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SOLD Shure V15 Type III cartridge in excellent condition with 3 styli for $150 OBO (free shipping to continental US). One stylus is an EVG (VN35E) and two are Ed Saunders. The EVG and one ES styli have less than 10 hours of playtime and the other ES stylus has about 20 minutes of playtime.

Somewhat reluctantly sent a pm considering circumstances but glad you see this as a positve step. Wish you the best. Tim

Thanks everyone for the support and interest so far! This is a very positive step for me. Gear can be replaced, and I need to lighten my load and raise money to be able to have more freedom of choice. It's all good!

Sorry to hear of the circumstances surrounding your sale.

Best of luck to you, Ben. PM sent.

smokin deal would be the ones i picked up exactly like these for 450$.

Ben, Sorry to hear about this. You have a lot of great gear, and I would be interested in it if I were in a little better shape financially myself. I am interested in the VPI 16.5 (depending on the price), and would be interested in your vinyl but I doubt I could do the whole lot, plus I live in FL. Mike

sorry to hear about anyones hardship... you will be okay, keep positive.

Sitting at my bench working away. A glance out the window shows no break in the clouds. Two days of downpours had left the world soggy and my mood gloomy. A deep sigh escapes me. Dark thoughts, aching bones and a general miasma steal over me more and more these days. Well, I still have my work. After 65 years, I don’t really need it for income anymore and my hands can barely grip the soldering iron, but it gives me a sense of purpose and helps fill the empty hours. Not much work to be had, truth to tell. Mostly older guys bring the stuff in, early solid-state amplifiers, old vacuum tube radios, sometimes a turntable. No tv’s anymore, not since the airwaves went digital. Gotta admit, I don’t miss working around the kind of voltages hanging around at the back of those cathode tubes. Still everyone bringing something by has a tale to tell, “it belonged to my grandfather”, got this for my 18th birthday and boy was I excited”. “Joe at the Stop and Shop said you could get this running.” And, in a poor town like this, “can’t afford to replace it could you take a look and tell me if it’s worth fixing”. Well that’s about all I can do to this old solid-state Heathkit. Going to have to get some parts in. I’ll just scoop up these transistors and other bits, put them in my pocket and figure out the parts order later. Hah, I surely do remember how Martha used to yell and carry on when she’d wash my work jeans and a pocketful of parts would go for a ride through the dryer. She’d always save her scolding for the dinner table, so the kids knew that even the old man wasn’t immune from instruction from the real boss in the house. The kids would always nudge each other and smile, knowing that Dad was in for it now. Dear, dear Martha, gone these four years now. Kids scattered around the country like pebbles tossed in a pond. Just distant phone calls now, and sometimes, a short visit. Caught up in their loves, family careers and life. That’s all right, part of the cycle of life. What’s up next? Oh yes this RCA tabletop radio, circa 1946. Middle age woman brought it in, said it was part of her aunt’s estate. The story was that it belonged to her husband, killed in a car accident after coming through the war unscratched. I remembered how’d those of us who come through that mess whole, wouldn’t even blink when we’d heard something similar about a returning vet. Don’t know if it was callousness or just or the incongruity of it all. Her aunt had put the radio in a box after the funeral and it hadn’t been turned on since. Had a frayed cord she said and could you replace it. Yup, cords shot, but so is all the internal wiring, caps are leaky and I’m sure it’s out of alignment. Well I got all the parts for this type of unit and any tubes I need. It’s amazing how many spare parts I’ve ended up with by tripping out unrepairable items. The caps are all common values I keep on hand. Looks like I might as well do it today, no walk today, not with this weather. That didn’t take long. Musta rebuilt a thousand of these old AC/DC radios over the decades. Never meant to end up a tech, but even with the GI bill, I had to drop of out of engineering after only a year. Needed the money what with a young bride and little Tommy on the way. Seems like babies just dropped out of the sky back in those days. One following the other and before you know it, my youth was gone and my pathway through life was set. Let’s do the dial frequency calibration and antenna peaking and see how she sounds. That should do it so let’s turn it up a bit. Yup can’t mistake that sound. AM through a small speaker. It always gives me a feeling of distance. Like the signal had to travel a long ways to reach your ears. A feeling that the world is wider and stranger than we know. OK, now to tune in ABC and see what’s on the news: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen and you are listening to the news on WABC in New York City. International news today saw the adjournment of the 1st session of the UN General Assembly. UN Secretary General Trygve Lie called it a historic event in the quest to create a more peaceful planet…and in national affairs, major labor stoppages in the coal, electrical and steel industries continue. United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther repeated his call today for a “democratization of industry…and in sports the St. Louis Cardinals walked away with the win in the exciting finale to their 7 game contest with the Boston Red Sox…” How, how can this be! It’s like the radio captured what it heard on the last day it was plugged in. This is amazing! It’s the same on all the dials. Hey it looks like there is an unusual blue glow coming from the radio tubes. Talk about time in a bottle. Oh my goodness, how wonderful. It’s approaching dawn and the longer I listen the more disconnected from this time and place I become. It’s like my mind is slipping away, or is it simply fatigue since I’ve now been up nearly 24 hours. Dawn’s breaking. Looks like the weather has cleared. Going to be a nice day. I’m spinning off into sleep, a vortex of thoughts spinning me around, around… …with I start, I snap out of my seeming daydream. Confused I gather in my surroundings. Looks to me like a typical early morning on Centre Avenue in my hometown, Secaucus, New Jersey. I’m staring into the window of Mr. Diggs hardware store. My reflection shows what it should, a 24 year old man, dressed up in suit and tie, with a nervous smile on his face. Nervous because I’m off to 229 West Pleasant Avenue, where I’m about to offer up a ring and proposal to my true love, Martha Ames. The ring! The ring! Do I have the ring! Patting my pockets I reach into my pants pocket and with a sigh of relief feel the small box. Say what’s this other stuff? Change? Pulling it out I spot several small transistors. Hey, how do I know their called transistors? Never heard of or seen such a thing, but I’m sure I’m right. I’m also thinking I should take a bus ride over to Murray Hill and show these to some folks at Bell Labs. Don’t know why, just a hunch. Maybe if they like what they see they’ll help out with my engineer schooling. Its’ for sure the GI Bill funds can only stretch so far. And why do I feel like I should take a train trip out to Hope, Arkansas? I have this funny feeling something specials going on out there. Oh well. I’ll save that thought for another day. Martha’s waiting and things are looking up. (End Note: The transistor was invented in 1947 by 3 scientists at Bell Labs. Hope Arkansas is where the folded corner horn speaker, known as the Klispchorn was first made in the year 1946 by it’s inventor Paul Klipsch. It is still in production in Hope today and costs of $11,000 a pair.) ********************** Now for the technical details. With the gracious assistance and seemingly endless patience of our own local tech, Maynard slash tubefanatic, I have just finished a complete restoration of 1946 RCA tabletop radio Model #56X3. This is my first real experience working with these radios which carry their own challenges, mainly the fact that they are AC/DC radios, which I gather to mean that there is both AC and DC voltages running around inside, thus a chance to double your fun. A customer of mine, knowing of my hobby, asked if I could replace the cord, which was cracked. Well when I pulled the chassis out of the case, the inside was something I had never seen. Every non-cloth wire’s plastic coating was crumbling into dust. Broaching the subject with Maynard he readily agreed to lend a hand. The primary issues were safety, safety, safety. He clued me into special safety caps now used in restoring these types of radio, which I obtained through Just Radios in Canada. In addition to the safety cap he instructed me on how to rewire the innards to accommodate a polarized wall plug thus removing a major safety flaw in these types of radios. He also advised me to obtain an Isolation Transformer, which is a special transformer that apparently puts all that mean ole AC in a special cage designed by some fellow named Farraday. He even let me stick multimeter probes inside the box when everything was turned on! The final steps were very cool. I just happened to have a RF Generator sitting around. I built a “probe” for lack of a better term to go with it. He then taught me how to check and see if the generator itself was properly calibrated. Finally, I got to align the tuner and do the dial frequency calibration and antenna peaking. Antenna Peaking! I love that phrase. It’s pretty cool too. I’d describe it, but it’s part of a secret radio rite and not for mere plebeians. Of course, throughout this process, there were the usual Thebesian mishaps and mistakes. Indeed at one time I had to warn Maynard that the power company had threatened to turn off my power permanently if I took out the East Coast grid just one more time.

