Lexington, KY - If you have a piece of vintage audio equipment that needs to be fixed, Terry Layman of Layman's Vintage Radios is your best bet - not just in Lexington, but in a region that extends from Cincinnati to Nashville.
With a small shop on Porter Place stacked high with old-fashioned radios, receivers and other audio components (not to mention shelves full of tubes, capacitors and other internal audio parts), Layman has been fiddling with radios since he was a teenager, and operating as a business for about 20 years. While his repertoire of fixable items has expanded over the years to include the occasional speaker and headphone set, pre-1970s radios and turntables are his most commonly fixed items - he estimates he fixes about three turntables a week.
"It's pretty interesting what you see come back around," Layman said, adding that he has fixed a handful of 8-track players and an increasing number of tape decks in recent years. The most common problem he encounters with radios is internal parts that have gone bad over time; turntables, however, often just need a good internal cleaning. "I've gotten into doing a lot of disassembly and clean up, and normally it works great again," he said.
Bringing an old radio to life after decades of silence can be chilling, and the historical essence is at the heart of Layman's joy in working with old audio equipment.
"You can envision the history that came through these radios that people listened to 70, 80 years ago," he said. "That was before Pearl Harbor, before the Depression started ... Hitler's speeches were heard through a lot of these radios."