[COLOR="DarkRed"]...thank goodness...since "the 18 inchers have a tinney sound an the 22 inchers have a funky sound".

....eh, $57 with shippin'...it's a little low, by $15-20 maybe....but really, IMHO...AZCO's weren't very good sounding..... but some of 'em could be alright....[/COLOR]

Everybody knows that.

That's the way I feel about all AZ's!

Weren't AZCO's exactly AZ's? After all, "AZCO does stand for "Avedis Zildjian Company" no?

When I toured the factory in the mid 70's, they had these big oil drums filled with ingots of the right size. Inside a drum there'd be a black blob with white paint on it that said something like"14 HH" and that would be the right amount of secret sauce to make a 14" hihat cymbal.

I got the feeling that those oil drums were sent up full from Quincy, and I really got the feeling that the AZCO's were 100% identical to AZ's.

I wish I had a pic of the piece of wood over the door somebody had taken 30 seconds to paint "AZCO" with a paint brush on.

The azcos are not equivalent to Avedis Zildjian cymbals. They were a budget production line and un-hammered. I have had a number of them and mostly they are pretty unimpressive, but every now and then one will be uniquely pleasing. Personally, I would not pay $40 for the Azco in that ebay auction.

The older non azco Zilcos are a different story.

[COLOR="Purple"]Indeed...those old Zilcos are gorgeous...I have a slew of 'em....eBay buys before people started catching on that they were not the AZCO versions....

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Interesting comments mountainhick - thanks!

When I was up at the Meductic factory (actually a big barn) it had the AZCO sign, but the cymbals were being stamped as "Made in Canada" AZ's. I'd tried AZCO's before but didn't realize that they were cheapos.

When I was at there it was '76, or '77, and when we got to the hammering part of the process they put the cymbal on a machine and a hammer came down and made a small "doink!", the cymbal turned a small amount and that repeated, and it did this over the whole cymbal. There was no hand hammering that I saw, and I remember thinking that their hammering process was kind of rinky-dink compared to the hand hammering on my K's.

[COLOR="DarkRed"]Just to avoid confusion, Canadian A's (Canadian Eh's) are not the same cymbals as Azco Zilcos.

The A's basically followed the formula of the American-made A's of the day. If you look at 2 next to each other, there isn't a discernable difference between an American-made one and a Canadian made one.

The Azco-Zilcos, as mentioned, had absolute minimal hammering if at all. The ones I have viewed close-up seemed to have zero hammering, actually.

That is funny...they were a nice B20 alloy...but no hammering ! They would make good cymbals for an aspiring cymbalsmith, actually. They are sorta already half-baked.

Honestly, landing an Azco-Zilco cheap and then sending it down to LA to Matt Bettis to hammer a bit...I bet you could end up with a great cymbal !!!!

Drumaholic can correct me, but I believe than hand-hammering on A's ceased in the late 60's-early 70's. I have NEVER seen a hollow-ink-logo Avedis with hand-hammering. By the late 70's....it was all machine hammering on the regular A's.

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