On Tue, 25 May 2010 09:31:40 -0700 (PDT), "William R. Walsh"
wrote:

.....[ snip! ]......

Here's the thing...I had wanted to find one of these little Technics
receivers for a long time. The trouble is, every one I could put my
hands on had been badly mistreated, blown up or both. I spent years
looking without any luck.

I'm not going to even try to justify my desire to have one. I just
wanted one in nice working condition and that's that. Something about
the overall design appealed to me.

When I saw this one sitting at a public television and radio
fundraiser sale, I just had to have it once I saw that it was
described as "working". I didn't even argue much over the price. Now
that I've got one in good working order, I guess you could say that
I'm just a little...protective (?) ... of it. (Yes, I realize how that
may sound dumb. It is, after all, just a "thing".)

That's funny.... when I was visiting my daughter in Ottawa, I
spotted a bunch of stereo stuff piled up for garbage pickup. I grabbed
a Techics (!) "new class A" amp, and a Technics CD player, and
stuffed them in the trunk of the car for the 1200 mile return trip. My
wife was really ****ed about the lack of space in the trunk, but hey,
the stuff was free. The CD player worked just fine (still does), and
the amp worked OK, but had a noisy cooling fan. I put a much quieter
fan in it, and redesigned the air cooling flow, and modified the
circuitry to give it proportional control of the fan. Works great....
you have to have your head right against the amp to hear it.
I find it depressing to see the stuff that gets tossed out. Around
here (Nova Scotia) you can't throw electronics stuff out, it has to go
to a special recycler. Now you can't get your hands on old electronic
throw-aways, the recycler refuses to let anyone have any of the stuff
so you can repair it (and do the ultimate recycling where you bring it
back to life).

I have had electronic equipment that I've tried to preserve and
gone to extraordinary lengths to keep them running, even though I KNOW
it's not worth the effort. It's like you want to cheat the grim reaper
of electronics. You kinda wish someone would do the same for you.....

Paul G.