I Spoke to the San Francisco Audiophile Society at the California Historical Radio Society

two, two hour sessions, September 14, 2024 condensed down on this video

The San Francisco Audiophile Foundation invited me to speak about whatever I wanted to talk about, in two, two hour long sessions held at the most fascinating and packed with cool radio and hi-fi gear, California Historical Radio Society. No, those are not my legs. Mine are actually better. Those two records are part of a multi-record set issued by Riverside Records in which they cut up a single long shot into three or perhaps four album covers. The records were part of a 4000 LP collection belonging to San Francisco's "easy listening" radio station K-FOG that were given to the SFAF.

SFAF President Leslie Lundin had them at her Orinda, CA home during my visit and I spent hours going through it finding a lot of "shlock" but also much great stuff! I brought some of what I found to the event and talked about the records and how I approach picking through a large collection.

There was a lot of "shlock"—Percy Faith, Montovani, etc. but also some really interesting records like:

The venue was a fascinating place! Part museum, part active educations center, part repository for most everything electronic involved in audio and video throughout its history. They have a fully functioning "vintage" radio station control room in-house, a huge collection of vintage audio gear, juke boxes, ephemera and "stuff" including a huge vacuum tube collection, old radios, turntables and even ham radio gear.

For instance this device automatically produces the famous NBC chimes. It's one of two. The other one is/was in New York. It works!

This enormous Wurlitzer 78rpm jukebox from WW2 uses only wooden parts. All metal parts, including the mechanism and coin slots were taken from scrapped machines.

Here's a collection of vintage tubes. Downstairs they had the ones you'd be interested in. There's a large, fully functioning repair and educational center where free of charge young people can learn about electronics.

An endless supply of great stuff to look at

I spoke about the state of vinyl, about what I've lately learned about turntable set-up, how I picked through the huge record collection and also about the record I released Rufus Reid Presents Caelan Cardello and Patrick Leonard's extraordinary It All Comes Down to Mood for which I "shepherded" (produced) the vinyl release.

It was a fun, two day trip during which we visited San Francisco record stores, two near the corner of Grant and Green