Oh God, I still have scars…
Stereos in early 80’s would have had dual cassette decks that could copy from one tape to the other and let you edit content. They also often could be set to play one tape and switch to the other tape when the end of the first was reached. They hardly ever had an 8 track player. In the 70’s stereos often had an 8 track player and one cassette player.
Something nobody has mentioned is, if you left the changer arm “open” (ie, not placed over the spindle) the album would repeat; the toner arm would get to the end then go back to the beginning and start over.
I am suddenly feeling olde.
When you think about it, it’s a pretty impressive mechanical device. It holds a stack of records (or, if you prefer, stax of wax) precariously above the tone arm / needle device; I don’t remember ever having one fail. Then, when the platter is done, the tone arm excuses itself, gets outta the way, and the spindle drops just one record while holding onto the other 4 or 5 (anyone remember how many you could typically stack?). The tone arm then returns to duty, placing itself precisely on the first groove.
When I was a kid, we got a hi-fi for the living room. If I close my eyes, I can still smell it.
One manufacturer (Garrard?) made a model that didn’t require a separate arm: rather than a single flange (for want of a better word) that tripped to drop the next record, it had three or four arranged in a circle. The stack o’ wax balanced on them, and they retracted in unison. It was a particularly elegant mechanism in that it still managed to drop one and only one record.
Hey! You kids! Get that iPod off my lawn or I’m callin’ the cops!
Pile of platters?
The anal ones still exist today. They just had so much more to fuss about back then - exactly how to stack records, the specail dust wipers, the bottle of distilled water… Change the needle every 20 records… Then the special tuned custom-made speaker cabinets.
These young whippersnappers don’t even fiddle with the equalizers today.
Of course, I couldn’t tell the difference between a $50 turntable and a $1000 one.
I believe the arm being raised up (over top the stacked disks) was what indicated to the system to drop the next record when the tone-arm retracted. With electronics we’ve forgotten how intricate purely mechanical devices could get.
I remember seeing ads for one stereo that had an automatic tape flipper. When the tape ended a little arm would pop it off the spindles, turn it over, and put it back on.
Supposedly the advantage of this was that the drive motor for the spindles only had to run in one direction, which resulted in less variation in the tape speed.
Like a lot of stereo stuff at the time, it just seemed like voodoo. Remember the careful ritual of cleaning the LP before you put the tone arm down? You had a soft brush and you’d squirt a little liquid on it and hold it on the spinning disk to catch all the dust. There was a special little fillip you had to perform as you picked up the brush so you wouldn’t leave a little line of dust behind on the record.
Oh, yes, I remember all that stuff. I’m old enough (born in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration) to have used it, too.
When I was growing up, my father was a classical music nut and an audiophile. He had a collection of thousands of LPs, and a complicated stereo system. No changer on his turntable – those were for the kind of record players the kids had. We weren’t allowed to touch his rig. And it was a rig – separate pre- and power amps for each channel, a tuner, and a turntable, and huge speakers. Lots of glowing tubes. And knobs and dials. Even as a child, I could hear the enormous difference in sound between his system and the kids’ record player.
More proof that you don’t need hi-fi to hear the whoosh. 
That’s the kind I had as a small child (not sure about the manufacturer, but that design). It was fascinating to a preschooler.
I guess I should start moving on to the elephants’ graveyard on the other side of the escarpment.
On the topic of record abuse:
My brother was a radio DJ in the mid-70’s, and to get that perfect segue between records he did something called “slip cueing”. He’s find the exact spot he wanted on the recore on the off line turntable, hold it there with the platter turning underneath it, then releas it at the same time he switched to that turntable.
Of course, that’s mild compared to the practice of taping three or four quarters to the tone arm of our home record player to keep it from skipping!
Well yeah, but when you’ve left your Jackson 5 records in the car in the Sun, what else are you gong to do?
I’m enjoying this thread because I’m listening to music playing on my 1978-era amplifier, but the input is coming from the aux input which is connected to an Airport station that’s connected wirelessly to the 15 or 20 gigabytes of music on my laptop. The music might start repeating 10 days from now. I’m feeling exactly zero nostalgia for the good old days.
If you wanted to listen to a record side over and over, you could raise the arm thingy and move it about halfway over. The tone arm would raise at the end and then move back to the start-
The DJs that I knew (which was admittedly a sample size of 3) would hold the entire platter still, then would give it a quick flick instead of releasing it so that it would quickly get up to speed. By the time the sound started it was already at the right speed. If you did this on your home stereo you’d wear out your belt pretty quickly, but DJ turntables were designed for it.
Get two panes of glass. Put one in the oven. Put your warped record on top of it. Put the other pane of glass on top of it (congratulations, you’ve now made a glass and record sandwich). Heat up the oven to the point where the vinyl just starts to melt, and the panes of glass will squish it back down so that it is nice and flat. You have to be fairly precise with the heat because if you heat it too much you’ll turn the record into a completely flat piece of goo that no longer has any sound stored on it anywhere.
So now I guess I’ve proven that not only am I an old fart, but I was a technical geek back then too.
That kind of side arrangement, with side 1 backed by n, 2 by n-1, etc, went back to the days of 78s for the same reason. Changers were invented in 1925, according to wiki. When a single work spanned many disks at 3 to 4 minutes per side, it was obviously useful. But it did give us the term “album”, too.
Nowdays they go for the other shape: Vinyl LP Record Bowl