Originally published at: The golden age of gadget catalogs | Boing Boing
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I remember the Crutchfield catalog being very popular with audiophiles back in the 1980s. Apparently it’s still around!
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Glorious! I bought stuff from DAK. So many memories.
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Edmund Scientific.
The only truly worthwhile Gadget catalog that has ever existed
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Brookstone was another. Amusing to read, never worth ordering anything.
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They are. I bought a replacement car stereo from them last year. (And, by the way, they were bang-on correct in suggesting the particular wiring harness and frame needed to adapt that stereo to my particular vehicle.)
I also purchased four or five things from DAK back in the eighties, and yeah, it was a diverting catalog to wander through.
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I’ve lost whole workdays to this site:
Oh, man, YES. They had a holography section in the 70s that made me drool as a 9-year-old nerd. Not to mention the pages devoted to the Astroscan 2001. Never could quite figure out what the biofeedback section was all about, though…
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I had the opportunity to write some direct mail advertising for a technology product back in the 1990s. My piece was heavily based on Drew Alan Kaplan’s style and it was surprisingly effective. That guy really knew how to make you WANT the newest high-tech gadget.
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Oh man. Dak was a treasure trove. I still have the DBX Soundfield V speakers that I scored second hand after drooling over them in the Dak catalog. I’m also pretty sure I ordered my first cdrom drive from Dak; a scsi caddy loading drive I hooked to my Amiga.
Picture ganked from the net:
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Are the speakers any good? They certainly have a bunch of speakers in them, ala “hi-fi speakers, man” era stuff. Look at that, is that 5-way??
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Didn’t I just see something like this
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Yes and no; they’re not exactly competing with classic Klipsch speakers for sound quality. They sound good but not great - comparable to, say, classic Realistic speakers or modern Parts Express kit speakers. Plus the addition of an absolutely shocking amount of bass given the 15" woofers in each speaker. They’re durable, too; once I loaned them to a friend for a house party. Knowing that the amp they were hooked to was a bit overpowered, and that it would be playing house music, we put a “do not exceed” label on the mixing board. Being a house party, the volume level was of course exceeded. For hours. The sole damage was melted solder on the board that caused the filter capacitors to pop one lead each out of the boards, disabling the treble section of the speakers. Five minutes with a soldering iron and all was good.
They will absolutely fill a normal sized house with stuff-rattling bass. As in, the whole house.
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as a kid reading that catalog, I wanted everything on every page. Except the pocket bible computer.
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Wow thank you so much for sharing!
I remember reading those catalogs in DETAL and loved how “crazy” every deal sounded. It was selling perfection - heightened only by Drew’s personal notes “welcoming you into the circle.”
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If you want a little taste of the catalog’s prime in the 21st century – not up to the heights of DAK by any means, but better than most of today’s alternatives – I highly recommend American Science and Surplus. They’ll still send you a printed catalog!
Their pedigree is clearly more J. Peterman and old-school Banana Republic – their catalog even features silly little stories and line drawings of the products – but the stuff they sell is way closer to DAK and Edmund Scientific’s weirdest and most random. (With a bit of Oriental Trading Company tossed in for good measure.)
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I bought a pair of those “Thunder Lizard Mistake” speakers from them back in the day.
They lasted a couple of decades. I think I gifted them to a roommate when I moved out.
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My first (non-shared) desktop computer was some DAKtronics 386SX special. I remember imploring my parents to get me the upgraded 60MB hard drive, to no avail. Months later I had to delete most of the software on my hard drive to be able to install Wing Commander II.
Further down the line, the purchase of a DAK 2x CD ROM drive did me no favors in the 7th Guest era (7G required a 4x drive, and I learned the hard way that they meant it).
For a kid like me, DAK did a lot to make computers affordable and accessible, but the machines were definitely not ideal for doing the then-cutting-edge computer gaming that I aspired to do.
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In these parts the gadget catalogue was for Jaycar Electronics.
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