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Glenn McDonald - Opinion Piece - Vintage Manuals and the Death of Vintage Hi-Fi

Glenn McDonald is a terrific vintage audio technician. He is well-known on popular audio forums as echowars. He is also someone whom we recommend on our Service Sources links page. During the summer of 2007, Glenn posted this article on AudioKarma for folks to consider.

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Opinion Piece - Vintage Manuals and the Death of Vintage Hi-Fi (Please Read)

Need a manual? What do you do? Who do you look to? A free online PDF? Or do you prefer (as I do) a good printed reproduction? Well, it is possible that manuals for many of the more uncommon vintage receivers, amps, preamps and oddball add-ons may disappear before too long.

Why is that? Consider that those who sell reproductions of service manuals survive on sales of the most popular gear. Pioneer SX-1250’s, Kenwood KR-9600’s, Yamaha CR-2020’s, Marantz 2275’s, and so on. You get the idea. But these people are also the keepers of documentation for the weird and unusual items of the vintage genre. The Tandberg TR-1040A, the Yamaha UC-1, the Luxman M-6000, the Rotel RB-5000. I could list hundreds of these esoteric pieces...gear that we’d seriously like to own and would buy in a heartbeat if the opportunity came along and the price was right.

But what do you do when this esoteric piece needs work? You don’t have a service manual, and your tech probably doesn’t either. You head out on-line, hoping to find a free one (which is doubtful), but you’d be happy to pay nearly any price for a decent copy. Lo and behold, that place you heard about that sold manuals is no longer doing so and has gone out of business. Nobody can help, nobody has one. And if your tech is like me, he hasn’t got the time to reverse-engineer your gear (its bloody hard work to do, and prone to major errors, not to mention the fact that YOU are going to foot the bill for his time to do it). The vendor stopped selling because all the popular manuals are available for free online somewhere, or as cheap protected PDF’s that too many have decided are ‘good enough’.

Never mind that a downloaded PDF may be a horrid copy. Never mind that a manual on your computer is tedious (at best) to use. Never mind that you have to pay $60+ for inkjet ink for your printer, so that ‘free’ manual is not so ‘free’ if you decide to print it out and use ¼ of your ink cartridge. Never mind that you have to print out schematics in bits and pieces and tape them together if you want a hard copy because your printer is limited to 8 ½” x 11” paper. Never mind that double-siding is almost out of the question, and single-sided printing of any manual over 20 or so pages makes it an incredible PITA to read. It was ‘free’, right? So you got a deal...

Those who make free manuals available online do so ‘for the good of the audio community’, and I have every reason to believe that their intentions are altruistic. But I don’t think very many of these people has considered the real danger that this does as a whole to the hobby. And those that sell PDF's online often (make that: usually) sell the PDF with pass-worded protection to limit what you can do with it to protect their interests, and since the manual is coming off their rented server space and they are generally charged according to server activity, it is in their best interest to keep the document as small as possible (read: poor copy quality).

Those who sell printed and bound manuals are not there to ‘rip you off’...they are a business like any other...offering a product at a price that they hope will make it worth your while to buy. And the ones that want to stay in business will do everything in their power to make sure that you are happy with what you bought. But, as I said earlier, what keeps their business alive is the sale of the most popular manuals...the ones you are most likely to find online in PDF form, perhaps free. For every Rotel RB-5000 manual they sell, they sell 1,000 Pioneer SX-1250 manuals. (StereoManuals added note: We don't suppose any vintage manuals vendor ever sold 1000 manuals for any model. More likely a few score or hundreds at best and that for probably less than a dozen models). Yet they sit there with that Rotel manual tucked away in a file cabinet, ready and waiting for the time that some poor slob like me needs it...and those slobs like me are eternally grateful that they have managed to stay in business long enough to make it possible for me to buy a copy from them, otherwise that beautiful amp is pretty damn unlikely to ever get repaired.

So I want you all to think about this a bit. How much sense does it make to buy that wonderful Pioneer SX-1980 that you’ve been wanting for so long, and paid $2000 for, yet when you need a manual you have some aversion to spending $30 for a printed copy and download a free one? How much sense does it make to buy that great Marantz 2385, just like the one you sold to a buddy back in 1982 and have kicked yourself for selling ever since - yet even though you value your time greatly you spend 4 or 5 days combing the web trying to find a free copy of that manual? How much sense does it make to spend even $15 on a PDF purchased on the web or through eBay for a questionable scan of a manual, when you could have a printed copy in-hand for $10 or $20 or $25? How much sense does it make to buy a PDF where printing a single page or copying and ‘blowing up’ a section of the schematic cannot be done because the seller has protected the document? (No, they are unlikely to tell you this up front...you get to discover it later when you really need that manual.)

I’ll tell you right now, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Those who love this old gear like I do have to realize that it isn’t just the owners of the equipment that keep this hobby going...we need guys who also love the gear and who understand the electronics enough to fix ‘em when they have problems. We need manufacturers to keep producing parts that can be used to replace the originals when they go bad. And just as much as we need these things, we need guys who have collections of thousands of manuals, some common, some extremely rare, so that when you finally buy that über-rare piece that had a total production run of 250 you can still find a service manual for it. Because the death of these manual sellers will be just as fatal to your piece of gear as that unobtainium part that dies, or just as disastrous as when you learn that the only guy who knew the piece well enough to fix it has retired and can’t help you.

No, we’ll never get to the point where you can’t find a manual for your Pioneer SX-1250. But won’t this hobby get awfully damn boring if the only gear we can keep running is the stuff that manufacturers sold tens of thousands of? Use your brains, gentlemen. The spokes of the wheel that keep this hobby going depend on your seeing the big picture.

Thanks for letting me rant.

EW





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Service Manuals, Schematics, User Owner Operating Instruction Manuals, DIY Electronics Repair Info, Brochures, Vintage Audio, Classic Audio & Newer. Consumer Electronics, Pro Audio, Musical Instruments & More!

Glenn McDonald - Opinion Piece - Vintage Manuals and the Death of Vintage Hi-Fi