Rudy’s Bio

This page will eventually contain a history of my musical interests, a rundown of the audio and video equipment I have encountered over the years, and a chronology of my online activities to date. A little bit is covered in the “About Rudy’s Corner” page.

Musical Bio

I grew up amongst an eclectic assortment of records. Dad was into the easy listening, Bossa Nova and polka records, where my mom was more adventurous and listened to mambo (a la Perez Prado), jazz and Latin music. Her favorites were Cal Tjader and Burt Bacharach. And one thing my parents shared was an admiration for early A&M recordings–we had every Tijuana Brass, Baja Marimba Band and Burt Bacharach album, and a few by Brasil ‘66 as well. For some reason, I gravitated toward the Tijuana Brass albums and listened to those quite a bit. Even though I had my own “kiddie” records, I still preferred to spin a stack of A&M LPs on the old Admiral hi-fi in the basement, standing on a chair beside it, all of three years old. My first record player was one of those GE “suitcase” portables, and my first 45 was the Herb Alpert/TJB single “The Christmas Song” b/w “My Favorite Things”. Mom reported a loss of bladder control on my part, having been so excited at the gift!

We also had a few of Henry Mancini’s albums in the house. Mom also had a handful of Harry Belafonte’s recordings, and a couple of interesting 10″ LPs. One of these was an RCA disc from Mexico, containing eight of Perez Prado’s early mambo recordings. Another was Moondog & His Friends on Epic. Mom certainly was the eclectic one!

My real musical “coming of age” happened with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and a local station, WMJC, that played a three or four hour disco program every Saturday evening. Shortly thereafter, the station WLBS, “Disco And More”, hit the airwaves, and it was my #1 station for years. I started buying 12″ singles, one or two every week, and the occasional album; thus began my first “serious” music collection, where the records would always go back in their sleeves, stored alphabetically, etc. Today, a lot of those 12″ singles are worth serious money. The Chicago “Street Player” easily gets well over $100 on eBay these days, as one example!

In tandem with the disco and dance music, we had a jazz band in junior high and high school, and I was also listening to the local station WJZZ. So, in addition to the occasional Maynard Ferguson album (his charts were always the “coolest” to play), I was buying some of the jazz and fusion music I was hearing on WJZZ. Back then, Jean-Luc Ponty, Stanley Clarke, George Duke and others were my favorites.

All the while, I was still keeping an eye on A&M Records. I still bought all of Herb Alpert’s solo recordings (seeing “Rise” hit the top of the charts was a thrill), and the first rock record I probably bought was Styx, Pieces Of Eight. I owned a couple of others, but this triggered a complete collection of Styx recordings that I’d amass by the time I got out of high school. With my R&B and funk background (via the disco), I also soon had collections of Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder (1972 onward), and many others I enjoyed. In addition, I was an avid reader of Stereo Review, and a couple of their Record Of The Month selections actually triggered entire collecting trends for me. For example: my liking of Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly led me to discover Steely Dan, and the Phil Collins Hello, I Must Be Going kept me up with his solo recordings, and also led me into Genesis and Peter Gabriel.

What really kicked my musical interests into high gear were two things: used record stores, and the CD. I always bought my recordings new, mostly from Harmony House and Peaches. But once I was working full time, I discovered Car City Classics and started buying used records…I could get a lot more for my money! Used records had another important function: they allowed me to pay a couple of bucks for an album I considered buying on CD. More often than not, I ended up enjoying the album enough to replace it with the CD!

I was an early adopter of CDs. My first three, in fact, were Earth Wind & Fire’s Powerlight, Phil Collins Hello, I Must Be Going and Give Me The Night by George Benson. While I bought the CDs early on, it took me six months to find a player I liked, for a price I could afford. I settled on a Hitachi, which was the same unit as the first Denon CD player. When I finally got the player, I probably owned 15-20 discs by then. Because there were not many CDs available in those first few years, I read a lot of reviews. Especially Wayne Green’s excellent “Digital Audio” magazine, which changed names into “CD Review” within a few years. I was discovering a lot of music, and taking chances on music I’d never heard before…and ended up liking a lot of it.

Thankfully, I had a good local source for domestic and import CDs. Anyone who shopped for records in the 80s surely remembers Sam’s Jams! Their CD buying was excellent–I had UK releases of albums very close to release day, and I bought many early CD imports of albums that would take another few years to reach CD in the states.

