Remember those Radio Shack catalogs?

1963 catalog shows an MC275 for $444

 

Look at the '59 catalog- a Garrard 301 turntable is listed for $87.22. Yes, back in the day RS sold name brand very high quality hifi. by the 70's I didn't know a single person with a Realistic receiver, etc, as who wanted that when you could buy a Marantz, Sansui, Pioneer, etc. when they went to sourcing their gear from who knows who, well, it was over.

Sometimes you did know what you were buying- Realostic LV-10 headphones were rebranded Koss HV-1a's.

 

Radio Shack also sold some rebadged (I think) Shure cartridges in the '80s. Or maybe co-badged. I bought one for my Sony linear tracker, a P-Mount - it was great.

 

Dang - that is a blast from the past.

I remember having the catalogs with Arthur Fiedler on the cover.

As a teenager in the 70's I had both the Radio Shack and Lafayette catalogs to wish over....and no money in my pockets...

 

It was Charles Tandy that made it Radio Shack corporate policy to get rid of the "brand" names and , and private label Radio Shacks own brand. he was a pretty smart businessman. By having the audio equipment made overseas, he acheived sales margins that other chains never came close to. While Tubes were still a strong item to sell, he was getting 60% sales margins on them, which was incredible.

 

They did sell co badged shure cartridges

 

Unfortunately, many of the tubes were seconds or overruns on industrial special runs. The former were seconds for a reason and often had poor performance or life. The STRs could be superior than the tube they were substituted for, but not always. Some of those special runs traded off one thing for another or had modified gain or other parameters.

They did have a good warranty, but you had to take them back and wait for the replacement to come in.

They also usually had a tube tester, but "smart" managers would tweak the calibration so that good tubes would read marginal or bad so as to sell more.

You got what you paid for, just like DAK's repackaged instrumentation tape.

 

Doh, don't remind me of DAK tape. (A friend of mine in Tarzana lived across the street from Drew Alan Kaplan's house, and explained that he had been the guy who founded DAK -- using his initials.)

I can recall all kinds of bad open reel tape in the late 1960s/early 1970s: Shamrock, DAK, Memorex, you name it. Awful stuff.

I wish somebody would do an entire website devoted to the Lafayette Radio catalogues. Those were really cool, much more detailed than the Radio Shack catalogues.

 

Found an '84 DAK catalog online!

https://archive.org/stream/1984-Fall-DAK-Catalog

I remember this one! Never bought anything from them, though - always sensed it was overhyped junk. Was fun to read though...

 

DAK (the founder was Drew Alan Kaplan) sold a variety of things but their initial 'success' was in buying a huge quantity of unused (Ampex, I think) magnetic tape and respooling it on smaller consumer deck reels. The tape was not of poor quality: it was tape designed for instrumentation or telemetry purposes rather than audio recording. It worked, and if you could bias up correctly for it it worked semi-well, but never as well as good audio tapes and most purchasers had neither the ability nor inclination to bias up for it. He conveniently never mentioned this, of course.

A similar deal was the film companies that respooled negative color 35mm cinema stock for still photography use. Again, it worked, but not as well and even then only if you knew what you were doing.

At least "DAK" is euphonious and nonoffensive. Good thing he wasn't named, er, "Richard A. Gertelsman", or something. (Richard has since changed the name of HIS company to TestEquity.)

 

It was.

 

That it was. My friend, Mr. Kaplan's neighbor, told me that DAK had gone out of business because Kaplan way, way overbought a whole bunch of bread-making machines at the height of that craze, and gotten saddled with far more machines than he could ever sell, putting the company horrifically in debt. I think more bad decisions followed and DAK wound up going under around 1994. Kaplan has since revived the company and I think it still exists in some form.

The great thing about DAK was that Kaplan wrote terrific copy for the descriptions of all the electronic gadgets he sold. His catalogues were pretty amazing, little mini-magazines that got dumped in your mailbox every 3-4 weeks. A lot of the stuff he sold was overhyped junk, but he had some real discoveries from time to time. And I used to laugh uproariously at some of his writing.

 

I worked for a company that made the bread pouch mixes for the first wave of bread machines, they made a killing on those, so much so they sent us all to an all expense paid 4 day trip to Disney World, less than 5 years later they lost their **** on bread machine mixes as off shore suppliers had seriously undercut them.

 

Olson had some cool catalogs back then too.

 

Wow, I forgot all about the DAK catalogs I got in the mail, never bought anything, they seemed like a lot of hype to me back then.

 

Their V15 was a great value and sounding player.

 

Right, the Olson Electronics catalogues were like little 4-color newspapers. Very interesting company. I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that Olson at one time had more stores than Radio Shack (!), but they were sold to Teledyne in 1968 and then went under around 1985.

My memory is that the slitting was very bad on DAK tape, and it also had a ton of dropouts. Not good. It's fair to say their consistency was all over the place. I had much better luck once I moved to LA and bought used 1/4" tape from the pro recording gear companies in town, and there was tons of it in the late 1970s. Those were the days...

 

Wow, that is surprising, must have been a regional density thing. IIRC We only had 1 Olson store in our area back in the day, but 4 Radio Shacks, 1 was fairly big with a large speaker room, the rest were smaller, dealing in more of the little electronic parts.

 

According to Kaplan, the bigger problem was their high-volume, low-margin business model. US banks just wouldn't lend to him. The Japanese did, until their bubble burst - then they closed down DAK's line of credit. And that was the end of that.

 

I literally remember every single page of the 1979 catalog. Thanks for posting this link!

 

I love that the DAK catalog qualifies as "over-hyped." What will we do when the next Avengers movie comes out and we're swamped with Stark Industries catalogs?

I was fourteen in '84 and I didst covet the Smart Sound Detonator.

 

Loved pouring thru those DAK catalogs. When I was 13 I wanted the BSR 24 band EQ so bad I could taste it. Talked my parents into getting it as my one and only present that Xmas. They warned me that I would be bummed to only have one gift under the tree while my sister had multiple smaller ticket item. "No I won't," was my reply. 33 years later that EQ still resides in my stereo rack. I wonder if my sister still has any of her gifts from that Xmas?

 

1965 catalog- interested in a Mac MR71 tuner for $399? Or an MR 67 for $299?

AR turntable? $78.

 

The DAK catalogs were great...i really looked forward to getting them every month. I remember the cassette tape that was touted in the catalog as being just super. I dont think I ever bought it.

I did buy a couple of phones, an EQ, and several other things. I miss it!!

 

I have a 1976 STA90, a wonderful sounding receiver, and a 1980 STA-2080 a really great sounding one too. Also have several of their speakers from the early to mid 70's. Enjoy them all.