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Comment by css | Hacker News Reader

Vintage technology is often far more repairable than modern. My turntable and all the equipment I use with it included schematics and booklets with information about how they operate. Even cars used to be like this, but that has mostly been lost in the interest of operational simplicity.

Almost all of my old household appliances included schematics, but new stuff only includes operational instructions. It makes me sad we have lost this culture of tinkering.

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On the other hand, I now have less things. I don't own a turntable anymore and no product replaced it. My phone has replaced tens of products which would have been dedicated devices before. Now I have one unrepairable phone that I replace every 4 years but thats probably less waste than buying things individually.

My main sound system is a Leak Delta 70 from the early 1970s. It was an absolute joy to work on and bring back to life, especially the turntable which is a rebadged Lenco with a wonderful drive system I'd never seen before. It uses an idler wheel (which is still the original, it hasn't perished like they often do in cheaper ones) on a cone-shaped rotor. The speed selector is a slide with little protrusions at 16, 33, 45, and 78 rpm which slides the idler wheel along the cone-shaped rotor. That means you can choose any speed between the common ones giving you pitch control way before that was common.

Despite being nearly half a century old and an uncommon design it was literally an afternoon to get it up and running again after it'd spent over a decade in my neighbour's garage. Ridiculously well made bit of kit.

This is because you cannot copyright schematics (you can only as a painting - connections between components can't be copyrighted, except if something was very unique you could get a patent). So the instant someone produced a successful device, a clone was being made. It was more difficult when products used microcontrollers etc, but some companies in China would just copy the original firmware, and maybe change here and there.

Plus we can rely on survivor bias! The stuff that’s still working was clearly built very well. The stuff that wasn’t isn’t working.

“flight proven”

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