Once I got online with Compuserve, and discovered their music forums, some of my musical purchases were fueled by what I’d read and discussed with others online. I found a couple of fellow A&M Records collectors, which rekindled my interest in the early A&M albums I’d grown up with, which in turn led to expanding my collection of other artists I’d grown up listening to. Aside from my TJB and A&M collection, I have a large Henry Mancini collection that must number somewhere around 60 titles. Since my mother was into Cal Tjader, I began buying up whatever Tjader vinyl I could find, and grabbing the CDs that were reissued on Concord, Fantasy and Verve. I then inherited an entire collection of Cal Tjader albums from a chance encounter online, and now have all of his albums, which probably number in excess of 70 titles.

Other interests were discovered through one-off purchases of albums I took a chance on. I borrowed Pat Metheny Group’s Letter From Home from the library, and soon found myself buying up anything of his I could find, and he’s among my favorite artists today. Jean-Luc Ponty is a favorite of mine back from my high school days, and I’ve kept up on all of his recordings over the years. The Donald Fagen album The Nightfly led me into Steely Dan and a few side projects of theirs. A single Phil Collins purchase led me to follow Collins, along with discovering all of his albums with Genesis; Peter Gabriel was another interesting sideline that grew into a collection of its own. Earth Wind & Fire was another big interest–I may not keep up on everything current, but I have all of their classics from the early years, and all of the Columbia albums. The Stray Cats’ first US album, Built For Speed, sparked a collection that included their first two UK albums, and I’m now keeping up on all of Brian Setzer’s solo projects and recordings with his full-blown big band.

The list of artists I’ve dabbled in include everything from A to Z in just about any style imaginable, and I have complete collections of dozens of artists, too numerous to mention right now!

Audio Equipment Bio

My first memory of playing music at home was standing beside the old Admiral hi-fi in Dad’s basement, stacking records on the changer. One Christmas when I was three years old, I got my own portable GE “suitcase” record player, and my mother reported a certain loss of bladder control over receipt of this gift, which included a 45RPM single of Herb Alpert’s “The Christmas Song” b/w “My Favorite Things”. Around 1969, we finally got a stereo system–a huge Magnavox console with AM/FM radio. The “good” stereo records I was not allowed to play for awhile, and they had to stay upstairs on the Magnavox. In the interim, my mom’s aunt gave me her old VM Triomatic console, which was a neat compact record player system that sounded better and could fit in my bedroom. I soon started getting a few of my own LPs in stereo, and I ended up saving my money and buying a small green GE stereo for my bedroom. Of course, this still didn’t sound good enough.

Around the time I was 14, Mom had redone the living room and bought another Magnavox console, this one smaller and more up to date. And I was into playing with electronics. (My grandfather and uncle were both avid Heathkit builders.) My Radio Shack catalogs were constantly being flipped through, and I soon wanted a real cassette deck. After having a problem with a top-loader, I ended up with their then top-of-the-line deck, and had it hooked to the older Magnavox console, as I didn’t have any other system to connect it to. I also got a Realistic Lab-50 turntable (made by BSR) for Christmas, and after buying a phono preamp for it, plugged it into the upstairs Magnavox. After I built my own two-watt amplifier from a kit in the Radio Shack catalog, and used a couple of speakers from parts salvaged from the old Admiral, I had a makeshift system in my bedroom.

For my birthday the following year, I got a pair of Realistic speakers–8″ woofers with cone tweeters. They had decent bass for their size, but the two-watt amp wasn’t cutting it. At the end of the year, Radio Shack used to dump the old year’s audio components into their “Where Is, As Is” sale, and clear them out. They had a gold-faced integrated amplifier, 25 watts per channel, that was in this sale, and I scraped together enough money to buy it. (I believe it was the SA-1000.) I finally had a decent amp and control center, and the speakers sounded much better. There was a matching five-band equalizer I bought for the system also. The tuners were also on clearance, and several months later I bought the matching tuner for a mere $60. A very nice looking combo!

