Record Albums have two sides! (duh!)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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On Saturday my husband declared that if he couldn’t listen to his vast and varied record collection he would surely perish. We don’t currently own a turntable but we’ve been talking about buying one for months. We headed on down to Circuit City and managed to find the two turntables that they actually still sell. As the young Circuit City dude was taking us to the register he asked us

“What do you use one of these things for?”

My husband and I looked at each other, incredulous. I thought for a moment he might have been making a joke but no, he really didn’t know.

“To listen to records.” was my answer
“You remember records, don’t you?” my husband asked.
“Nope, that’s way before my time.” he replied

Feeling really old we finished paying for the turntable and headed over to the pickup counter.

Today, we’re enjoying my husband’s record collection which includes some albums that were given to him by a friend so they’re new to both of us. After the first album ended my husband looked at me and said

“see, this is the problem with record albums” as he turned over the album to listen to the other side.

“Records have two sides!” I said

I had somehow completely forgotten that records have two sides and needed to be turned over. How could I forget that?

We’re listening to this excellent jazz album by Dizzy Gillespie and The Deep Six which was a parisian vocal group. It’s just outstanding. Both sides of it.

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Man, does Circuit City suck or what? They must have gone out of their way to find a clerk who was so totally ignorant of the store’s stock that he doesn’t even know what a turntable is. I mean, vinyl isn’t the format du jour anymore, but to not even know what a record player is? That’s not because of youth. That’s because of stupid.

I’ve only ever once been genuinely glad to have a Circuit City nearby. A couple months ago, a new video game, Dead Rising, came out. And sold out almost immediately. Best Buy was sold out. Electronics Boutique was sold out. I went to Circuit City as a last ditch effort. Turns out, their incompetence actually worked for me. See, DR is an XBox 360 game. The Circuit City near my house apparently hasn’t figured out that XBox and XBox 360 are seperate consoles. Also, they haven’t figured out how the alphabet works, because they just throw the games on the shelf in any old order. By combing through the shelf of randomly mixed XBox and XBox 360 games, I was able to dig up a copy of the game I wanted. It was behind a copy of the movie, Son of the Mask, which was filed with the XBox games on the grounds that it was packaged in the same neon-green DVD case that XBox games come in.

Circuit City: We’re idiots, but sometimes we’re useful idiots.

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To be honest, I’m shocked that that they even sell turntables. I haven’t actually seen a turntable outside of dedicated audiophile stores in several years.

I think you’ll find that’s the Double Six. BTW, I completely agree with you, it’s an outstanding bebop album with some awesome vocalese scatting. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Dizzy Gillespie at Newport, though.

4

How cool! We really need to get our turn table hooked up and start playing some of Suburban Plankton’s albums. He has tons of them.

As for the dweeb at the electronics store…sheesh, what an idiot. Even my 8 yo knows what a turn table is for. He wonders why we still have it, but he knows what it’s for.

5

They still make quite a bit of new vinyl. It’s mostly in the dance/hip-hop genre or from bands that appeal to music nerds, mostly on indie labels. For instance, I just ordered the new Decemberists album on vinyl.

You can usually find plenty of it in your local independent music store. That’s also a good place to look for a turntable, or certainly for someone who can tell you where to find one.

I’m no audiophile. I’m trying to learn the art of mixing/turntablism, but it’s a curiosity for me more than anything.

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Turntables have never gone out of production, really. You can still get cheap, crappy ones, fairly inexpensive, nice ones, and you can still get unbelievably expensive, precision ones. Just like the old days. Circuit City wouldn’t have even been on my list of where to look, but there you go. They’re still carrying them.

I’ve mentioned this before, but for this thread, it bears repeating. A kid came to work at the radio station, and he was asked to transfer a record. He had to ask how the turntable worked. He had never seen one. Inside of two minutes, he had demolished the record and the stylus on a $200 cartridge by scraping it across the grooves to find a track. Apparently even the concept of the cue lever was alien to him.

