Some eye candy from Allied, 1969

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charbee

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I found a really well-preserved copy of a catalog that I used to love to peruse as a kid, the Allied Radio "Electronics for Everyone" 1969, on eBay . Scanned some pages from it and slapped 'em up on a basic webpage with a little editorial blather. I'll try and get some more scanned and upped soon, but in the meantime, there's everything from Barzilay cabinets to Polaroids up to drool over...hope y'all enjoy.

 
Cool!

I have Dynaco PAS 3X on page 475. I still don't know if I want to restore it to original or upgrade it like most audiophiles are now doing to them.
 
Cool!

What a great catalog! I used to have a Polaroid Swinger camera like the one in the catalog. Thanks for the memories!
 
These guys were great, also Lafayette...

I built two Dyna PAT-4s, the transistorized successor to the PAS-3X. First one was stolen in a burglary in Okemos MI. A few years later, the second one was stolen in a burglary in Tucson. By that time (1984) I don't think you could still get the kits. In any case, I abandoned the separate components at that point and have used integrated receivers since then. I had the Dyna FM-stereo tuner stuck in the closet for 20 years. I got it out with the intention of offering it on Craig's list but before I got the chance the cats chewed through the antenna wire for the AM section and the power cord. It went to the landfill instead.
 
I actually got to shop in their main store on N. Western Ave in Chicago when I was a teen.
The store was about the size of a small size Sears store. It had speakers listening rooms near the front door, then tape decks, amps and tuners and finally turntables towards the rear of the store. It was an L shaped layout.

On the second floor was the service department along with the credit department. Back then, if you wanted to take out something on credit, it would take you 3-4 days to get an approval! I should know as I bought my first Knight Kit, a Star Roamer radio ($39.95) out on credit. The payments were the minimum $8.00 per month! My parents thought it would be a good lesson for me. They co signed for me.

Anyway when you got to the area where they had those consoles, the entire area smelled like oiled walnut stain. And oh my goodness. I am still running a pair of AR-3a speakers. I overhauled them (none of the parts needed replacing!) and refinished the pair. They sell for more than the $225. now than they were advertised for then.

In college our theater department bought a Knight Kit reel to reel tape recorder as a kit. He had me and another guy from our drama class put it together as a "extra credit" project after school. It took us about 10 days to do it. Of course he supervised the project. It was a lot of fun! Especially when it was used for sound effects during some of our school plays.

Directly across the street was an Olsen Electronics store. Compared to the Allied Store, it was more like a flea market. Allied was laid out like a department store, Olsen was laid out like a dime store. They both carried very similar merchandise.

When I went off to college out of state was the last time I was in Allied (1970). One of my favorite growing up memories.
I think there was also a Lafayette Electronics store about a block or two away. The 100-300 block of N. Western was like audio/ham radio row!
Thanks for putting up those pages! How wonderful!
Do you have any pages with Dual turntables on them?
 
Glad y'all are diggin' the catalog...and thanks to all for sharing your memories, too.

I'll try and scan some of the turntable and cartridge pages next...they were my favorite things to look at. Over the years I had a few, one of my faves was a Garrard "Zero 100C" with that crazy pivoting cartridge head. It didn't last as long as I wanted it to, and I settled into a fine German Dual 1219 with a Shure M91-ED about 25 years ago and haven't ever looked back, except to collect a couple of 1229's too.

As for speakers, I'm hooked on Dynaco's Danish delights...They all featured butyl rubber-surround woofers, so they will NEVER rot, and their tweeters are still held in high regard...spread over several different systems, we've got two pairs of A-10's, 3 pairs of A-25's, and one pair each of the A-35's and A-50's. I'm saving the 35's and 50's for a "megasystem" after we get our family room built...it'll be powered by four Stereo 70's. At the moment, we've got two ST70's set in mono mode (one for left and one for right) going through the PAS-3X, each one powering an A10 and an A25, and this is our main TV/music system for now. When I first hooked up a pair of Dynaco speakers to the amp, I was floored by the sound...heard things I'd never heard before in the music...instruments I'd never known were being played, everything so well defined!

