Kiddie records were 78 rpm when I was growing up, and cheap turntables had a little device in the center that you could pop up to play 45s (you’d twist it to keep it in position). Drop it, and it had a size for LPs and 78s (both had the same size hole).
Better record players by the 60s had a long spindle to play 33s; you needed the little plastic adapters to play 45s. You could play multiple LPs; some two-record sets (e.g., The Who’s Tommy) were even designed with sides 1 and 4 on one disk and 2 and 3 on the other. You could then stack so that 1 and 2 would play consecutively and you could flip both records over to play 3 and 4.
Top-of-the-line players didn’t have tall spindles. Audiophiles considered it a bad idea for a record to drop onto the turntable (or, even worse, another record), since any debris could cause scratches. They also have a lever to gently lower the tone arm onto the record to reduce wear and tear on the needle or record. And, of course, an audiophile wouldn’t be caught dead playing a 45.
I remember too the stack-and-drop feature for LP’s on fancier 33 turntables. Maybe mine was adjusted wrong, but once you had about 4 or 5 on the turntable, the friction of the tone-arm would stop or slow the rotation of the top disk; after all, the only real contact from the turntable was the thicker area of the central labels, paper on paper, with relatively smooth paper.
So if you bought the box set of several discs (Beethoven’s Complete Symphonies or Complete Piano Concertos) the disks would be Sides 1&8, 2&7, 3&6, 4&5. You could stack all 4 and listed to almost an hour and a half of uninterrupted music before you had to remove and flip the stack. I believe Garison Keillor (Lake Woebegon) describes this feature at the college radio station in his monologue, “How I got Into Radio”.
I actually had one of these 45-only turntables. Found it in the basement along with an old Knight Kit vacuum tube amplifier. Found a couple of old 5" speakers, made speaker enclosures out of a couple of large margarine tubs, and voila - my first stereo.
Even had a special carrying case for my stack of 45s.
Really wish I still had that turntable and amplifier. The speakers, not so much.
Recycled LPs yes. They sent them away to be minced up and mixed with some virgin plastic, before feeding it into the presses. It was accepted that 33 quality had to be a great deal higher than 45s since most of those would end up in juke boxes or on auto-changers. LPs were often played on high quality (= expensive) record players. We had HiFi before WiFi. To thos enthusiasts, stacking records on a turntable was desecration.
My parents had a big hi fi cabinet system which they’d bought in the 1960s, shortly after they’d gotten married – the sort that was furniture as much as it was a sound system (it looked much like this). It had that long spindle with the lever / changer, as you describe.
When I bought the Star Wars soundtrack LPs in '77, I initially thought there was some sort of error in the manufacturing (as it was laid out 1+4, 2+3), until I realized that it worked perfectly with that spindle.
My uncle had an oddity in portable changers. It was a high-end portable with a leatherette case and better than average speakers. The unique feature was a lever that projected partially into the record drop path during a record change cycle. If the lever wasn’t touched by the next record, the machine assumed (all mechanical, mind you) that the record was a 7" 45rpm. If the lever was pushed back just a little, the player assumed a 10" 33rpm disk, and if it was pushed back all the way, it became 12" 33rpm.
So the mechanism was able to change both the speed and the setdown location for the tone arm and you could mix all three record types in the same stack.
Unfortunately, in actual practice, it didn’t work very well and the player would select the wrong speed and wrong setdown location sometimes. Hillarity ensued.
Same here with Jesus Christ, Superstar. Side 1 was on disc 1, Side 2 was on disc 2. Side 3 was on the flip side of side 2, and side 4 was on the flip side of side 1. Play the first two sides, then flip the stack over and play the other two sides.
In the late 70’s - early 80’s I had a turntable that could play both sides of a record without flipping. It had 2 needles/cartridges and an optical sensor that let it “see” the spaces between tracks. And it had a series of buttons so you could select, not just which side, but which song to play. In any order.
You could push, say, B3, B1, A6, B4, A3, A2 … etcetera – as many or as few as you wanted to hear. Then push Play and it would play those tracks, and those tracks alone, in that order. Sweet piece of technology!
Gave it away some time in the late 90’s along with my record collection, foolishly convinced that CDs were somehow better than vinyl. Wanna see the place on my ass where I still kick myself?
I used to be a library cataloger, and the term we used for this was “automatic sequence” (if every record had to be flipped individually, it was “manual sequence”). I remember sets of the complete Beethoven symphonies where you could listen to the whole set (7 discs!) and only had to flip the stack once. Pretty cool, although as bob++ pointed out upthread, no serious audiophile would own a record changer.
Ben? Ben kenobi? (Extremely nifty user name/post combo)
I never understood why they did that with the “Star Wars” soundtrack (or other double albums with shorter pieces); I get playing a Beethoven symphony straight through, but I don’t think the tracks on “SW” are in “chronological” order with the movie (and besides, sides 2 & 3 seemed to be mostly filler, anyway). Could there be (insane reality stretch here) added expense with putting the sides in 1, 2, 3, 4 order? I’d be surprised if so. But not shocked.
Just for completeness’s sake: There were also 16 and 2/3 RPM records; I’ve never seen one but I was told they were for spoken word records–Berlitz language courses and such. Smaller hole.
IIRC, other than “Princess Leia’s Theme”, which doesn’t really appear in that form in the film (and was the first track on “Side 3”), the tracks are more or less in the order that they appear in the film.
If you’re it all interested in the history of formats I suggest this excellent book. It gives some good background on the different systems.
The 45 was actually developed back in the 1930s as an attempt at an improved record changer. 78s did have record changers, but they were prone to malfunctioning and damaging records. RCA’s research found their new record changer worked best at 45rpm and with a big hole for the reasons cited above. The problem was RCA realized in the middle of the Depression consumers were not going to adopt a totally different format.
Skip down to 1948. CBS has just brought out the first effective LP and is willing to license it to RCA. But the two companies were bitter rivals, so RCA searched for a system that wouldn’t involve any royalties to CBS and would not be compatible with the LP. So someone remembers their old record changer idea, and passes it off as a new system. When the LP wins the album market over boxes of 45s (like these), RCA is seemingly sunk. However, in an incredible oversight, CBS never really tried to replace the single disc 78. 45s, on the other hand, are perfect for this and take over the single disc market from 78s.
12" 45prm disks were very much a thing as well. They tended to be EPs (extended play), with typically two tracks per side. The higher groove speed and wider groove spacing allowed for a significantly improved frequency response and dynamic range, which made them a favourite with the 80’s dance clubs. Even before the resurgence of the LP we see now, these disks were in production for new dance music when just about everything else was already going straight to CD.
The advent of the loudness wars probably did more to kill them off than anything else. Their dynamic range becoming essentially valueless.
With a third hole size! Obviously, a proprietary thing. How was the fidelity at that speed and did anyone care?
Did you know, Charles Berlitz (grandson of the founder of Berlitz Language Schools) wrote books on paranormal phenomena (the Bermuda triangle, the Philadelphia experiment)? Seems important, for some reason.
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