Why all the disdain for young people who haven’t used a record player? So? Do you disdain people who don’t know how to use a mimeograph machine? How about a wax cylinder phonograph? Or a crank-start automobile?
Old, crappy technologies give way to new, better ones. The fact that you grew up with the old technology and have nostalgia for it doesn’t mean that young folk have some responsibility to be aware of it and conversant with it.
I strongly question this assertion.
There was a device that could sense the spaces between LP tracks with infrared, allowing you to (IIRC) program tracks and use a remote control to select tracks. It’d detect quiet passages as spaces, though. I’ve forgotten the name of it.
[hyper-nitpick]most vinyl records.
Multi Grooved Records | Snopes.com [/hyper-nitpick]
But they still exist and clearly are sold, where this kid works.
If anybody’s looking for a turntable after reading this thread, Big Lots is selling some neato looking retro style radio/turntable thingies. Neat stuff.
Yeah, except that as has been noted, turntables are not obsolete, and are still widely sold. If Circuit fucking City carries them, that alone is proof that they aren’t some speciality or niche item. And note that the kid in question was the person selling the OP the turntable. Even if it were unreasonable to expect a young person to know what a turntable is, it’s not unreasonable to expect an employee of an electronics store to know what the hell his store is selling.
And that’s not nostalgia speaking. The only vinyl record I’ve ever owned was the one that came with Billy and the Boingers. All the music I’ve ever owned has been digital.
They are sold only to people with very special requirements… they are not now a mas market item or anything even close to it. I personally have not used one in 20 years, and I don’t think I’m unrepresentative.
The cashier at Circuit City should recognize every item sold at the store, even very obscure and obsolete ones? Well, maybe in an ideal world, but I can’t get all motivated to mock them if they don’t.
I’ve never had any problem finding a turntable over the last 16 years. What’s a problem is finding the right needle for the things!
And because you could hear the sound as you rotated the record backward (at least, I could), this technique naturally allowed us to search for the backwards Satanic messages that some said were there.
We never found any. But it was funny to listen to!
Dude. Circuit City. If it’s being sold there, it’s neither obscure nor obsolete. We’re talking about the K-Mart of electronic goods, here, not some high-end speciality shop. A lot of people still listen to vinyl records. A lot of contemporary bands are still releasing vinyl records. It’s not a dead format by any means. It’s just not the standard any more.
Here is the link that will take you to a place where you can buy a replacement stylus for virtually any cartridge.
Thanks, fishbicycle! Here is a site in return.
You’re describing a stylus, not a needle. OLD record players, the kind that only played 78 RPM records, had needles. They were very much like sewing machine needles, about 1/4 the length, without an eye. In fact, in a pinch, you could cut a sewing machine needle to length and it worked just fine.
I put one nearly through my thumb once.
I would say it’s a specialty item. Circuit City sells some specialy stuff, just not nearly as good a variety as you’d find at a specialty store.
They’re also something which it’s hard for those of us who are familiar with them to imagine NOT being familiar with, because of how important they were for so long.
I’ve got a turntable in the basement that does that. No remote control, but eight buttons on the front. Want track 3? Put the record on the platter and press 3. The arm would scan for the wide bands between tracks, and when it got just past track 3, it would back up, and drop down in the right place. And thanks to a link in this thread, I may be able to find a new stylus!
Now, though, you get the pleasure of scouring the record bins at a a good music store and picking up good stuff practically free: on my last trip to Real Groovy, which has thousands of old albums they’re clearing out for the floor space, I picked up the entire Shriekback back catalogue, a couple of Magazine albums, a Mick Ronson solo album - all for about a buck and absolute cherry: they’d come from someone who’d known how to look after albums. Fire up Audacity, and rip them to hard drive. Fun!
with one famous exception:
Monty Python produced the world’s only THREE-sided record.
(explanation for those unforturnate people who don’t know:
One side of the record (about 20 minutes long) was perfectly normal.But the other side had TWO sets of grooves parallel to each other. When you set the needle down on the vinyl, it landed (at random) in one set or the other, and you heard about 10 minutes of comedy. You could re-play the record 5 times and hear the same 10 minutes every time, if you happend to fall into the same set of grooves. Then one day, 2 weeks after you bought the record, you play it again, and you happened to drop the needle into the other set of grooves. And -bingo- you hear 10 minutes of something completely different’.
(pun intended )
There was no mention of this surprise anywhere on the packaging, and if at moment if first happened you were under the influence of certain green leafy substances, it was quite a memorable experience. 
For those who, like me, have a great big collection of vinyl but dislike the hassle of setting up the turntable, tiptoeing around to avoid making it skip, etc., behold:
There are other models available; that was just the first link Google turned up. Basically, for about $100, you can either listen to vinyl through your computer’s speakers, OR convert your old vinyl records to mp3.
I really want one of those.
By the way:
In a similar vein, MAD Magazine released a record called “A Super Spectacular Day” back in the late 70s or early 80s; the first half of the song would play, and then there were, IIRC, eight different second-halves that would play at random. My brother and I listened to it constantly for a few weeks until the novelty wore off; I can still sing most of it.
Ooh, Google is my friend!
Snopes page on “multiple-groooved records”
And, coolest of all: This blog links to a ZIP file of all eight “Super Spectacular Day” endings!
Pop would almost always add the extra plastic liner inside the paper liner the albums came with. You could tell the albums he had no respect for as they stayed in the paper liner only; usually they were the ones he passed on to us kids.
I work at Circuit City and sell cameras. I don’t have much of a clue of what else is in the store, minus the TVs, computers, DVDs and CDs I can see from my department. If we sell turntables I haven’t seen them. I never got a store tour when I was hired and don’t have time to wander around.
I am only 20, but my grandmother and parents played records all throughout my early childhood. I mainly remember my parents busting the turntable out at night, in the winter, with the fireplace going and blasting Neil Young and stuff. My grandma had hers in the spare bedroom and had exercise records. Cheesy music and instructions for the workout on vinyl. Funny stuff.
He wasn’t a cashier, he was presumably one of those guys wandering up and down the store helping customers find what they’re looking for, on account of his knowing where things are.
That said, if you re-read the OP it doesn’t say that he didn’t know where the turntables were. It seems he was able to get them one and was taking it down to the cash register with them, when he asked “The Question”, “what is this thing for”.
I sort of agree that jumping all over him is a bit much, on the other hand I rather doubt his comment was completely sincere – I would have assumed he was taking the opportunity to, I dunno, make the buyer feel old. He knew what records were, enough to proclaim them “before his time”, so he wasn’t completely ignorant of the medium; and hip-hop is so entrenched in today’s music, symbolized by “two turntables and a microphone” in countless videos and lyrics, that I can’t really believe even a teenager wouldn’t visually recognize a turntable as a “record player” even if they’ve never actually used one.
I’d believe it more if he were a ten-year-old or something. Or maybe he only listens to country music.