[1beautifuldaughter]

Ive been collecting transportation related covers for wall art for a long time.

My aunt gave me an old 1915 credenza record player that was my grandfathers pride and joy,, I started looking for old 78 records and now I have ended up with cabinets filled with them also. Some are pretty interesting but I know nothing about them. Some are original recordings signed from some recording studio in NY.

[Alvin]

Interesting covers...and funny to see some I have (had) too!

Back in the '70 worked part time w an Antique Broker who'd bid and buy out estate contents.

One buyout included a interior dryedin end-cap barn wall of shelving with 78's from left to right & floor to ceiling...and freestanding turn of the (20th) century wood cabinet w Tulip flower shaped "horn" speakered hand crank Victrola.

Literally 100s of original mint sleeved 78 12" discs...that I was offered for...free....and I passed! Biggest reason, the then current market $$$ worth was low to zero, didnt recognize ANY of the artists or groups; most importantly:

==> They weighed a ton and I dreaded the thought of having to move and/or store them!

Imagine there were several "treasures" imbedded in that collection...IIRC the children & grandchildren had most leftovers from the estate taken to the dump....which is typical.

My grandparents had one of those flip top WWI vintage hand crank record players w the "turkey quill" sized needle too...

[Alvin]

Originally Posted by GRX

Always thought this particular Led Zepp IV album really sparkled and years later I came to know who audio engineer George Peckham was, and the significance of this original "Porky/Pecko Duck" pressing. Also note the 6-sided star in the wizards lamp which was omitted from subsequent releases. Sadly this record has seen more than it's share of abuse though. The usual pops at the beginning of each song from dropping the needle. Even so it was great to reminisce reading along with the lyrics of Stairway to Heaven which are imprinted on the inner sleeve. </br> </br>

"LIB MR R DUCKS!"

So...grabbed one of our ZEP IV LPs and "LIB M R PECKO Ducks!"

Hard to grab a good pic as you weren't kidding...has both Pecko Duck inscription (below)

[Alvin]

And the "...6-sided star in the wizards lamp which was omitted from subsequent releases. " below vvvv

[pmdclassics]

I have been collecting albums for years as well. Probably close to 900 by now. I am at the point where I am close to having everything I want so taking the hobby to another level by buying the foreign and 1st pressings to compare to the ones I have. Crazy as it may sound its interesting in comparing sound quality and not only that but obtaining the 1st release with original inner sleeve and possibly gatefold release.

Its much like the Pontiac hobby isn't it? NOS or original parts over aftermarket every time you can do it.

I have some extra cartridges (Shure and AT) and a Sansui AU-9900 amp if someone is looking for gear.

[1beautifuldaughter]

Here is a pretty comical old Hippy record

[61 389-348]

Originally Posted by pmdclassics

I have been collecting albums for years as well. Probably close to 900 by now. I am at the point where I am close to having everything I want so taking the hobby to another level by buying the foreign and 1st pressings to compare to the ones I have. Crazy as it may sound its interesting in comparing sound quality and not only that but obtaining the 1st release with original inner sleeve and possibly gatefold release.

Its much like the Pontiac hobby isn't it? NOS or original parts over aftermarket every time you can do it.

I have some extra cartridges (Shure and AT) and a Sansui AU-9900 amp if someone is looking for gear.

It certainly is the same or even more extreme level of detail. (Btw, I'm still shocked at the music knowledge here in this forum.)

In this instance, some or even many of the reissues can be better than the originals. An example would be the Living Stereos. I have many, not all though, of the originals beginning in 1956 or 1957 and most of those are early stampings. I also have the first round of reissues from about 15 years as test pressings, which are really early stampings and then some as early production releases. And then this new round of reissues as they come out. I think there are around 25 released to date. These actually do sound better than the originals mostly due to about 5 - 10 db quieter vinyl.

Of course, if you lower the noise floor, you hear more detail ... some good and some not. You can clearly hear the keys click on the woodwinds. You clearly hear musicians turn the pages. You can hear the hall's HVAC cycle on and off. You hear some details you didn't even hear live. And unfortunately ... really unfortunate is that you can clearly hear trucks and buses outside the hall. Why didn't they record these at night, late at night?

On the newest Living Stereos, I've heard detail that I've never heard before, and do once in a while, compare originals with the first and current reissue to confirm what I remember.