The speakers did not last me more than a couple of years. The woofers couldn’t handle the disco music I was pumping into them, so I ended up bottoming out the woofers. Still had the turntable, but dumped the cheap Shure cartridge for a Grado. I wound up heading out to Woodward Ave. to hit all of the audio salons, and after deliberating on my $300 budget, I came away with a pair of Grafyx SP-10 speakers. And during another Radio Shack clearance sale, I picked up their very first direct drive turntable.

Around the time high school rolled around, things still weren’t cutting it for me! I took the turntable out to Absolute Sound (where I bought the Grafyx speakers) and they mounted up a newer, better Grado cartridge for me, and gave it a proper alignment. And the tape deck wasn’t doing me much good, so I first bought a JVC that was unremarkable, and I took it back in trade for a Harman/Kardon, which I still have today. (Sort of…after a few repairs, I convinced H/K to swap me for a newer one, a CD-301, which still sounds fantastic today.)

The 25 watts was also not cutting it. Despite what everyone told me, I went and bought a Carver M-400 power amp, “the cube”. Because I had no preamp, I got into my Realistic integrated amp and modified it to send out the preamp signal. Well, it was louder, and it rocked! It wasn’t until high school when I got my Hafler DH-101 preamp kit, put it together, and was impressed at how much tighter everything sounded. And because I had some spare money, I bought another pair of the Grafyx SP-10 speakers, this pair having a nicer cabinet (real wood veneer vs. vinyl). I still own both pairs today!

So I’d been out of high school a year or two, working full-time, and upgraded the cartridge. Enter the Shure V15 Type V. Even today, it’s hard to surpass this cartridge–it can track just about anything I throw at it! It originally shipped with the “HE” (hyper-elliptical) stylus tip, but a year later, the MR (Micro-Ridge) stylus tip came out, and I upgraded. I could also do better with the turntable itself–I got a Grace G707-II tonearm for my birthday, and purchased a Walker CJ55 turntable to mount it, and the Shure, on. Things sounded much better now!

CDs came along in 1983, and it wasn’t long before I had a Hitachi CD player, first generation, same model as the first Denon. It worked OK, but wasn’t all that fast, and it started to get flaky. The portable Sony D-5 became my second CD player, and the Nakamichi OMS-7 became my third. That one didn’t last very long either! By 1989, I purchased a Magnavox 6-CD changer that held me for a few years. I added a DAT deck in the early 90s to archive my LPs, and also a used Sony CD player with digital output to make my own digital compilations on DAT.

By 1995 or so, I’d gotten tired of fighting the Walker turntable, so I found a used Denon DP-1000 direct-drive turntable on Usenet and set my tonearm up on it. I first had a Sony reel-to-reel deck around the same time, but then picked up a better Teac A-3300S deck that’s built like a tank, and takes the larger 10-1/2″ reels. Good deals at the Sony outlet netted me a MiniDisc home deck, along with a dual-well CD recorder. And on eBay a few years prior, I picked up a used 8-track deck, which is in need of a good tune-up. Along the line, too, my Carver M-400 started buzzing, so I picked up a Carver M-500 on eBay, the one with the dark front panel and huge analog meters. And shortly thereafter, got the Hafler DH-110 preamp. (The DH-101 is now doing duty as a preamp for recording projects to the computer.)

In 1997, I added a Pioneer 101-CD changer to the system, and in 2003, a Pioneer Elite DV-45A for playing back SACD and DVD-Audio. As I don’t have a true surround system yet, I’m using a 100 watt Kenwood receiver in “direct” mode to power rear speakers for my 4.1 surround system. Until I can find a true analog multichannel preamp with a phono input stage, this setup will have to work for now!

I’d added video gear to my system starting in the mid 80s. I bought a mid 80s top-loading Pioneer laserdisc player, followed by a top of the line JVC VHS deck, the first one ever to have HQ video circuitry, hi-fi sound and stereo MTS broadcast reception. The Sony KPR-36XBR was my rear-projection set, which failed on me a few times. The early 90s brought along an Onkyo add-on unit that gave me center and rear Dolby Pro Logic surround from the movies I bought. And then, a Hi8 video deck to go along with my Hi8 camcorder. By 1997, I’d bought a DVD/LD player, and a year or so later, a Toshiba DVD-only player. By 2000 or so, I picked up a pair of JVC S-VHS decks. And aside from a much better DVD player

To be continued…