There is an increasing trend for independent bars and pubs to support the current revival in vinyl music. If you go to the Robin in Crouch Hill or the Marquis in Covent Garden you’ll see staff pulling pints and slapping on vinyl records from the collection behind the bar.
A recent trend has been the growth of “listening bars” where interesting music is put on high quality sound systems as customers relax with drinks (generally craft beers and cocktails). This genre began in Japan and now London has a number of listening bars like Spiritland in Kings Cross, Brilliant Corners in Dalston and All My Friends in Hackney Wick. The nearest thing to this is Tuesday night at the Antwerp when the vinyl decks come out and we mine our supply of donated and brought in vinyl records.
Our collection of donated records has grown with some significant free dumps of previously loved vinyl. Despite this we lack many great artists (still no Bob Marley, Bowie or Black Sabbath to name a few). Given our limited storage we now need to do a weeding job on what we’ve got. We’ve got lots of compilation albums and albums that we might not ever play (how many Neil Diamond albums do we need ?). So our “vinyl committee” now has the hard job of deciding if we need some of our long players to return to a local charity shop.
If you have an old piece of hi fi kit that isn’t working then we might be able to fix it for you - like we did recently with an old turntable we acquired.
Our three year old Audio Technica deck mysteriously stopped working and despite our best efforts we haven’t been able to fix it yet. We’ve relied on an old Pioneer deck borrowed from a committee member to play records. So we’ve been on the look out for a new deck.
Somewhat fortuitously a committee member noticed a WhatsAp posting on a local site offering a free “stereo” . The photo was hazy but it looked like a turntable under its vinyl lid. So we collected the item hoping for the best.
To our delight the “stereo” turned out to be a Thorens TD150 mark 2 deck which was manufactured between 1969 and 1973. Thorens was a leading manufacturer of high end hi fi equipment back in the day. Their gear was designed in Switzerland and manufactured in West Germany. The engineering is superb.
The new Thorens arrival
The power wiring was via a weird two pin continental adaptor. So we put a plug on the deck. Having downloaded the original instruction manual we took the back off the deck and checked that the electric supply was set to 240 volts. We switched on and were pleased to see the deck rotating at 33 and 45 rpm and the tone arm lifting mechanism was still working after being in a box in a loft for many years.
The tone arm came with a good quality Shure cartridge but was without a stylus. So we sourced one from eBay for £18. We also bought a new rubber drive belt for £8.95 as we thought the old one was a little perished and slack.
So if you come to the pub to play some vinyl you can now do so on our lovely 55 year old Thorens deck.
