I'm Steve, nice to meet you all, in my spare time I collect, fix & listen to wind up gramophones (as the short life of anything electronic does my head in!). Recently rekindled (cough) my love of cassettes after buying a WM-D6C a few years back, but prefer not to venture much beyond the latter half of the 20th century.. ;-)
Wind up gramophones is an interesting subject - I have thought about those a number of times over the years - as an almost ideal long term music device that will outlast all other formats. As indeed they already have. To send into eternity and still produce music in distant times. Now I should do some reading about just what gramophones were made and how well made they were... I "get" the need for everything to last forever. These concepts have been a fixation if mine since childhood when, obsessed with the Romans, I saw old bridges and aqueducts still in use 1600 years later... and slowly understood them to be somehow maybe superior to modern equivalents...
There's certainly something magical about bringing back to life the contents of a dusty old box that's lain forgotten about for decades. Very often needing nothing more than a degrease of a mechanism, a replacement of a rubber soundbox isolator and a bit of fettling, then playing media stored on something a beetle's excreted (shellac)...
Welcome Steve. I had two of these already so will admit to buying this purely because of the sticker. In the 20th Century there was loads of cool stuff being made in Hong Kong while the main things coming from China seemed to be copies of 1950s Tinplate toys. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305966495205
Even 32 years ago when I first arrived the manufacturing had long moved to China, some factory areas remain but turned into office space or data centres.
Welcome to the forum Bikesteve! One of our Hall of Fame Members lives there, while we haven't heard from him in 10 or so years he used to give us long stories of the vintage audio markets. I guess stores would get in a ton of killer equipment, some extremely rare and valuable, and he'd buy it for nothing. I was personally exposed to a ton of gear I had never heard of, but now is more common with the internet. The forum has changed hosts over the last 25 years and a lot of threads were lost but you can look up some threads by his username ARKAY, he was also over on AudioKarma for a long time with tons of audio gear stories.
