As you can probably tell from my recent posts, I’m home for most of August and enjoying the wonderful city I live in, Portland Oregon. I realize I sound a lot like a homer, and I promise I’ll be back on the road in a few weeks with plenty of pithy observations of other places. But for now, I’m deep into PDX. I’ve lived here for the last 24 years (with interludes in LA and Phoenix) but there is one characteristic of Portland I never quite get used to. In this modern twenty-first century world, a person can get pretty much anything he wants on-line, but in Portland, unlike most other places, almost anything you might imagine is likely to be available from a locally owned business within a few miles of home. I don’t know of any comparably sized city where that is true. An example of this happened today and even though I should be jaded by now, I was still surprised and delighted. I have about 800 vinyl records left over from the good old days. My old Marvel comics and my collection of Rolling Stone magazines (dating from issue #1) have long since evaporated, but the records are safely tucked away in cabinets here in my apartment. I had a craving for analog sound and pulled out my turntable, a Harmon Kardon T-25, which had been in storage for quite a while. Alas, the drive belt was rotten and came apart in my hands. Where to buy a belt? Well, there are plenty of places on line and I could have sent my credit card number and in a week or so I’d have a belt. But I live in Portland, and just a couple of miles up Hawthorne Boulevard is Fred’s Sound of Music, locally owned and in business in the same location since 1948. In addition to selling and installing high-end audio systems, Fred’s stocks parts for older equipment (they also sell classic audio gear and their stock of perfectly restored, jet black, tube-driven McIntosh amplifiers was wonderful to behold). Did Fred’s have a belt? Yes they did. I was a bit annoyed that they wanted me to bring the turntable in, but when I arrived, instead of just installing the correct belt, at no extra charge the tech adjusted the tone arm balance, adjusted the tracking, adjusted the platter speed, and checked the needle for wear, finally playing a classical record to evaluate sound quality. Noticing that the rubber caps were missing from the bottoms of the turntable’s spring feet, he suggested some vibration deadening cups that Fred’s carries for the purpose. Watching him rapidly and professionally work his way through the adjustments took me back to an earlier time, when techs were expert craftsmen with a skilled touch, a time when electronics and mechanics were married together, a time very different from today, when so many devices have no mechanical parts at all. Swap out a board and reboot. Besides the hard drive, the only thing mechanical about my I-Pod is the lockout switch. When that little machine fails, I’ll just recycle it and get another. I’m betting that the turntable will still be playing records then. I came home with my refurbished turntable, which like all machines, was very happy for getting the attention, and put on the Boz Scaggs classic, “Loan Me a Dime.” Wow. Listen to the cymbals. They are so clean, extending perfectly up into the high frequencies way beyond the range of our hearing without any of the choppy hash that dogs lossy digital processing. Of course there are also quite a few clicks and pops from this album, which I bought sometime in the early seventies. And my I-Pod has more music on it than all of those vinyl records combined. Nothing is a panacea! Richie Cole, Merle Saunders, Igor Stravinsky personally conducting his Sacre du Printemps; all came alive this afternoon because there is a local source for turntable parts and service in Portland. And that’s not all. Over the years I have taken advantage of local Portland sources for electronics parts, pneumatic swivel casters, electric motors, washer and dryer parts, black Formica, neoprene plastic, white artist’s tape, trick line, and so many other things, all easily found within a couple of miles of home. All these things are also available in LA, but miles and miles apart. Manhattan probably also has such a large concentration of riches in such a small footprint, but no other place I can think of does. Dang, my homer is coming out again! Steve Miller’s ethereal “Songs for Our Ancestors” comes on with loud crackles. It has a big thumbprint on it. I can’t find my Discwasher! It’s been lost since my turntable was last operational. Not to worry. Fred’s carries them!
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 05:01:38 +0000
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