Hello everyone!
One day when I was a little kid, I found one interesting book in my dad's library. It was about some things they called "Video LPs".
Now, many days in the future, I realize it was mostly about CEDs and mentioned LDs too. But back then, the fact that you can have concerts along with music on an LP amazed me so much, I decided that I must by any means get hold of such a device in my life.
LDs were not quite a thing in Russia. Back in the 90s, when they appeared on sale here, many people couldn't even find the money to buy something to eat -- not to mention paying a huge grand for a movie player, and then another 60~90 bucks for a movie.
Fast forward 13 years to 2015, and it seems like my dream is about to come true. Somebody was giving away a Philips CDV496 locally. They didn't even know what it was, and just wanted to get rid of it, so I rushed to be the first in line to get it. Sadly, it was badly misaligned, or just the caps and etc started giving up -- it barely even played CDs, constantly trying to tilt farther than it could, skipping and making awful noises of a crushing tilt drive gear. Not to mention, I had no LDs to try it on.
This started a long journey of evenings and nights at the bench with a bunch of tools, ordering glass discs for alignment at local glass work plants, which lasted for roughly 6 months, helping me to go through a tough period in life, by being something that I would do every time I don't know what to do.
But in the end, it was dead. It stopped focusing on CDs as well, and no matter what I put into it, it wouldn't detect it. After all this time, it was hard to accept such an outcome.
But it started a fire in me. I knew that I must now, anyhow, get a hold of an LD player and at least some movies. Especially after watching a lot of Techmoan, and their episodes on LDs, and specifically Pioneer's combo DVD+LD series. All these mechanics, dual side playback, it all seems like a miracle, somewhat as beautiful as a Nakamichi RX505, but hidden inside the case.
I visited Japan in 2017, and surprisingly, there weren't many LD players in second-hand shops, unlike I expected. And those that were up for sale were very expensive, so after putting all my funds into arranging the trip, I just couldn't afford even paying for the extra luggage to take one with me, let alone buying one. So I almost gave up...
(Though there were some interesting ones, such as this Karaoke-LD-Cassette-playing-TV-speaker-table :-)
Until one day in 2018.
I met a girl online -or maybe she met me, I'm still not sure- she's got an R2R machine recently and wanted to get it back to spec after doing a recap. So I proceeded to answer her questions, we talked about different things tech-related, and I got to mention the LD format and those rare Pioneer combo players.
And then she says something like, "Oh, are they rare? We've got one here at our university waiting to be tossed for years now".
And so it was straightforward.
Before that whole story, I wasn't really sociable at all, and I didn't even know there's much life around Russia besides Moscow, let alone anything about Siberia.
I hit up Skyscanner in an instant, got my tickets to Tomsk, not even really thinking about where I will even live there.
That was an interesting week, pretty much as saturated and as awesome as you can have in 6 days. Walking around the historical architecture of Tomsk, talking about things like the difference of sound across the Yamaha's OPL generations, even building some electronic things together, and so on, and so on.
In the end, that desire to get hold of a certain format got me through a tough period in life, I got to find out that Siberia can be way hotter than many places unlike the stereotypes say, I got to make some close friends, and get the exact player model I wanted as well.
Probably a bit more fun than just buying one on ebay and hoping it arrives undamaged, I guess? :-)
So I hope it's just the start of it all. Long live LD and let the fun continue!
Ouch, this post is getting a bit too long... should be a bit easier with some photos :-)
* All photos in the post, except for the book cover, are by me and you are free to use them as long as you keep the link to the original author.