Why did/do 33 1/3 rpm records and 45 rpm records have different-sized holes in the middle?
Explanatory note for young’uns: Way back in the old days—before MP3s, before CDs, before cassettes, even before 8-track tapes—people bought their music on records. You played them on turntables that had a sticky-up thingy that went through a hole in the middle of the record to hold it in place. Long-playing record albums, or LP’s, were recorded at 33 1/3 r.p.m.s and had a relatively small hole in the middle, while singles, with just one song on each side, were at 45 r.p.m.s and had much bigger holes, so that you had to put some sort of adapter thing on the whatchamacallit to play them. What I want to know is, why didn’t they just make all the holes the same size?
Most vinyl records did/do have holes the same size for both singles and LPs. The much larger holes only appeared in records designed to be played on juke boxes.
Most 45s I had came with a small hole that could be “popped out,” for use in a jukebox maybe??.
To be on the safe side, most record players came with an adapter that either fitted over the spindle or rose out of the turntable when needed, just in case you ever needed to play a record with a big hole.
In the UK 45s did indeed come with the same small size hole as LPs, just as Everton said. My brother used to buy lots of imported US soul 45s which came supplied with plastic ‘middles’ which continualy fell out.
Most cheap record players in the US 40 years ago had some sort of popup spindle arrangement to accomodate the large holes for the 45’s, which is the only size hole I remember ever seeing in a 45 in a US record store. Of course, once I got past adolescence, I never bought 45’s - at some point in there, “album rock” made the single “uncool”.
I always associated the plastic insert thingy with what you would use if you HAD to play a 45 on your upscale stereo which did not have the popup spindle arrangement, supposedly because the imprecision of the large hole was beneath contempt for serious stereo listening.
You could also get the little plastic adapter thingies for the records. They looked like colourful plastic throwing stars and you just popped them into the “big hole” and then your record could be played on a record player (primitive sound making device used by early humans) that only had a spindle for “little hole” records.
I think they are the same “plastic middles” that ticker mentions above. You could buy them in little packages. (And they did always fall out.)
No offence, RealityChuck, but even allowing for the smiley that was a pretty stupid comment. What point were you trying to make?
The original reason for the discrepancy in hole size may well have been due to deliberate incompatibility introduced by RCA, but it doesn’t explain why the large hole was retained after they’d patched things up with Columbia.
Not only do most 45s sold in the UK have the standard size spindle hole, but some are even sold with a punch-out centre. There are plenty of sites online offering disks like that for sale. The accompanying blurb usually says something like “allows disk to be played with an adapter” but that doesn’t make any sense. Why would you punch out the centre of a perfectly good disk just to let you use a piece of plastic to get it back to where you started?
The real reason must be that there’s some equipment out there that needs the larger hole. As ticker suggests, a larger hole would be easier to locate by an automatic device, and it would also give a more “planar” grip to stop the record rocking about as it was swung onto the platter. Unless someone can offer a better explanation, I’m sticking with the juke box as that piece of equipment.
In any case, the only 45s I’ve got that have the larger hole size were bought mail order and the company said that that was the reason for the larger hole.
