Old Equipment Blues
Fred Manteghian has an interesting dilema. What to do with the two laser disc players and one hundred laser disc movies that are taking up space in his home.
Two laser disc players, buried in a closet, waiting to play the near one hundred movies that I collected at prices I’m too embarrassed to admit to now. Back then, you’d think nothing of paying $40 for the privilege of owning a double disc that had you swapping discs in the dark at usually the most inappropriate points during a movie. But there was no choice if you owned a CRT projector. On my Dwin CRT projector, Laserdiscs were the only thing that looked good on the big screen until DVDs and HiDef came along.
My friend Steve has a laser disc player and I fondly remember going over to his place for a Star Wars movie marathon to see all three movies on his system. This was, of course, in the days before Episodes I to III and before DVD. Laser discs, at the time, were the best in picture quality. And if I remember correctly, Steve was skeptical of DVD’s picture quality given the disc size and digital compression. But he was soon swayed over to the dark side, and now has a DVD player like the rest of us.
So what old equipment do you have lying around? I recently got my S-VHS VCR out of the basement so that I could tape F1 races for my cousin’s kid, because they don’t have cable. I still have my old ghetto blaster that I bought when I was eleven. I have a dual-tape deck that rarely gets used, though it’s hooked up to the stereo I’m listening to now. Come to think of it, I just played a tape of Crumbacher the other day. But before that, it hadn’t been used in ages. Maybe I’m just not old enough to have too much stuff lying around.
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April 12th, 2006 at 6:32 am
I have an old set of Cerwin-Vega home speakers. You know the ones… 30″ cabinets, 15″ woofer that does its best to rattle pictures off the wall, regardless of sound quality. They currently sit in my basement used as workout speakers when on the treadmill.
Hmmm… Somewhere in a closet I still have 50+ blank cassette tapes from back in the day when I would make copies for or from friends.
April 12th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Yeah, we have a bunch of cassettes in the basement we don’t listen to. But there are a couple choice ones that aren’t available on CD that I get out every once in a while and listen to.
April 26th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Some of my laserdiscs represent material that just isn’t available on DVD (e.g. the aforementioned Star Wars discs, which correspond to the original theatrical releases, which will NEVER be made available on DVD according to ol’ Georgie.)
Others contain movies that were well worth the price I paid for them in that format, and are simply not worth upgrading to DVD, such as Terminator 2 and the Indiana Jones series.
For these reasons I keep my laserdisc player connected and go to the trouble of loading up the discs and watching movies on it occasionally. I also get a kick out of having hacked the player to produce an RF AC-3 signal from discs that have it, a format which was not available when the player was originally sold. This is then decoded by the external decoder to produce a Dolby Digital 5.1 bitstream, which then goes to the pre/pro. It doesn’t get much better than that! At least until this new HD audio stuff gets resolved.
Beside the LD player and discs, I too have a variety of tape decks, amplifiers, CD players, etc. kicking around in the basement. I will probably construct a system out of these for use in the living room, which is not primarily a theater room but can benefit from better sound than that coming from the TV speakers. I might even have enough pieces to make another system in the garage. So you never know when some of that older equipment might suddenly be useful again. Otherwise, sell it!
April 26th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
Oh yes, and the other thing I was thinking about this topic is that old LDs almost certainly constitute a thriving resale market, for many of the same reasons that old vinyl records do. I’m almost tempted to pick up some cheap but high-quality LDs this way myself, although not until I get better organized…