That's the thing with analog, it's infinite. You just have to lower the noise floor enough to get to it

[MikeNoun]

I have a lot of MFSL Original Master Recordings. I have all The Beatles releases (still sealed), along with Cream's "Disraeli Gears", and many others. One of the most dynamic MFSL releases was "Sticky Fingers" by The Rolling Stones. They changed the mix and really boosted the treble, sort of updated the sound to the late 1980's. Purists didn't like it, but it was amazingly clear. I also have a lot of QuadraDisc (quadraphonic) albums.

I remember when the 5.1 digital cd's came out, they were very interesting to listen to. I never bought any, but had a few friends that did. Nowadays, people take these digital mixes from "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero" and isolate the vocals, or guitar, etc.

Do a search on YouTube for "Eddie Van Halen isolated". If you're a guitar player, you'll get a kick out of hearing just his guitar work.

[Alvin]

Bit off topic was a previous mention regarding performance halls.
Reminds me of Avery Fisher, Avery Fisher Hall, and the High Quality Audio Fisher Electronics in the late 60s early 70s that was excellent unlike the later junk w Fisher name slapped upon it.

Our local (Houston) symphony hall is "sonically challenged" and I seem to recall many purists complaints about same at the Avery Fisher Hall and it's "sonic issues?"

Will post 2 - lengthy- Parts about Avery Fisher, Philanthropist, Musician and his Death here in case you too are interested w my bolding.

Avery Fisher, Philanthropist, Ides at 87 - NYTIMES Feb 27, 1994

Part 1 http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/27/ob...ies-at-87.html

Avery Fisher, Philanthropist, Dies at 87
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: February 27, 1994

Avery Fisher, the founder of the Fisher electronics company and a philanthropist who donated millions of dollars to arts organizations and universities, died yesterday at the New Milford Hospital in New Milford. He was 87 and had homes in Manhattan and in Washington, Conn.

The cause was complications from a stroke, said his wife, Janet.

Mr. Fisher, for whom a concert hall at Lincoln Center was named, was an influential figure in New York musical circles, an amateur violinist whose love of music led him to build his own high-quality radios and phonographs in the 1930's, first as a hobby and later as an extremely profitable business. He sat on the boards of the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Marlboro Festival and other organizations.

"I like to be thought of as a musician who incidentally manufactured high- quality, high-fidelity equipment for music lovers," he said in 1973.

Mr. Fisher was frequently seen in New York's concert halls and was as likely to be there to hear a young performer as an established star. Philharmonic Hall was renamed for him in 1973 after he donated $10.5 million to Lincoln Center. Rescuing a Troubled Hall

The gift was intended as an endowment fund, with 80 percent of the proceeds to be used for the maintenance of Philharmonic Hall and the remaining 20 percent for the Avery Fisher Artist Program, which gives cash awards to young instrumentalists. When Lincoln Center decided to renovate the acoustically troubled hall, however, Mr. Fisher agreed that $4 million of his gift could be used for the rebuilding.

The hall, which opened in 1962, had undergone less extensive modifications in 1964, 1965 and 1969, at a combined cost of $2 million. But its problems, which included echoes in some parts of the hall and dry, unresonant sound elsewhere, persisted. In the summer of 1976, the hall was rebuilt under the supervision of the architect Philip Johnson and the acoustician Cyril M. Harris.

Mr. Fisher took an active if unofficial hand in the process, conferring with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Harris several times a week as the new hall was being planned. It reopened on Oct. 19, 1976. Although some critics still find fault with the hall, the renovation was generally agreed to have solved many of its original problems. First, Books and Graphics

Avery Robert Fisher was born in Brooklyn on March 4, 1906, the youngest of six children. His father, Charles Fisher, and his mother, the former Mary Byrach, had come to New York from Kiev, then a part of Russia, in 1905. Mr. Fisher said that he had become fascinated with music through his father's large record collection and that everyone in the family had played a musical instrument.

Mr. Fisher did not choose to pursue a professional career in music, however. He entered New York University in 1924 as a prelaw student but later changed his fields of study to biology and English. After he graduated in 1929, he took a job at an advertising agency that had book publishers among its accounts. In 1932 he left the agency to take a job with one of those publishers, G. P. Putnam's Sons.

The next year he moved to another publisher, Dodd, Mead & Company, where he worked as a graphic designer for $18 a week. He remained with the company for a decade. Although he left publishing in 1943, he often described book design as "my first love," and he occasionally undertook projects for Dodd, Mead long after he had made his fortune in the audio world. Among the books he designed were "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples," by Winston Churchill (1960) and "The American Seasons," by Edwin Way Teale (1976). He donated his fees for those projects to charities.

