Home Grown: Klipschorns and tube amps in downtown Los Angeles

Because every record collection has a story.

Home Grown is our series profiling you lot and your excellent record collections. Taking our cue from the brilliant submissions to the #VFRecordCollections thread on Instagram, we want to share a little of your hard-earned love for vinyl with the world.

Each week, we’ll be profiling a different collector from around the world and finding out what makes them tick. Want in? Send us a pic of your collection and a few words about your collection to social@thevinylfactory.com.

Name: Zach Cowie

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Size of collection: About ten thousand LPs and 45s in total

What part of your set-up are you most proud of? I don’t like to think about genres — I’m truly interested in anything that’s good no matter where it’s from or when it’s from, which makes me very proud of the musical range my collection covers.

I’d also like to think that my collection doesn’t have much in the way of ‘filler’, everything that gets filed is important to me and I regularly cleanse the shelves to get rid of anything that no longer makes the grade.

Beyond the records themselves I’m very proud of my two Hi-Fi systems which are the products of MANY years of trial and error. The pictures I’ve submitted show my main system which is comprised of the following pieces:

– Restored grease bearing Garrard 301 turntable w/ a modified Ortofon 12” tonearm, Vinylista plinth & either a Denon 103 or an Ortofon SPU cartridge (for stereo records).

– Michell Gyrodec turntable w/ QC power supply, SME IV tonearm & Grado Sonata mono cartridge (for mono records).

– Shindo Masseto tube preamp.

– Shindo Cortese tube amp.

– Klipsch Klipschorn speakers w/ Bob Crites xo’s.

What does your record collection mean to you? Everything.