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Nhac Xua (or Old music) Café at No. 46 Yen Hoa Street, Hanoi is an ideal place for those who love the sound from old music machines.
Nguyen Duy Binh is turning on a reel-to-reel tape recorder playing old songs.
Located beside West Lake, the café looks more like a shop selling second-hand electrical products. The 15-square-metre front room is piled full of old big amplifiers stacked roughly to the ceiling, along with old record players and reel-to-reel machines, with hundreds of other pieces of not easily identified audio equipment.
Seeing the only small table and some tiny tools being occupied by some customers, I walked to the inner room to find the same scene. This room didn’t even have a place to sit.
The owner, a middle-aged man with a gentle smile, asked if we wanted some drinks or just were looking for some equipment. Then he invited us to a range of tables outside, which were arranged next to the banks of West Lake.
“People usually come to my coffee shop not just for coffee,” he said. “Most of my customers are fans of the old stereo equipment and come to enjoy their music.”
The 'scrap-iron’ collection.
Nguyen Duy Binh revealed that he had spent almost all his life collecting these old machines and he opened this shop in 2010 mainly to share his hobby with others.
“Some decades ago, they used to be the dream of many people including me,” he said while pointing to an old reel-to-reel machine in the middle of the room. “It cost as much as a big house during the 1960s and only wealthy families could afford them then.
Binh said that he loved music and had been attracted to audio equipment since they became popular at some cafes and among wealthy families some decades ago.
The young man tried to save money and buy an old one. He also taught himself the mechanics through books so that he could restore old pieces. Due to his tight budget, Binh could only buy old and broken-down equipment from scrap-iron dealers for his collection. However, he has successfully restored many items.
Since he left his job at a confectionery company in 1990, the audiophile has spent all his time with the old machines and the number of items in his collection has quickly grown.
“My wife has complained about my ‘scrap-iron’ collection, which keeps growing bigger in our house,” he said with a big grin. “They have been costing me a lot of money too.”
However, he said that recently he has begun earning money from restoring old machines and selling them on to other people.
“Customers are welcome to discover my shop and get free advice over any items they want to buy, but they won’t be able to persuade me to sell some machines, including this made-in-the US record player.”
“It used to be my dream to own one, and so I won’t sell it,” he explains.
When I asked a customer at Binh’s shop about the quality of the audio equipment, he said that although the sound was not as clear as modern stereos, old analogue equipment had a warmer tone.
‘The most important thing is that I want to relive my old days with the old songs played by these old machines,” Binh said.
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