that he would get a Hi-Fi when Dean was 16.  We never go it.  A Hammerstein radiogram arrived in its place.  That would have to do.  It was OK I suppose but it was not particular trendy.  It did its job but it was nothing to boast about to your friends which was the norm for our house.

All was not lost.  That old valve radio without FM had an AUX input!  We could do something with that.  Dean’s  friend, Michael Baker, who was into electronics told us about a reel to reel tape deck that he had bought from Hamrads in Cape Town via mail order.  I borrowed his catalogue and ordered the tape deck by posting off a form along with a postal order for about R35.  Luckily, I had read the fine print as it said that you needed to order a power supply too – whatever that was.  The tape deck duly arrived with a transformer, loose diodes and a capacitor.  I figured out what I was meant to do with the stuff and made a box.  We were in business.  It, along with the Valve radio, was proudly installed in our bedroom.  As there were no plug points – there were only 5 plug points in the whole house – it was powered via a twin flex cable tacked to the ceiling and plugged into the bayonet fitting of the light socket.

This exercise whetted my appetite and I commenced my quest of chasing sound perfection.  A class mate, Barry Altwig, worked at the top hi-fi shop in P.E., Hi-Fi Academy.  I would listen to music in the soundproofed studio and drool over Marshall amplifiers and new fandangled electrostatic speakers.  By means of careful saving and money making activities I managed to buy a second hand Garrad SP25 MkIII from Barry .  It had a hydraulically damped arm lifting mechanism, finely adjustable arm weight and an anti-skate setting to neutralise the sideways force.  It came with a strobe disc to check the speed and an antistatic arm for distributing antistatic fluid on the record – way cool.

The ensemble was completed when I acquired a Sanyo amplifier via the Gumtree of old – the classified ads in the Evening Post.  Somewhere along the line I added 2-way home built speakers.  That set up was dragged around to many a party and served me faithfully long after I left the army until some prick broke into my house and stole my baby.

That was painstakingly replaced with a top of the range NAD system as and when I could afford the components.  That too served well at many a party.  The best was when I owned a smallholding outside Gordon’s Bay where the Hi-Fi could be turned up full and we listened to it down below at the swimming pool.  God help you if you had to go inside to get more drinks.

It moved with me into Somerset West and again served me well at many a party or lazy Sunday afternoon with friends.  It even managed to attract a girlfriend.  This was the first time that I didn’t have to let my manly charms do the spadework – I just sat back and the sounds of Deep Purple, Bowie, Pink Floyd et al floating down the street in an otherwise dour neighbourhood drove her into my arms.  She was a young and dark haired beauty that lived a few houses down and was intrigued by this Bohemian setup that seemed to party all the time – well at least there was always music emanating from the house.  But that’s another story.

One day I came home from work to find that another prick had broken in and stolen my next baby along with half my CD collection – déjà vu all over again.

I lost heart.  I’ve never owned a Hi-Fi again.  I flirted briefly with a TEAC surround system but my heart wasn’t in it and I got rid of it.  The modern world had arrived where people enthuse about their crappy external computer speakers or try to play songs for you via their shitty cellphone’s tweeter.

We have now entered the latest adventures in music where everyone has thousands of mp3 encoded songs of forgettable intrinsic musical value and reproduce them on devices with the same qualities as a wind-up gramaphone.

The crazy thing was that Steve Jobs was an audiophile.  It’s like a whore professing fidelity to her husband. Maybe it’s not the apple from the Garden of Eden that’s the origin of Man’s demise but Apple from Silicon Valley.