Incense and Radio Shack

©2015 by John LaTorre

For the past year or so, I’ve been jamming with some friends in a sort of open-mike situation at a local art gallery. The venue does not lend itself to unamplified acoustic instruments, so I’ve been building pickups into my most recent crop of instruments. I usually bring a guitar and a mandolin, and it’s been a problem having to plug both instruments into the house board. So I decided to acquire a little gadget called an A-B switch, which is basically a box that allows you to choose which instrument you want to run into the house sound system. You plug both instruments into the box and run another cable from the box to the board. Then you can simply flick a switch to determine which instrument you’re going to amplify, without having to unplug anything. Easy peasy.

I got online and found that these little gems can cost from forty to a hundred dollars new, and not much less used if you can find them. That price seemed steep to me, considering that it’s essentially three jacks, a switch, and a box to put them in. Sure, they’ve got little light-emitting diodes that tell you which instrument is “hot” and that requires a battery and a battery holder and a few more wires. But forty dollars?

As it turned out, I spent a lot less than that, because my local Radio Shack store was going out of business, as part of the sweeping downsize that followed that company’s recent bankruptcy. Everything in the store as at least half off, with many components going for almost a quarter of what their list price was. I walked out of the store with everything I needed for about ten dollars. The only thing that they didn’t have was the switch itself, which I bought for another ten dollars at another electronics store.

I am no stranger to soldering things together. When I was in college, I’d built several audio components from the kits that were widely available to the hobbyist at that time. Those were the days when a number of companies were offering high-quality electronic gear in kit form, and you could build them for a fraction of what they would cost completely assembled.

As I wired and soldered the various parts of those kits into place, my dorm room would be perfumed by the smell of the rosin that was incorporated into the solder I used. It’s very much like incense, that smell: sweet and musky at the same time, pungent and addicting. A well-made solder joint is a thing of beauty, with just the right amount of solder forming a satiny sheen over the wires and terminals, and without clumps or globs of excess solder. It also meant that the connection would be reliable and trouble-free, which is paramount to the success of the project. Over the next year or two, I would build a couple of audio amplifiers, a tuner, a pre-amplifier, a voltmeter, and a bewildering array of switch-boxes for hooking up the various components. Sometimes I’d need to adapt a project for some particular use, and a friend of mine, who was an electrical engineering student, would make a quick sketch of a circuit for me. It was up to me to translate that sketch into reality. But mostly I just built the kit straight off the plans that were provided by any number of companies. And, in those days, there were a lot of companies that sold these kits.

 Radio Shack sold a variety of kits under their Archer brand, mostly consisting of test equipment. Dynaco sold high-end components, in both kit and completed form, which competed with the best audio equipment that you could buy off the shelf. Allied Radio and Lafayette Electronics, who were the major players that Radio Shack was in direct competition with, had all sorts of kits for the audiophile and engineer, which could be bought by mail order or at any of the storefronts they maintained in major cities. Other manufacturers focused on the ham radio market.

And at the top of the heap, lording over the field, was the Heath Corporation, a company that started out building kit airplanes before World War II and drifted into avionics after the war. Their first kits, for test equipment like voltmeters and oscilloscopes, were instant best sellers. After that, they branched out into kits for audio components, musician’s electronics such as guitar amps and mixers, and finally computers, which put the latest in technology into the hands of any kid with a soldering iron. The Heathkit catalog, packed with page after pages of cool stuff you could build in any garage or dorm room, could be found in the hands of a hobbyist or student in nearly every high school and college in the land, and was probably studied as lasciviously as any edition of Playboy by the audiophiles and techies among us.

All those companies are gone now. Electronics kits, once a billion-dollar industry, are now relegated to simple gizmos like LED flashers, buzzers, and other toys tucked into the corner of your local electronics supply center (if there is indeed one of those in your town anymore).  You can buy more specialized things like power-supply kits on-line, but they are marketed to the techie, not the hobbyist. Ironically, in a culture where we are more dependent on electronics than ever, we have ceded control of the crafting of them to large companies and now receive them in the form of finished components.