And yeah, some of the prices may seem high for the time, but others are so low as to seem silly these days. Tubes (especially vintage tubes) are going for upwards of $200 for a quad of EL34's on eBay...it's insane!

I'll get some more scans up soon!
 
Scans

Hey, can you scan some more of the turntables and record players? Looks like they sold Garrards.

WOW! What wonderful stuff. I like those EV speakers with the 2 12" woofers, 8" midrange, and cone tweeter.

I bet they sounded phenomenal!
 
One of my cousins had that Norelco cassette changer. It wasn't very reliable; it jammed a lot. Of course, part of the problem was that the cassettes available in those days were cheap, flimsy, lo-fi things intended for dictation machines. Cassette didn't come into its own as a hi-fi medium until the late '70s.
 
Here's more...

OK...spent a little time this afternoon and scanned some more pages. Ended up splitting them over four separate web pages. There's a link to the next page at the bottom of each, and a link to get you back to page one at the end.

So, just go back to the same link, and scroll down to the bottom and click on to the next page.

Enjoy! It's been great fun reading everyone's memories/comments! I'll probably post some more later, but this oughta keep ya busy ;-).

 
I love this stuff! I used to pore over those Allied and later Radio Shack and Lafayette catalogs all the time. Ah, those turntable deals with cartridges for a penny! I always liked those Garrard changers. I have a Zero 100; it’s cool but very fussy. Don’t use it much these days. Actually, I would like to find a good working Garrard model with the semaphore size selector because I always thought it was an elegant design. An AT-6 or SL-55 would be nice. Those Dynaco speakers are great. I have a pair of A-35s that I use to this day and haven’t found a speaker I like better.

It looks like those portable record players were VM?

Enough from me. Thanks for posting these pics. I really enjoyed them.
 
1969 is a few years before I got interested in stereo equipment. We went through several turntables, a couple portable (mono) cassette recorders, and a Zenith stereo turntable. Saved a LONG time for that Zenith, mowing at my dad's business & rental property, birthday money, etc. My first "real" system was JCPenney MCS equipment. I still have and use the turntable, with a Shure V15 Type IV cartridge. Are styli still available for it?
 
DADoES, I was a few years behind you. I didn't buy my first good system until 1979, which was near the end of the golden era for component audio. I went to Circuit City with $1000 in my hand and bought, all in one swipe, a Phillips N2535 cassette deck, a Technics SL-230 semi-auto turntable, a Kenwood KR-4070 (I think that's the model #) amp, and a pair of Lyric speakers (they were a Circuit City house brand, manufacturered by Fisher). Man, I was the dude among my peers for the next several years after that.

29 years and nine moves later, I still have most of that system. The speakers are long gone, replaced by a pair of Cerwin-Vegas in the early '90s after the crossover circuits failed. The cassette deck still works like new. The turntable's start-stop mechanism doesn't work well anymore, and the motor speed control is a bit flaky until it warms up, but it still plays. (I've replaced the neon strobe bulb twice.) The amp was working until last year, when something failed in the left channel; I think it lost a pre-driver transistor, but I haven't found the time to trace the circuits and try to figure it out. Eventually I will fix it.
 
FA-F3-20:

It sounds like your Technics turntable just needs a cleaning and relubricating. After years, the old grease gets stiff, causing the turntable to bind and jam up. It's a pretty easy job to do.

I think the Golden Era of audio ended about 1985-86. That's about the time most major audio manufacturers stopped putting their R&D money into stereo and started spending it on "Home Theater". Also quite a number of audio companies failed during that time period as well.
Around 1990 or so we had the "I don't care what it sounds like as long it is cheap and makes some kind of sound" phenomena began.
 

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