Lloyd Taylor

Lloyd was the CFO at Electro Sound -- let me guess -- starting about 1981, for two or three years. He left Electro Sound for Dahlgren, a company bought by Ray Shaffe (sp), the former CEO of Electro Sound. Dahlgren build and sold what was at that time a high tech computer controlled engraving machine.

Lloyd and I became friends and keep in touch.

Lloyd is still in the sign business, he uses a Dahlgren (and other equipment) to make signs, badges and such for retail and wholesale customers.

Lloyd has a daughter, and two grandchildren. He is now mostly based in rural Marin County, also has a presence in San Jose, Calif.

Jody Wilson Smith

Jody (my ex) worked at Electro Sound for years. She was in material planning — making sure that engineering documents matched productions build list and such.

Jody now lives in Los Gatos, Calif, and (we) have a son Nick, who is now 20 years old, and attending school in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Lee Cotterill

Lee worked at Electro Sound for many years. Started in the assembly department as I recall, and was in Engineering when he left Electro Sound.

Lee was responsible for much of the mechanical design of the ACL as I seem to remember. The ACL was the Automatic Cassette Loader, a machine about the size of a recording slave. It had a turntable on the top plate, this turntable held four audio cassettes, it could do one operation on each turntable station at the same time — for some fast throughput.

Lee is married, living in San Jose, and has a daughter.

Martha Lopez

Martha Lopez worked for 22 years at Electro Sound. When I was there Martha had several positions: I remember her being charge of the stock room; also I believe Manager of Production. I kind of remember Martha being in Purchasing. Martha had some of her children working at Electro Sound — her daughter Maria worked at Electro Sound as I recall.

These are pictures of an install in China back in 1987. Bob Fonda and myself installed pretty much an entire tape duplication plant. Electro Sound 8000 bin loop, slaves, QC machine, audio cassette loaders, air compressor and dryer and other bits. As I remember about the only part of the package that we did not install was any of the studio or mastering equipment.

We flew into Zhengzhou (near Xian), then hired a cab to the factory that was located in Shangqiu.

One of the pictures shows Bob in discussion with the cabbie; another pic shows me in a car taking a picture of Bob in the back seat. The last picture shows Bob Fonda with the 8000 master and some slaves, apparently offering instruction on the operation of the Power Bin.

I was in China for about three weeks, Bob stayed longer. I remember getting on a train heading to Shanhai with my escort — who did not speak hardly a word of english! The airport was chaos, people waving and yelling trying to get on the flight, and with no one to help me or answer questions. It seemed kind of like what one imagine with old fashioned Wall Street trading. I really felt alone. I remember thinking that if I didn't get on the plane, I would be out wandering the streets of Shanghai lost, alone and in big trouble!

Magnafax Bin Loop Duplicator

Here is a picture of a Magnafax seven slave bin loop duplicator. The Magnafax sat on a table, positioned so that the bin could hang down the end of the table to floor, the bin on this has been removed and is pictured behind.

The Magnafax competed against Electro Sound — but only in the low end of the market as I remember. Magnafax was a low cost, simple and compact design, manufactured in Arkansas as I remember.

REPLItech

Here is a ball point pen labeled: Compliments of apex machine company REPLItech International 94. Most all my blog readers can guess that I received it from apex during the REPLItech held in 1994.

It seems that apex machine company used only lower case letters in their name (I wanted to start a sentence with their name but I rewrote the sentence as I do not how how to start a sentence with a word that is supposed to be lower case).

REPLItech was the duplicating specific trade show that became the default trade show for the duplicating industry — having wrestled duplicators away from the then industry stand show (whose name escapes me right now, starts with the letter A).

Electro Sound Documents

Pictured is what I remember as the 'new' master at Electro Sound, designed after the 8000 series. It was to be the replacement of the 8000 master; designed to be used with the new 4800 slaves.

It operated at a faster tape speed, had several vacuum chambers, and was supposed to be the New Faster Whiz-Bang. It was never produced.

The Start

I worked at Electro Sound for many years. I thought to start a blog to reminisce, and I hope and expect Electro Sound alum to provide pictures and words to this project.

I moved some years ago and ended up dumping some of my pictures and such — I will search and post what I can find.

The first picture is of my son Nick posing in front of a Versadyne slave pair stored in my brother's garage in Sacramento. My brother and I bought the equipment of a closed duplicator in Washington State and resold it. Most of it anyway...