Braun Atelier amplifier

TEST DATA. It started with a deck I could not afford, in 1984, secondhand even then. I had a shelf I had built for books and no books worth putting on it, so the deck went there, and that is the shelf this whole thing grew out of.

I was working nights at the time. You come home at six in the morning and you cannot sleep straight away, so you sit with headphones on and listen to a side of something, and after a year of that you start to hear the difference between machines. That is how it happens. Nobody sets out to own fourteen of anything.

Everything after that went on the same shelf, and when the shelf filled I built another one above it. My wife counted three at one point and said nothing. She counted nine about four years later and said something.

I never sold one. That is the part people find odd. The old one simply moved up a row, and the row above that, and eventually up to the loft, but it never left the house and it never stopped working, because a thing that stops working gets fixed. I can solder. I am not a technician and I would not pretend to be, but a belt is a belt and a capacitor is a capacitor, and most of what goes wrong with this equipment goes wrong in the same four places.

The receiver is the one I would keep if I could only keep one. It came from a man in Schiedam who was emigrating and wanted it gone that weekend. It had been serviced properly, once, by somebody who knew what they were doing, and you can tell. Whoever ends up with it should leave it alone and just use it.

I kept the receipts. All of them, in the boxes, with the date and what I paid written on the back in pencil. I do not know why I started doing that and I am not going to claim it was foresight. But it means that for almost every piece here I can tell you exactly what it cost and exactly when, and that felt worth handing over with them.

What I did not want was for this to be sold as a job lot to a dealer who would split it up and put it on a marketplace with a photograph taken on a kitchen floor. Forty years of Saturdays deserves better than that. It does not have to be a museum. It just has to be honest about where it came from.

So take the shelf as well, if you want it. I built it badly in 1984 and it has held up better than I have.