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PostPosted: May 2nd, 2019, 4:48 pm 
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Joined: March 2nd, 2013, 2:43 pm
Posts: 216
Location: Potomac, MD
I have a Voice of Music tape recorder that I use on a regular basis. Not particularly hi fi, but a sturdy consumer product that my dad bought in 1963. I have never changed any tubes and it has had lots of use. The web site that Steve flagged is hosted by a fellow who has taken it on himself to supply wearable parts such as belts and idler wheels for VM phonos and tape recorders. I have bought many belt sets as the machine I have breaks belts about every three years. They made the turntables for many of the hi fi consoles.

David


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PostPosted: May 2nd, 2019, 4:51 pm 
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mix4fix wrote:
Do we have a speaker worthy of being mono?


What attributes does a speaker need to have to be worthy of mono?

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PostPosted: May 2nd, 2019, 5:13 pm 
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Hello David,
it sounds like your unit needs serviced and gone through the belts should last longer then that .

Sincerely Rich


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PostPosted: May 2nd, 2019, 5:56 pm 
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Location: Parkville, Maryland
DaveR wrote:
mix4fix wrote:
Do we have a speaker worthy of being mono?


What attributes does a speaker need to have to be worthy of mono?


The same as stereo. That's why I mentioned Quad Electrostatic speakers. However, back in the day, music in the home was provided by pieces of furniture. The "hi-end" names that dominated were Fisher, Magnavox, General Electric, Scott, Bogen, etc. My parents bought (because of my desperate nagging insistence) a Magnavox console hi-fi. It had AM/FM radio, phono playback with a Collaro record changer and Electrovoice cartridge, a bi-amped horn-based speaker system with a 15-inch woofer, 6V6 based Williamson amplifiers, and cabinet work by Drexel. I died and went to heaven with that piece.

The more audiophile type systems were usually built-in to mill work including the speaker system. Here is where Western Electric, later Altec Lancing, JBL, Jensen, and Electrovoice dominated the audio landscape in terms of speakers. The electronics were centered around Fisher, H.H. Scott, Bogen, early Marantz and so on. Phono playback was interesting to say the least what with Weathers and their F.M. pickup, ESL and Grado with their moving-coil pick-ups, and of course G.E. and Decca variable reluctance pick-ups. All of these goodies were way outside my modest wallet. All of which was monophonic and centered on the long play 33-1/3 records of the day.

There were of course many more choices, but you get the idea. Mono does not mean poor or bad sound -- it is just not two channels. Just one damn good one.
:character-oldtimer:

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PostPosted: May 2nd, 2019, 6:13 pm 
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Joined: June 22nd, 2013, 11:00 am
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DaveR wrote:
mix4fix wrote:
Do we have a speaker worthy of being mono?


What attributes does a speaker need to have to be worthy of mono?


I don't care what speaker you use. Put it upside down in the hotel room bathtub with the water turned on and the leads plugged into a wall outlet for all I care. Just make a selection and stop with this unnecessary semantics.

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PostPosted: May 14th, 2019, 10:28 am 
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My take on single mono speaker.

In nature, there is no such thing as mono, unless the person is completely deaf in one ear. Evolution have given two eyes and two ears from the very beginning of evolution, even to primitive life forms. Two eyes give us the ability to perceive the depth of the images, and two ears give us the ability to perceive the location and distance of the sound source.

Sound recoding technology started with single channel (mono) recording and soon replace with stereo. Mono recording when played thru two speakers (stereo) can sound excellent.

The sound emanating from single speaker generally lacks location info. We perceive the sounds as coming from the general direction of the single speaker. The mono recording played thru two speaker system adds location info to the sounds. The sound images are clearly defined between the two speakers.

Secondly, I presume single speaker system is more sensitive to room reflections than a two speaker system.


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PostPosted: May 15th, 2019, 6:20 am 
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It seems to me that if you put a single speaker centered between where two stereo speakers would be and play mono it ought to sound remarkably similar.

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PostPosted: May 15th, 2019, 8:07 am 
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It would be an interesting experiment to try, comparing true mono to stereo as mono. However, I suspect that to get the best from both setups you would need to have the mono speaker in a corner and the stereo as mono speakers out in the room.

Now that would be an interesting demo to put on at CAF (presuming we get a room). Have one of the speakers movable so that it could be placed either in a corner or out in the room. We could switch between the two setups.

ray


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PostPosted: May 15th, 2019, 8:35 am 
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putting any speaker in the corner will make it sound different than when out in the room. Even having a mono speaker in the room centered between where a stereo pair would be would result in a different position from the side walls than the stereo pair. You are bound to have different sounds due to different room effects. If you really wanted to try this although not a CAF you could do the experiment outside away from all wall influences.


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PostPosted: May 15th, 2019, 11:48 am 
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Pretty much all CAF vendors who do mono do so with a pair of speakers.

If you are going to only have one speaker, make sure it is something that is impressive to look at.

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