Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Growing Up in The Late '70s Through The '80s With A Love Of Hip Hop Music Leads To One Kind Of Collection: Boomboxes! Status: Check One Two, One Two...Can I Hear You Say Ho!

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Party people in the place to be - I'm Mr. Modtomic, I'm not an MC. I do collect Boomboxes though!  Actually I've wanted to start a boombox collection for EVER.  Even longer than I've been collecting vintage modern furniture.

Yeah baby! Livin' the dream! I'm finally starting to find these vintage '80s boomboxes for

cheap. To tell you the truth...I'm finally starting to find them AT ALL!!! Cheap or otherwise. You

know how the cars you grew up with during high school become the iconic cars of your life and

if you were to start a collection, it'd start off with the baddest car that was available when you

were like 16 or 17? Well that's what it's like for me with boomboxes. So you'll never see a CD

player on my boombox. Or an 8 track. Cassettes were king. DUAL cassette dubbing machines

were like GODS.

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The big guy here is a Magnavox. Not exactly what you think of when you picture a Boombox

right? Love the ingenuity of placing a one BIG speaker in the middle presumably for mono bass

output. Bigger speaker = bigger BOOM!

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This is my baby. It was the first of the collection and it's the big brother of the first boombox I

bought when I was like 15 years old. My first boombox was (and still is...I still have it!) a JVC

PC2
. This one is a JVC PC3 which, after the speakers are removed, can be broken down into a

small shelf system. The upper tuning and amplification half of the center section can be

separated from the cassette section on the bottom. Set them side by side and place the

speakers farther apart and you have a mini shelf stereo system.  By the way, this is supposed

to have white speakers like the Panasonic below but they were rotted out and I had to replace

them with some KLHs that I found at...yup, the thrift store.  What is up with white speakers and

the '80s?

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Picked the Panasonic up at the Wentzville Flea Market a while back. It was real cheap. There is

a mar on one of the speaker boxes. Something made the plastic melt. No biggie. I'm not looking

to start a museum. I just wanna have some cool boomboxes! I think these are gonna get put up

in the garage so I have some tunes out there when I'm rearranging everything to fit one more

chair or table in. The great thing about all these boomboxes is that they all have "line in" inputs

so that I can hook up an MP3 player or whatever.  They will never be outdated!

4 comments:

  1. hang on a second here... Where the heck did u find that Magnavox?! I've always been fascinated by Ghetto-Blasters and I even carried one around with me all the time during my senior year at a military school of all places (I was able to because I used a loophole in the rules and I hardly ever got in trouble so nobody cared If I blasted some tunes every once in a while) But I know that those particular Magnavox's are really hard to find and expensive when you do. I used to dream about have a massive ghetto blaster like that Magnavox or the even rarer SANYO MR-X20 or the Sharp GF-777 and even the famous DiscoLite. Man I love Ghetto-blasters! I do have a Ghetto-blaster that has a record player that ejects from the bottom and I can play 33s and 45s on it! It's pretty wild! But I'm Jealous of your Magnavox D8443...

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  2. yeah, I'm with Mr.Fizzle, that Magnavox is badass!

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  3. I bet you anything the melted part of the Panasonic is from a curling iron or hair dryer! It was so great to finally bring your tunes into the bathroom while you made your bangs stand up on end. : )

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  4. I had one of those Magnavox boom boxes in the 80's. Despite it's large center speaker, the thing really didn't have much bass and sounded pretty flat. It looked impressive though.
    Wish I hadn't sold it at a garage sale all those years ago! Funny the things that become collectible later in life.

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