It’s really quite a sad story as it was a total labour of love for the guy, Axel, who set it up.
He ran a small vintage hi-fi shop in Paris suburbs and owned some of the most incredible vintage hi-fi as well. He wanted to share his love of vintage hi-fi and had the idea for the website and hoped that it would became a reference library of vintage hi-fi for people to use and enjoy.
Axel admitted he was very naive at first when it came to the running of the website and the name (the English double meaning of Knob) became a millstone.
Being a printer to trade - all of the images on the website were high-res rotary scans from the original brochures. He sourced them from all over the world and bought them all (which cost him a fortune).
But he didn’t realise until it was too late how people were copying his images (which he didn’t copyright at first) and using them elsewhere but with no credit to TVK.
He eventually watermarked the images and tried to get people to use the very early google ads links to generate some income for the website, but nobody used them enough and eventually he had to sell the website and went back to printing as he was broke.
Over the years he had managed to build up the most complete brochure archive of quite a few of the Japanese companies - so much so that a number of them approached him a few times for info on certain vintage products of theirs that only he had !
A lot of brochures he owned were unique - even the manufacturers didn’t know they existed. Just before he had to sell up, he had taken delivery of a huge amount of Japanese reference material that had taken months (and a lot of money) to source but he never got to scan and catalogue the stuff for the website in the end as, by the time the stuff arrived from Japan, the money situation had overtaken things.
Tragic really when you see the quality of the artwork he put together.
Absolutely - all those images are from the original brochures and scanned by hand and then checked over (pre photoshop days) for any flaws and fixed.
Even sadder to think that a lot of his brochures never saw the light of day. He told me that a lot of the stuff from the last shipment was incredible.
What drew me to the website was the designs and photographs as I’d never heard of most of the stuff. I still think they’re some of the best equipment photographs there are to this day.
I really liked it and it sounded great when it was working. Sadly, when it broke down for a third time I cut my losses on it and sold it for spares/repair.
From the info on the TVK website - it seems Rotel never made their equipment in mass market numbers but rather manufactured a lot of OEM stuff for other brands; including Leak surprisingly.
That is indeed a sorry tale. What makes it even more sad is that TVK is still a treasure trove of a site.