Hey everyone... Just wanted to thank you all for your continued input. I want to also let you know that we are currently not going to aggressively move topics around, for now anyway. We've got too much other stuff to do. What we'd like to do is keep things as they are for now, and compile some usage data over the next few days/weeks or months. Then we may (or may not) consider a forum restructuring of sorts, which would almost certainly consolidate things a little. By that I mean combine certain forums that don't get much traffic, rename certain other forums, and simplify things a bit. Again, we aren't going to do any sort of restructuring beyond what's already been done yet. We may not even do it at all. But, time will tell. Anyway, thanks again. I'm going to go ahead and close this topic, as I think most people that have a strong opinion on it have said what they wanted to say.

Chad, I think you'll fit right in around here.

In light of that, so long as it sounds good to you, then it's good to go. It's not like the L,C,R are seeing all that much voltage to begin with. IIRC my La Scala clocked in around 1.5 V at reference level, most of which was showing up in the woofer section. +10 dB might seem like a fair bit of boosting if taken out of context, but if the tweeter level signal is hovering down below the decimal point, there's nothing to be concerned about. One of the best attributes of owning high-sesitivity speakers is that they afford a very wide margin for shaping the signal. If there is ever a doubt, using a multimeter across the the different sections of the terminal block will disclose what's actually going on.

No doubt, with very little bass to back up the horns they are straight-up LOUD when run flat out of the gate without boundary assistance. The ones I acquired were neither minty, nor completely thrashed like some I've seen...good wear for being gigged, I gather. This was filmed before I had a chance to completely service them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBqR1vfrnNg A bit of EQ contouring driven by a home theater receiver...they showed some potential. The more bass I gave them, the less inclined I felt to mess around with the top end. ..and those K-42's will take quite a bit of prodding before they even start to flinch. Just a touch of EQ, powered by a DC-300AII however, augmented by a horn subwoofer as the cornerstones of a proper 4-way, and they easily lived up to their Heresy name sake. One of these days, I'll have to get that on camera too. Audyssey will have their response curves sorted out for you, no problem.

Paul Klipsch wasn't FROM Hope. And Clinton wasn't the best president.

Normally I would say that is a joke, and it is. But I would gladly take Bill back in favor of what we have now. Hillary, OTOH........

I'm not sure. Maybe put calls into the Hope City Hall and express displeasure with the whole thing? I'm not sure. From what I understand the city is doing everything they can to keep this out of the news and papers.