Tech HiFi

Their house brand speakers were called Studio Design. Seemed to be similar to some Ohm designs. Then again, wasn't the owner of Ohm involved in Tech Hifi also? If so, little surprise.

 

I think the owner of Ohm used to own Tech HiFi as well. At any rate, the theory behind that Lincoln Walsh driver is now also used in some German speakers whose name I do not recall. Apparently, the patent has expired ...

 

I still have at least one Tech HiFi catalog from the mid to late 70's. Tech HiFi was quite instrumental in introducing college students to hifi, both in NYC and Cambridge. I actually was in the Cambridge MA store once but was not too impressed ...

 

Too bad I have never visited any Tweeter stores. Didn't it have quite a number of stores in NE?

 

I loved my first Nikko receiver and I believe Micro Acoustic speakers.

Bill

 

And I have a pair of Ohm F's sitting in my garage in need for restoration! The surrounds of the Walsh drivers are in need of replacement and my brilliant son shot a BB through one of the drivers- the papers portion.

 

I think Ohm provides the restoration service. Here is the link

http://ohmspeaker.com/

 

They can't rebuild F's. The have a replacement driver but you no longer have a Walsh system. The story is that the last guy who knew how to build a Walsh driver retired 30 or so years ago.

 

I bought a pair of Advent speakers at the Cambridge store while in college, after the salesman tried hard to upsell me a pair of Bose 501s. Those Advents were my first glimpse of audio nirvana and served me well for years.

 

I thought all the new Ohm speakers continue to have the Walsh drivers ...

 

I would have been a lot happier with a pair of Advents than with a pair of Boses, though I have owned neither ...

 

Here is the Tech Hifi ad I posted 4 years ago:

 

And another ad from 1983:

 

Here is a picture of the Kenwood integrated amp I bought at the Tech HiFi near Columbia University back in the late 70's. I gave it away to the Salvation Army in the late 80's to make room for new equipments ...



It was a decent amp, though a mid-fi amp at best.

 

Tech HiFi distinguished itself from two other types of audio dealers, the snake-in-the-grass type or the extremely snobbish type which is only used to selling expensive gears to Wall Street bankers ...

 

I wish this store was still around, they were a decent place to hear decent audio gear back then...

 

Too bad I can no longer upload scanned images or I would scan in a few pages of my Tech HiFi catalog ...

 

That is something I would have liked to see......wish I had not tossed out my old catalogs from 77-79. I always liked the systems they put together at different price points, as well as the background info of each piece within the system.

 

I forgot about Tech HiFi's excellent catalogs especially the systems they put together as you mentioned. I'd love to see one of those catalogs as they'd bring back fond memories . When I was a kid it was the annual Sears catalog at Christmas time that I spent hours reading and dreaming over. As a teenager it was Tech HiFi's catalogs that replaced the Sears catalog !

Bill

 

Someone has take the time to upload the entire 1980 (I think) catalog from Tech-Hi-Fi:

 

That looks just like my first amp, I got it in '79. I don't remember the model number but the control layout was identical.

 

I don't think we had Tech HiFi down here, but we had a bunch of mom & pop hi fi stores back in the late 70's.

Not any more!

 

I had that back in 1979. KA-907 and KA-9100, great amps though they all sounded the same. Memories. John M.

 

IIRC, Tech HiFi stores were mainly located in the northeast, though there were some stores in Michigan ...