GREETINGS! Meet Tony Baker – the Yoda of the DJ Deck Fixits!

I always knew I had what the pukka pro audio trade called ‘ears’. If not golden ones, they were not bad.

In an earlier life, had to test every speaker driver and passive crossover in a rubber lined rig of my own making at Acoustic Energy when making the first AE1 speakers, 30 years ago. My test rig was nice and dead and inert with my head in the booth. Made from racking and rubbery sheeting, it housed a posh Technics power amp that had a big old relay in its guts, so it didn’t care if the speaker wires touched sometimes when you were unplugging or plugging-in yet another set of test kit.

For I had a speaker enclosure box with a ‘known good’ crossover and ‘known good’ tweeter with a gap for the bigger speaker, to test the bass units. I had another speaker enclosure box with a ‘known good’ crossover and ‘known good’ woofer to test tweeters. And lastly a box with a ‘known good’ woofer and ‘known good’ tweeter with wires on croc clips hanging out the back to test all the passive crossover assemblies.

One day I heard one crossover that sounded a bit dull and less sparkly than normal. I summoned Jones The Speaker. (The designer who started it all and hired me, ‘rescuing me’ from Pro Audio.) At first he couldn’t hear it, then he could and then measured all the components to find that one resistor was 0.18 Ohm off spec… and I could tell.

Needing the income to pay the mortgage, I figured once the car audio career took off that I could also use the ears to write about HiFi. So I phoned a few people and as soon as they realised I was from car audio, they wanted nothing to do with me. Then one suggested a NEW magazine about that awful thuddy Home Cinema stuff as they used subwoofers – just like you thugs in cars! That title was short lived but paved the way for Home Cinema Choice magazine who did hire me and soon were sending me woofers and speakers.

But here is the cool bit I hadn’t anticipated. In order to test the speakers and subwoofers, I had to have a set of “known good’ test equipment, just like at AE. And the equipment started to arrive. I had a huge AV pre/power amp unit with LOTS of plug holes in the back from Denon suddenly show up. I unpacked it and realised that the huge roll of Esoteric Audio 12ga speaker wire I had stashed in the loft was going to be called upon. Then, it was a Denon laserdisc player and I was smitten.

This wondrous HUGE format delivered sound and images way above VHS and I became deeply interested in the evolution of surround sound in the years that followed. Pro-Logic was awesome and yet when AC-3 came along, (that was later renamed Dolby Digital) you could be on the Jurassic Park Isla amongst the dinosaurs, with them running about behind you! I loved it. And although hugely costly, even main-birthday-present costly, I started to collect movies and any Laserdisc that wasn’t nailed down at the magazine when I made a point of visiting at Christmas to deliver a wee business gift to my editor, Steve May, whom I adored.

But the kit could be expensive (for everyone that didn’t get it sent to them) especially a massive Cathode Ray Tube TV set. Yet HiFi was loved, so there was a slew of owners of big, costly multi channel amplifiers made to do Dolby ProLogic that were suddenly obsolete when the new full-surround Dolby AC-3 models hit. Yamaha and Mission Cyrus owners, with massive investment, were VEXED. And Tony Baker at Videotec was the man who made the UK a leading light in saving equipment and even taking it from obsolescence to actually upgrading it.

Starting with Laserdisc players and later moving onto the upgrading of amplifier equipment, Videotec became THE place to get your kit breathed upon. They were like the medics who repaired Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. (Google that if you are too young) Their efforts made things come back from the dead to be better, faster and more up to date.

Pioneer dropped analogue from their Laserdisc players, once digital soundtracks became a thing on new Laserdiscs production. John Bamford of UK Pioneer was on record for berating his bosses in a product presentation at Pioneer when the Japanese designers came to see them, for making most of the movie collections of their customers obsolete if they couldn’t play the analogue discs any more. Videotec offered a modification that offered up a simple analogue audio output once again for these players and this was popular until Pioneer got a grip and put the analogue output back on their machines in future.

So why after all this time am I writing about this? Well, one of the LDs I bought was to entertain our baby son at Christmas. He is now 25. But I played that damn disc every single Christmas until the player died a few years ago. At first, it literally seized up through ingress of decades of dust (we have four cats…) and then, it wouldn’t power up. For an age, I thought it was just a drive belt and that I might have been able to fix it. That was as arrogant as thinking I could drive a racing car.

But I remembered Tony, I had met him at Home Cinema Choice’s awards evenings in the far past and knew him by legend. The magazine’s tech whizz, the lovely Bob Tomalski, held him in utter esteem. I had some awe for an operation that could not only fix and upgrade these machines with beautiful elegant modifications but could even form relationships with both British and Japanese manufacturers at the highest level and have their work approved by these top end electronics companies’ designers! So I got in touch and after a lovely chat, I arranged to drop the machine off to him on my trip to deliver a crucial parcel.* If anyone could fix it, it was him.

Videotec have long since been the place that you sent your CD DJ deck stuff to when it got drinks spilled in it, or damaged by the club life. They have been the repair centre for the UK Pioneer DJ scene for ages. This equipment takes a beating and yet Laserdisc technology begat CD that begat DVD that begat BluRay. And somewhere, Pioneer, who are darn good with mobile tune or two, worked out how to scratch with a CD. And THAT put Tony and Videotec at the heart of the coolest electronics scene ever. Although with a customer base even more out there than musicians in the ways they describe faults. “It just stopped sounding creamy on the bass..” has to be investigated and translated.

So Tony &co. fix Pioneer DJ equipment, and Videotec is arguably the best in the world. These days they offer upgrades like dust proof faders instead of home theatre things and are set up only to fix this equipment. Which means they do not take repairs for Laserdisc machines any more. Parts are all rocking horse poo grade rare as well. A dead laser means a dead machine. But Tony said he would have a look for me.

Second lockdown ends and I get an email with pictures. Here is what he sent:

So if you have any Pioneer DJ kit that is dirty and a bit farked, these are the folks to contact. They are the best in the world and have had some quite bizarrely famous customers, that just like in the Billionaire Boys car shop at Auto Audio, I am not allowed to mention… sigh.

I want to offer my deepest thanks to Tony and Videotec. I was ready to drive to Scotland and pay £600 for a machine that was working….. and just to see him again was awesome. We had a good old nag about the old days…

To say I was emotional is an understatement. In the video, you can see the carefully researched libations that I took with me when I went to make the clip. It is in wobbly vision as I had to zoom in order to keep my distance..

Thanks Tony. You made an ageing home cinema aficionado very happy.

_{*Trip was about a ‘Tower of Treats’ that four kids have had every year for as long as any of them can remember. That was not being thwarted when I have KN95 masks and my car has a virus-grade filter in the air system. It was a health issue, mental well being. To have covid kill that would resonate on a rather long term basis. Social Distancing was fully observed.}