General Forum

Re: Gramophone magazine archives

soundproof — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:33:08 GMT

The Quad 6000 review kind of shows B&O the way of the future. They managed back then:

"ANY readers who have noticed the price in the heading of this review—and who are nevertheless prepared to read on—will have realised that the Beosystern 6000 is a very ex pensive audio system indeed. It may be asked why we devote space to such a luxury product when so few readers can possibly be in the market for it? Well, our answer is that the Beosystem is technically of great interest and a study of its features may well provide pointers to the way other equipment (at hopefully lower prices) will go in the future."

I'm in the process of finishing my review of the styluses that Peter sent me, and looked up my Beomaster 5000 on Gramophone. You'd be hard pressed to find this kind of performance today - +/- 0.2dB from 20Hz-20kHz. B&O should be pushing the envelope, like they did back then.

Re: Gramophone magazine archives

Cleviebaby — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:45:41 GMT

The Gramophone used to be the source of review for classical music, highly authoritative with, in most cases, really well written reviews. Their equipment reviews, usually no more than 2 or 3 a month, were undertaken by technically knowledgable music lovers with test equipment, most of whom were very sceptical of some of the 'emperor's new clothes' hype that gained credence in the late seventies and early eighties.

I remember reading a review of the Beovox 2702 in the early seventies that prompted me to go and listen to a pair that I eventally bought. Much later, in the early nineties, they wrote fairly nice things about the BS2500 that intrigued me - at the time the design was pretty radical. I stll have that system in the office!

Lost it's way a bit over recent years, as has the classical recod industry, but the archiv is a real treasure trove.

Cleve

Re: Gramophone magazine archives

j0hnbarker — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:02:16 GMT

Great this Mika :)

Loved the review of the Quad Beosystem 6000. Now looking through for reviews of all my other older gear!

Re: Gramophone magazine archives

vikinger — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:56:21 GMT

Great find Mika. Didn't realise that this mag was still in publication!

Some odd errors in their index though.. search for Beomaster 1200 takes you to April 1971 but there's nothing on the page that's relevant (Pickering cartridges in this particular case.) Lots of reminders of the equipment B&O was up against in the 70's.

Now going to have to spend too much time going through these archives. Might even register.

Graham

EDIT: found the Beomaster 1200 on 3rd page (after following arrows at bottom of 'Pickering' page.) So search takes you to first page of article and not necessarily the page with the B&O ref.)

Re: Gramophone magazine archives

burantek — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:21:02 GMT

Spent some more time there! Really great stuff!

So far, I have hit the BM1000, 4000, 4400, 5000 and so much more left! Thanks again!

Re: Gramophone magazine archives

tournedos — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:12:56 GMT

BTW the navigation is a bit funky - in addition to selecting the pages, you should select the area of the page to read (hover your mouse over the page image, and you'll see). Took me a while to realize why some texts were so terse!

Re: Gramophone magazine archives

burantek — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:51:50 GMT

OH! How cool is that!

I did the obligatory search for "Olufsen" and in seconds was reading about the BM5000 tuner from a 1968 article!

Thanks!

Gramophone magazine archives

tournedos — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:45:35 GMT

Can't understand why I've never found this before - perhaps the service is brand new? - but Google just pointed me to the archives of the Gramophone magazine, which has been published in the UK since 1923. Lots of interesting reviews in there, especially on the (now) vintage products!

The older issues have seemingly been published through some OCR program, and so the text contains a lot of errors. Apparently you could register and see the original pages in PDF.

"No matter how pro-British one feels, there is no denying that each new product coming from B & 0, until recently a comparatively little knownfirm in Jutland, now takes an increasing share of our own and the world's markets. They do it in the best possible way, by sheer merit of design and unusual value for money." (July 1965)