The Endangered Repairman

[FredStembottom]

25. I repair old tube radios and amps as a hobby and...

.... There's some important caveats here:

1) doing what I do you soon discover that cheepnis is nothing new. So many parts in the most elaborate and beautiful old 1940,s and 50's tube audio have cheap substitute parts.
Cardboard tube sockets instead of Bakelite ones is just too common and hard to repair.
Beeswax and paper capacitors that just melt over time.
Metal tubes (an experiment in avoiding more difficult glass enclosures). And on and on.

2) one of the great drivers of throw away audio products is that they very soon will have NO PARTs.
All those components hooked together with wires was soon replaced with printed circuit boards ( no wires) then printed circuits (more parts formed together as one part. And now chips. Your iPod is very nearly a single piece. One part. Coming next is software defined radio. No parts except an initial antennae/converter. Software does the rest by simply pretending to be a radio.

So..... My point is that this has been a 100 year process of Cheepnis. but equal numbers of improvements have driven down the size and permanence of things.

Just sayin'