General Music Chat

Head stock is in the pics below.

If you are going to do that, buy from guitarfetish.com - best deals on Chinese bodies and components, and their premium pickups are good, too.

I wanted to see body weights and body wood types. Nothing mentioned on most any of them. "What is drop top?" I notice they don't use the word veneered. Are they photo tops where a picture of wood is laminated to the tops?

Rondo Music sells their cheaper guitars with photo tops, but they look very real until you ding through the finish. I have played one of them and it looked, played, and sounded great. Rondo guitars are made very well. Rondo guitars play good, they sound good and the wood work is as good as the finest guitars. But best of all they sell for pocket change. You can purchase some of their guitars completely assembled and finished for around $99. The finish is as good as any high priced guitar, at least on the one I played.

I told the guitar player in the neighborhood about them and he bought one in the $125 range. He liked it so much that a few days later he had another one on order. A good thing about Rondo is that they tell you the weight and the body woods used in the guitar you are considering.

I had thought about purchasing one just for the parts. The pickups, the tail pieces and the pick guards as well as the necks and bodies would be great for spare parts if you are building a guitar.

"The ad says mahogany body and neck w/ rosewood fingerboard"

Perhaps that would be true if you only looked at one guitar and did not explore the site. I didn't strop at the cover. To quote them:

"We also chose really good quality woods. Choose from lightweight Pauwlonia, Solid Figured USA Sourced Ash, dense and toneful Mahogany or sweet White Poplar."

And you are also wrong about Rondo. I think I am a qualified enough musician to judge a guitar on playability sound and construction. I was a repairman for over 50 years, and I certainly have found Gibsons and Fenders that did not impress. The Rondo I played was better than a lot of those.howbeit that production methods have also improved since those days. You scoff and say that they are junk. You are as entitled to your opinion as I am mine. I have heard from more than one purchaser that would disagree with you, as I do. .For the quality at the price point they are hard to beat. Their high end models are at the least something to covet. I have seen one of their high end basses and it was amazing.

My Bad.

I thought you were saying that they were crap. I hit post before I realized that you may have been saying something else but I can not edit my posts after they are up as I can't find an edit tab. Regardless they have great quality whammys, tuners, pickups and other stuff on them if you ever break something on a high dollar guitar.

":Dude, you take everything too seriously. Lighten up for a change, OK??" And you make a big deal out of misunderstanding of a statement that clearly could go either way.

As far as your telling me to lighten up.. Stick it where the sun don't shine. ..

"I'm popping jokes over here, man.................."

OK I'm down wit dat, peace man. Misunderstandings on line come easily.

I had foam edges on some speakers but something caused them to get brittle and disintegrate. A few of them went bad while in their boxes having never been used. I'm real skeptical about foam edges these days. It may simply be something in the air they do not agree with. It has happened to some of my woofers and some squakers, 8 in all.

I liked my Echoplex a lot in its day. They sounded fairly quiet for a unit that didn't have any type of noise suppression to subdue the tape hiss. Had they used commanding or noise reduction circuit more people would probably still be using them. Although a commander or a simple dynamic noise reduction system could be easily added.

I made a dynamic noise reduction system for my video tape player. National Semiconductor makes a chip for that purpose that needs only a handful of external components. I designed mine so it could be switched in and out with a mini toggle switch. It is a National Semiconductor LM1894N chip and most likely you can find the circuit on line. It takes only 17 components in all including the LM1894N. It did make a great deal of difference in the amount of hiss from my VCR tapes. They went from crappy to tolerable. How about this, I found it for you.
http://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-p ... 1894N.html

Yes, good cables cut down outside interference but they don't do much for the tape head noise. I believe that the signal to noise ratio on those machine is pretty poor by tape deck standards. At one time I thought I would use a Dolby noise reduction circuit in my home made echo, but that was a [pretty complicated compander circuit using quite a few parts making it not worth the trouble to me. When National came out with this chip I went for it.

I tried to download the pdf from the site above but they sell it evidently. However, should you wish to see how simple it is to make, here is a legitimate link that has the circuit right on the page, and I also downloaded the pdf from this page. It shows the unit wired for stereo (Very simple) so you would only have to use 1/2 for the mono Echoplex.

I designed two circuit boards with stereo circuitry as in the schematic and daisy chained them for twice the noise reduction. That really quiets a tape signal without effecting anything else. You might want to download it in case you run into someone who has a little experience. It really is a simple project. To utilize it you simply hook the output signal to the DNR input and run the DNR output to your amplifier for a really quiet Echoplex. You can even use the DNR with noisy FX pedals and it will tame them.

At least at this link you can see how simple it is to build.. LM1894 Dynamic Noise Reduction System DNR

http://www.datasheetlib.com/datasheet/2 ... uctor.html
or
http://www.datasheetlib.com/datasheet/5 ... uctor.html