I don’t know why. Maybe it had to do with the reduced scale of modern electronic components. When I started getting interested in electronics, before the days of the integrated circuit, semiconductors were the new kids on the block back, but most of the other parts in your average radio or hi-fi were the same ones that my dad grew up with: resistors, capacitors, tubes, potentiometers, and switches. Putting those parts together in different ways was how you got them to do different things. Now those parts have been reduced to invisibility, thousands of them crammed onto a microchip. When I pop open a radio nowadays, there’s scarcely a part I recognize. And I used to know them all. I could actually tell a resistor’s impedance by reading the color bands on it, without the need for a legend, thanks to my experience with kits.

One of my first jobs after I left college was working in an electronics parts store in Arlington, Virginia. It was technically a wholesaler, selling tubes and television antennas and such to the various television shops in the area, but anybody could walk in and buy stuff. If the customers didn’t know exactly what they wanted, somebody on the staff would ask a few questions and usually be able to sell them the right part. The Pentagon also had an account, since it was only a few miles from our store. Once in a while we’d get one of their telephoned orders for various electronics parts. We’d fill the order and, by and by, somebody in an Army vehicle would come by to pick them up and whisk them away, presumably to use them for classified projects. That was not the sort of thing we were supposed to ask questions about.

Due to my experience in building kits, I’d already had a passing familiarity with many of the components I sold, and I completed my education by taking a discarded television completely apart, resistor by resistor and capacitor by capacitor.  I would spend my evenings dissecting that television, filling the air with the incense of melting solder and noting what the pieces looked like so that I could provide the right part when asked for it. Of course, those were the days when it was actually worthwhile for a skilled technician to repair things like televisions and radios. Now it’s more cost-effective to simply replace them.

And that, I think, was what led to the demise of the kit industry. As integrated circuits took over, the cost of the electronics gear plummeted. You no longer could save money building a kit, because the parts themselves would cost more than the finished product, unless you could make your own integrated circuits. And your radio or boom-box or computer now comes with a warranty, something that no kit manufacturer could provide, since they relied for labor on clueless people like you and me.

So their market dwindled. Radio Shack bought out Allied Radio, and Circuit City bought out Lafayette. But the market was changing swiftly, and even these large companies found themselves competing with big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, and Best Buy, which treated electronics as just another commodity, like toilet paper or dish towels. Circuit City was out of the picture by 2009. (It appears that my old employer in Arlington closed down at about that time, too.) Radio Shack is holding on by its fingernails by promoting mobile phones and batteries, but continues to be a place where the hobbyist could buy a switch or a pack of resistors. I doubt if that will continue much longer, although I hope it will.

I finally got the A-B box built, sweetening the air of my garage with the familiar smell of solder, a scent that brought back memories of unpacking kits, checking their contents of neatly packaged wires and transistors and such, completing each step and putting a check-mark in the accompanying box to mark my progress. Now I was working from a schematic I downloaded from the Internet, but I didn’t need an instruction manual now. I found that I still had my soldering skills, and except for a minor wiring error that I easily corrected, all went well. I even built in a nine-volt battery to power two LEDs that tell me which instrument is going to be amplified. They’re not really necessary, but since they only cost me an extra buck or two, why not?

And some day I’ll find a use for those other parts I bought for forty dollars or so. I couldn’t pass up a 70% off deal like that, and I’m sure I’ll find a use for them somewhere. I’ve smelled the aroma of hot rosin again, and who knows what I might end up building?

[Note: since this article was written, it has come to my attention that there is still at least one purveyor of high-end audio component kits. It's called Akitika, and their web page can be found at http://www.akitika.com/index.php

I don't have any personal experience with them, but they're worth checking out, I think. The people on the various do-it-yourself electronics forums say good things about the company.

Another thing: the electronics store I mentioned in the third paragraph went out of business about six months after I posted the article. And our last Radio Shack in Sacramento is gone.  For parts, you have to go to Fry's Electronics here in Sacramento ... and the Internet, of course.]