"Looking at a beautiful typographical design," he told an interviewer in 1976, "is like listening to music."

Beginnings of a Business

Mr. Fisher's endeavors in audio design began in the mid-1930's, while he was still working for Dodd, Mead. He began building his own radios to get better sound than ready-made models delivered. By 1937 he had made notable improvements in the design of amplifiers, tuners and speakers, and he established his first company, Philharmonic Radio.

"I was developing my hobby in hi-fi, and a number of friends asked me to make for them the kind of equipment I was constructing for my own home," Mr. Fisher recalled in 1976, "the sort of thing that was not commercially available, the type of thing found in radio stations or movie theaters. And so I started constructing for this small group of people, and before I knew it I had the beginnings of a business."

In 1945 Mr. Fisher sold Philharmonic Radio and started a second audio company, Fisher Radio. He assembled his engineering staff by luring the best audio technicians from European companies. "I had the best engineers around," he said in 1986. "Whenever another company needed an engineer, the first place they came to try to steal somebody was my company. I didn't blame them. I got my engineers from Europe, where they were grossly underpaid. I offered them four or five times what they were making. And those fellows turned out superb equipment." Premium Prices and Quality

[61 389-348]

Originally Posted by MikeNoun

I have a lot of MFSL Original Master Recordings. I have all The Beatles releases (still sealed), along with Cream's "Disraeli Gears", and many others. One of the most dynamic MFSL releases was "Sticky Fingers" by The Rolling Stones. They changed the mix and really boosted the treble, sort of updated the sound to the late 1980's. Purists didn't like it, but it was amazingly clear. I also have a lot of QuadraDisc (quadraphonic) albums.

I remember when the 5.1 digital cd's came out, they were very interesting to listen to. I never bought any, but had a few friends that did. Nowadays, people take these digital mixes from "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero" and isolate the vocals, or guitar, etc.

Do a search on YouTube for "Eddie Van Halen isolated". If you're a guitar player, you'll get a kick out of hearing just his guitar work.

"Sticky Fingers" by The Rolling Stones."

I gotta go dig that out. I think the MFSL I have of it is still sealed. What a lot of good that does!

Three MFSL and all sealed. Three sealed MFSL White albums too. However, glad you made me go look. I found my EMI Harvest Ummagumma and my German EMI Harvest Quadrophonie Dark Side

[Alvin]

Avery Fisher Part 2 http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/27/ob...l?pagewanted=2

(Page 2 of 2)

Fisher Radio entered the high-fidelity market with a line of components that sold at premium prices and that audio critics of the time described as the Rolls-Royces of sound equipment. But Mr. Fisher and his European engineers never rested on the company's early reputation; their technical innovations kept it at the forefront of the field. In 1956 Fisher offered the first transistorized amplifier.

Two years later the company brought out the first stereo radio and phonograph combination. From 1959 to 1961, it made several important improvements in AM-FM stereo tuner design, and it consistently found ways to increase the power and improve the sensitivity of its components.

"I wanted my equipment to be the best that technology made possible," Mr. Fisher said. "So we didn't cut corners. We weren't the biggest in the world. I'm sure other companies sold more units than we did. But we weren't interested in that."

When the audio market began to veer toward mass merchandising in the late 1960's, Mr. Fisher decided it was time to leave the field. In 1969 he sold Fisher to Emerson, a St. Louis-based company, for just under $31 million. Emerson, in turn, sold Fisher to Sanyo of Japan. Mr. Fisher maintained a consulting relationship with both Emerson and Sanyo, and made a habit of attending the annual sales meetings, even though he no longer had a financial interest in the company. Paying Back With Interest

After he sold his company, Mr. Fisher devoted himself mainly to philanthropy, "the repaying of old debts," as he put it. In the early 1970's, for example, he endowed the Avery Fisher Listening Room in the Bobst Library of New York University. "I was a graduate of N.Y.U.," he said, "and I owe a great deal to them because I was there on a working scholarship."

His most public gift, however, was the endowment fund he gave Lincoln Center, and he frequently described the Avery Fisher Artist Program as especially close to his heart.

"Music has been my life, and my family's, too," he said in an interview in 1986, on the 10th anniversary of the program.

