Remember the old DAK catalogs?

Ah man, I forgot all about DAK! As a young teenager, I used to read those catalogs pretty much cover to cover. I will admit, I did try their cassette tapes once - ONCE!

 

Yeah, they're tapes were pretty crummy. After I tried them, I stuck with TDK.

 

My XL-1200 turntable (a DAK purchase back in the late '80s) is still going strong.



Not my main table, but it still gets some use in the basement studio. For a 'plastic wonder', it actually performs quite well. Very low IGD, especially on 45s.

 

Here's a beauty that I purchased from Drew many years ago, and it still looks new. I no longer use it because I now live in a valley surrounded by mountains (actually very large hills, but they call 'em mountains), but I don't have the heart to rid myself of it. Love the vintage stuff...





...and believe it or not I still have the receipt...

 

10-13 to 10-21-1982, eh? i was around eleven months old at that time!

'fraid i'm still pretty much in diapers compared to the median average age
of the typical HOFFMANite!!

 

I bought a Sound Feeder SF100 from DAK, after seeing an ad in some magazine like Sound And Vision. For my purposes, it did indeed do everything I wanted it to; my '85 Olds Cutlass Supreme only had an AM/FM radio, and I wanted to be able to play my Discman while I drove. The Sound Feeder used a low-powered transmitter and allowed me to "broadcast" my Discman onto 87.9fm, and it would supply AC power to the Discman itself. And the unit did indeed work like a charm...

...for a short while. Then the one wire connecting the lighter-jack to the SF unit started shorting out. Can't blame DAK; the unit did as it should. It was just sort of cheaply manufactured.

 

Remember the Blue and Red K-Mart brand blank cassettes? That is all dad would buy me as a kid. If I was really good I would get a Certron. The best cheapo blanks I bought were a brand called "Tracks". They sounded pretty good. Once my dad purchased me a Memorex blank 60 minute cassette (the ones with the funky case) and it sat for weeks because I could not make my mind up of what I wanted to record with such a holy grail of a blank tape.

 

were they anything at all like this?

 

Man, seeing that receipt is like a time machine for me. I used to have a Sherwood receiver years ago that looked very much like that. Looking back, I should've held onto it. I dug my LRC-1 out of a box in the garage and located the instruction manual. I'll replace the lithium battery this weekend before I begin programming. Hard to believe I bought that thing 19 years ago.

 

Yep, I remember those days. I was in the range of 11-16 years old then (between '86 - '91 or so).

My oldest brother had a subscription to Stereo Review and Audio magazine. Remember those little tear-out cards they had in them where you could check the little boxes to the various ads throughout the mag, then mail that card in and they would mail you back brochures from those ads? Well he used to let me do that with every new issue. Thanks to me, my family had loads of junk mail flowing into the house on a daily basis! LOL

Anyway, one of those ads was none other than DAK.

I would sit there in my bedroom listening to my hand-me-down stereo equipment from my brothers while browsing through those catalogs, wanting to get this, that and the other in there. A wish list if you will. I really wanted that BSR EQ-3000 because it was identical to my oldest brother's ADC Sound Shaper Stereo SS-300SL EQ and a lot cheaper in price. I was told the BSR unit was nothing more than a re-badged ADC.

ADC SS-300SL


BSR EQ-3000



My brother did buy two of their large passive dbx SW15 subwoofers. I still remember their catch phrase... "Krakatoa Erupts!" Since they were passive and he ran his JBL L112's with them, he powered each channel with a Carver M-400t bridged mono for 500 watts! He ended up cooking the crossovers in the subs a couple years later (they were only rated for 250 watts peak), so he gave them to me. They were very boomy and one-note, so I pulled the drivers out of both, tossed one of the enclosures, flipped the other upside-down, bypassed the crossover, bought a Klipsch 18" pro woofer, mounted it to the dbx enclosure and powered it an SAE A205 amp that my other brother bought from DAK, then gave to me after the two large capacitors leaked their juices all over his rack. The rectifier in it also died.



This is a pic my brother took of the SAE amp...


Well that's it for now. I didn't mean to write a book! LOL Sorry...

 

I was just thinking - I believe my 1987 Teac cassette deck with DBX came from their catalog.

 

I had 2 of the BSR subwoofers and an adcom 555 and some pink floyd/led zepplin.... rail fuses and main fuses in the 555 upsized and the xovers in the subs melted thru the terminal cups... DAK's customer service said that they did not expect anyone to use anything larger than a receiver to power these... I still have the subs, one with an orion woofer and the other with a cerwin vega woofer in it, one in my father's system still powered with the same 555, the other is part of a larger sub system powered by a large qsc amp. I also have the earlier cerwin vega 12 inch sub, it backs up the center channel on my home theater.

 

For any of you guys with copies of these old DAK catalogs, I'm wondering if you could give me a hand. The very first modem I ever bought was a phone/modem with (gasp) speed dial. You basically used the phone to dial the remote system and flipped a manual switch to turn on the built-in modem. Once connected, you were blazing away at 300 baud! It was really one step away from an acoustic coupler. I was telling some friends about that modem and I've love to locate a picture. If anyone would be so kind as to help me relive the past, I'd appreciate it!

 

You may find some info here http://dak2000.com/

 

Whoa, that was always around my house. I'd forgotten.