Finally, at last, my nickname

[bgadow]

I'll have to read more about V.E.F.

It's a long story but in short, my birth mother was originally from Latvia. I discovered this in 2014 and am still trying to learn about the country. I'd enjoy someday having a radio that was made there.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by bgadow

It's a long story but in short, my birth mother was originally from Latvia.

I once had a boss who was born in one of those Baltic countries. I said something to the effect that I saw a map of Europe and it looks like it's a state like New Jersey, New York or Connecticut in the USSR. That put me on his shjt list. Hey I didn't know that those countries were conquered in a hostile takeover. I'm a generic white trash American, I'm not gonna know every detail about every other country of the world. He turned out to be a bad boss anyway, but not as bad as the one I had a Bell Labs... But I have had good bosses.

[bgadow]

The story goes that my grandparents, who were upper middle class in prewar Latvia, had to go into exile when Russia & Germany started playing ping pong with the country during WW2. Slowly they worked their way to the US, always hoping to return home. Sadly, I don't think my grandfather (who I never met) lived to see a free Latvia again.

Some pretty nice looking VAF radios on ebay, mostly 80s era. Someday I'll break down and buy one. My wife suggested maybe a European VK'er might want to trade me even up for something American.

[Telecolor 3007]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUXN...ature=youtu.be

[maxhifi]

LOTS of Soviet electronics were made in Riga, speakers, reel to reel and cassette tape decks, moving magnet hi-fi cartridges, radios, record players, TVs, etc. Some of it is really crap, and other stuff is surprisingly good and even innovative. I think that a part of the Soviet 5 year plan must have been to set up Riga as a consumer electronics manufacturing area, because that's what they seem to have done. I would like to get my hands on some of their better MM cartridges, just to try out in my SME. They are more or less Ortofon knock offs, but what the heck, worth a try!

I have one Latvian radio, which I picked up in Belarus about a decade ago, a Selga-405as per this link http://translate.google.ru/translate...se.narod.ru%2F It is an unremarkable AM transistor radio, which does a decent job of entertaining me in the evening. I changed all the electrolytic capacitors, and a couple of transistors to lower noise.

I think globalization has made the world homogeneous and less interesting. I was recently in Moscow and struggled to dig up any sort of local electronics. I ended up finding an old radio with the Soviet FM band made by Horizont (Minsk, Belarus), but couldn't turn up any cool newly made local products like they had even ten years ago. Electronics stores now are basically like best buy but with everything in Cyrillic.

One thing which may be handy to know about Soviet electronics. The three digits following the model name mean something. The first digit is the "class", the second two are the model number.

Professional level equipment gets a number like 015, where 0 is the highest class, if it was 115 it would be is first class, or the best consumer level, 2 is still very good, 3 is decent, and 4 is the lowest. They have government standards (GOST) which define performance parameters which determine what class a piece of equipment falls into, and they are directly related to performance specifications. Most consumer equipment is 3rd or 4th class. These numbers will give you an idea what to look for. My Selga radio is 4th class, or the worst... it probably got this rating because it's not very sensitive and has a small speaker.

[bgadow]

Excellent information, maxhifi! I think one radio I looked at was a 340 or some such. The rating system will make my eventual purchase easier.

[maxhifi]

Originally Posted by bgadow

Excellent information, maxhifi! I think one radio I looked at was a 340 or some such. The rating system will make my eventual purchase easier.

Yeah and don't be turned off the lower class items entirely - a lower class means lower performance but not junk. For example a portable cassette deck and a studio recorder are evaluated by the same standards basically, so a mono portable cassette deck gets 4th class and a studio recorder 0. It doesn't mean the portable cassette recorder is bad quality, it just means that judged objectively it has worse performance than the studio recorder does.