The program offers two kinds of annual awards. The larger, more prestigious one is the Avery Fisher Prize, a tax-free $25,000 gift awarded to young American instrumentalists whose careers are already established and whose achievements have made them valued members of their profession. Among the recipients are the pianists Andre Watts, Murray Perahia, Richard Goode, Emanuel Ax and Horacio Gutierrez; the cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Lynn Harrell; the violinist Elmar Oliveira, and the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman.

The other prize is the Avery Fisher Career Grant, a $10,000 fund against which recipients may draw to cover career-related expenses. The program awards up to five of these grants every year.

Mr. Fisher counted many musicians among his friends and frequently invited groups of them to his Park Avenue apartment for evenings of chamber music. "It's a busman's holiday for them, and we have a grand old time," he said in 1986.

In addition to his interests in music and graphic design, Mr. Fisher's hobbies included maintaining and driving old automobiles.

In addition to his wife of 44 years, the former Janet Cane, Mr. Fisher is survived by two daughters, Barbara Snow of Paris and Nancy Fisher Kirschner of Manhattan, and a son, Charles, of Manhattan.

Photo: Avery Fisher in 1986 showing off his hi-fi speakers from the 1939 World's Fair. They were installed in the fireplace of his home. (Associated Press)

[61 389-348]

A bunch of halls designed and built in the 60s and 70s had serious problems. Another example would be the Dorothy Chandler Music Hall in LA. It was so bad that I quit going.

The new Disney Hall is far far better and I think as good as Severance or Chicago. Worst hall I've ever heard is Royce Hall and I think Troy NY is the best of them all with Severance close behind

[Alvin]

Here's another interesting read IMHO "The History of high End Audio - Audiophile Review
http://audiophilereview.com/the-hist...end-audio.html

Many "blasts from the past!"

[61 389-348]

Originally Posted by Alvin

Here's another interesting read IMHO "The History of high End Audio - Audiophile Review
http://audiophilereview.com/the-hist...end-audio.html

Many "blasts from the past!"

Another good one

http://www.stereophile.com/category/we-see-it

[Alvin]

Originally Posted by 61 389-348

Another good one

http://www.stereophile.com/category/we-see-it

Indeed. Lots to love and many rabbit trails there.

Avery Fisher Hall - why it matters below:

[Alvin]

And this - Miles Davis @ Avery Fisher Hall

[Alvin]

Mott The Hoople too...

[MikeNoun]

Originally Posted by 61 389-348

"Sticky Fingers" by The Rolling Stones."

I gotta go dig that out. I think the MFSL I have of it is still sealed. What a lot of good that does!

Three MFSL and all sealed. Three sealed MFSL White albums too. However, glad you made me go look. I found my EMI Harvest Ummagumma and my German EMI Harvest Quadrophonie Dark Side

Another odd one I bought, I think back in the early 1990's, was an HMV boxed version of Led Zeppelin IV. Can't recall what was special about it, but I never played it.

The MFSL of "Sticky Fingers" is definitely an eye opener.

Back in the early 1980's, I bought a boxed set of The Beatles, Japanese import. The labels were all Apple, the album covers were stunning, extremely colorful and very high quality. All the recordings were in stereo. I played them once and transferred them to cassettes. For the next 20 years, I kept making cassette-to-cassette copies of the first 4 albums for friends and co-workers. Everyone was simply blown away by the stereo separation of those albums because Americans were weened on the crappy, fake stereo versions that Capitol released (called DuoPhonic), which was just mono with a delay.

[pmdclassics]

I have both of Boston's Half speed mastered LP's. I have yet to open Don't Look Back but their self titled has been played many times.

If you guys are into changing out cartridges to compare sound quality here is a must have:

Audio-Technica AT-150MLX

What this cartridge will do for you is make you play all your favorite albums again because you will hear so much more detail. Outstanding cartridge (MM)

[61 389-348]

Originally Posted by pmdclassics

I have both of Boston's Half speed mastered LP's. I have yet to open Don't Look Back but their self titled has been played many times.

If you guys are into changing out cartridges to compare sound quality here is a must have:

Audio-Technica AT-150MLX

What this cartridge will do for you is make you play all your favorite albums again because you will hear so much more detail. Outstanding cartridge (MM)

For a MC try a Lyra Cleos or even a Delos or Koetsu Rosewood. For a MM give a Soundsmith Zephyr mk 2 a try.

For real real cheap the Ortofon Blue is OK, plenty of detail, robust bass, a little hot, but gawd is that thing noisy.