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cringes My dad still has the stereo system he built from a kit back in the 70s (I used to know the brand name, but right now I can’t think of it). My parents still have lots of records around and one of my early memories is my dad teaching me the correct way to use the turntable. All those buttons and levers! Much more fun then a CD player. :wink:
I even had a little turntable that I played my score to Cinderella on and this was only in mid to late 80s.

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[QUOTE=Achren]
cringes My dad still has the stereo system he built from a kit back in the 70s (I used to know the brand name, but right now I can’t think of it). /QUOTE]

Heathkit?

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What the heck is a cue lever?

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Does Bang and Olufsen still make the turntable with the fixed arm? The arm was attached to the rear edge of the TT box and tracked straight across.
I had one for a week, back in the late '70s, but it was stolen. :frowning:

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Yes! Thank you.

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A little lever you find (usually) back near the tone arm swivel, where the arm is anchored to the unit itself. Move the cue lever to the Up position, the arm rises straight up. Move it to Down, and the arm lowers straight down onto the record. The beauty of using the cue lever is that the chance of scraping the needle across the record while trying to put it up or down while “freehanding” the tone arm is impossible.

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It’s the mechanism attached to the tonearm that lifts it up and holds it over the surface of the record, while you position the stylus over a track, then sets it down gently in the grooves.

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I just looked up Bang & Olufsen, and it looks like they don’t make a turntable of any kind anymore. Linear tracking tonearms were impeccable in design and theory, but they only worked well on new, previously-unplayed-on-any-turntable records. If you played well-used records that had only ever known a pivoting tonearm, on the LTT, you’d hear groove distortion in one channel at the beginning, gradually becoming absent in the middle, then groove distortion on the other channel as the stylus got nearer the label.

I have a BIC linear tracking turntable that’s been in a box for 20 years for this very reason.

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But do you remember how some 8-track tapes would

pause and
Ka-CHOONK

in the middle of a song?

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Are you sure that’s English? That’s the beauty of a laser, the chance of scraping the CD is impossible.

As you can tell, I’ve never used a record player in my life. Unless you count those old Fisher-Price ones that used hard plastic records. And I’m still not sure how the heck you find a track on vinyl.

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BBC news reported last week that* records* made of * vinyl* are making a comeback.

That’ll screw up many a sprog whose existence thus far has only witnessed CDs

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asterion How to find a track on vinyl.

Experience dear boy, experience

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To this day, when I hear Meat Loaf’s “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad”, in my mind it still fades out halfway through the song, Ka-Choonks, and then fades up.

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Cue levers also came in two styles – good and sucky. With the good ones, you could pull the lever quickly and the tone arm would still glide down gently. With the sucky ones, the tone arm would fall like a hammer.

Finding songs on a record was easy. Songs had the grooves close together, while the silences between the songs had the grooves farther apart. If there were, say, four songs on a side, then there’s be four bands of close groves, seperated by bands of wide grooves. If you wanted to play just the fourth track, you’d place the stylus just outside of the innermost song band.

In fact, I got pretty good at finding the good parts of songs just by looking at the color of the grooves. On some albums, I might notice that where the bands got darker and bumpier was where the hot guitar solo started.

Records scratched, they warped, you had to turn them over, styluses broke (and could be expensive to replace), you couldn’t dance in the same room without the record skipping – all in all, it’s a technology that I don’t miss. I can’t fault youngsters for not knowing a technology that they’ve thankfully never had to deal with.

But here’s a story that will make you shudder: When I was maybe in kindergarten, I took one of my parents’ records to show and tell. Since I knew all about needles and grooves and the spiral pattern they made, I figured I could play it at my desk. Since I couldn’t really spin the record, I figured I could move the needle around in a spiral pattern. And I figured that since I didn’t have a real needle, some other metalic sharp object would work. Like the sharp end of a pair of scissors.

I wanted to make sure I played that record real good. So I pressed down with the scissors really really hard, as a traced a spiral pattern. Hmm, the record didn’t play. And I’d left a deep mark in the record. Obviously I did something wrong, but what was it? Ah, it was clear. I’d been playing the wrong side…