vintage gear

The greatest audio and video products of the 20th century

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when audio and video products were introduced that were so revolutionary that their impact was felt literally decades after their introduction.

Take the JBL L100 Century. It was the first speaker I fell in love with. Its brilliant orange "waffle" foam grille and white 12-inch woofer looked so cool in the early 1970s when the competition's speakers were all drab brown boxes with boring cloth grilles. The JBL was the ultimate "rock" speaker of the era, so my Hendrix and Led Zeppelin LPs never … Read more

The ultimate tech nightmare: time to clean out the wire box

Everyone has a wire box -- that container you toss random wires, plugs and other tech junk into. It's generally all the useless stuff that you just can't bring yourself to get rid of just yet. Being in "the biz," my wire box is actually a set of four interlocking plastic storage containers, which had become a serious closet hazard, to put it mildly. Here's how I spent part of my MLK weekend -- the dreaded annual wire box cleanup.