A total stranger called me at work at the radio station yesterday, and she said,“Someone recommended you to me. I have a 33 album. Could you transfer it onto a cassette for me?” I’m thinking, “a cassette? Are you kidding?” I offered to declick and denoise it for her and put it on a CD. “I don’t have a CD player.” Wow. Just wow. This lady doesn’t know a single person with a turntable or a tape deck, and has to resort to calling a radio station to get a tape made of a record. I find that just a bit sad, I don’t know quite why. I can’t decide if it’s because she must be some kind of luddite, or that a radio station is now viewed as the last bastion of obsolete technology. CD players have been around for 22 years. You can get one for $15. Mundane and pointless, yes, and I thought I’d share it with you…
I am the only person I know with a stereo that has a turntable, dual cassette players, and a cd player. It’s great, because everyone has given me their records and cassettes since they can’t play them , and I have a HUGE collection.
I love listening to those old records 
:eek:
Really?
(Where’s that “you know you’re getting old when…” thread these days?)
We have a large LP collection and a turntable as well. WhyKid loves to watch the records go around and around and around. He thinks it’s just the silliest, goofiest thing possible. I told him yesterday that some albums, especially ones for kids, had pictures on the LP itself, and he just cracked up at the thought of Kermit the Frog spinning around and around and around while singing “Rainbow Connection.”
But we, uh, also have a CD player. Four or five of 'em, I think. Yep, one office, one living room, one kid’s room, one portable for WhyKid and one portable for WhyDad - although since he’s found Mp3, he doesn’t use his CD player much! Me? I listen to the radio. 
Why be sad? Until a couple of years ago , *I * could have done what she asked, with a still-working LP-cassette unit I got 22 years ago – now that’s sad. Console yourself with the thought that nobody owns one 33 album --this favor would have been the beginning of a long association.
I’ll hold up there. The association might have been rewarding, especially if it was with an older person confused with new technology seeing their best memories gathering dust, inaccessible, in a corner. Okay, now I’ve made myself sad now, too.
We live in Florida. There are people living here who predate recorded music.
And their parents live here, too.
Sweet rhetoric, but not strictly true. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1878, and by 1890, nickle juke boxes were popular forms of recorded music.
Got many 145 year olds in Florida?
It’s just impossible to make hyperbolic jokes on the Straight Dope, lemme tell ya.
Yep, yep it is. I’ve tried lots, and I usually get called out by some killjoy. Sorry about that. Just flew back from Great Debates, and boy are my logic circuits tired! 
Those are the ones the older ones call young whippersnappers.
That reminds me vaguely of the guy that flagged me down on the street. “Do you have a VCR?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Can you record something for me?”
I’m thinking his daughter’s piano recital must be being broadcast or something, if he’s flagging down strangers.
Nope. Full House. 
Hee. I wonder if my parents still have their turntable. I know they had a bunch of LPs. We younguns used to pretend the thing was a carousel and put our toys on it to watch it go around and around and around and around.
I have all of the above as well :). Well, an old NAD dual-deck cassette deck, rather than dual players. Oddly enough I still use the cassette deck from time to time, as there are certain things I can’t ( or haven’t gotten around to ) replacing on CD, but my nice little Music Hall turntable is packed away with my albums for reasons of space and ( sadly - it’s a failing ) convenience.
- Tamerlane
My foks collected antiques, and I grew up listening to old Victor 45’s on a huge cabinet-housed wind-up Victrola on our front porch!
You just can’t beat an original recording of “Beal Street Blues” on a hazy summer afternoon, full of snap, crackle and pop…
And you thought that woman was Old School!
Hey, my Grandmother has a bunch of these old records that are smaller than an LP, but larger than a 33. About the size of a dinner plate. They’re really heavy. Any idea what they are and if I can still get a player for them? Are they these “45s” of which Daithi Lacha speaks?
I’ve got all kinds of obsolete technology at home. 4 different turntables of the regular kind, and one linear tracking one. The tonearm moves across the record in a straight line, just like the lathe that cut the master. This is great if you are using an unplayed record, but it tends to show you how much wear a pivoting tonearm puts on the grooves of a record: at the beginning, it’s all gross on one channel, fairly clean in the middle, and all gross on the other channel on the way to the end. I’ve got 5 or 6 tape decks, with all the Dolby NRs represented: B, C and S. Also a deck with dbx NR. And an 8-track cartridge record/playback machine. And an open reel machine. I am missing the one item that WhyNot needs: a turntable to play 78 RPM discs. They are still made, but you need a cartridge for it that will fit a matching 78 RPM stylus. I’ve got about 100 78s that date back to 1908 that I need to transfer onto CDs one of these days.
One of the older gentlemen with whom I work collects gramophones. I went to his house and heard music come out of cabinet-sized wind-up gramophones playing near-mint records that was so clean and sweet, it’d make you cry. I want to undertake a project with him before he gets too much older, to set up microphones in his living room and record these discs on their native format machine, onto the computer. I’d clean them up and give copies to the Smithsonian.
You’re confused about the various formats. The 33 1/3 rpm format was the “album”. “Album Oriented Rock” was invented for this format, which could take anywhere from a half-hour to a full hour to play both sides. 78 rpm records, if I remember my dad’s accurately, were a bit smaller in diameter than 33s, but much thicker as you noted. Both 33s and 78s had a small hole for the turntable spindle, that was about a quarter inch in diamerter.
45s were about six inches in diameter, with a wide hole in the center. Turntables had a little disklike thingy about the size of a half-dollar, that you would fit over the turntable spindle, which held the record in place on the turntable, and helped you center it. 45s contained one short song on each side, and were the main format of rock and popular music before albums became widespread. The early smash hits of the rock era, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, appeared in this format.
Older recordplayers also had a setting for 16 rpm records. I have never seen one of those.
I understand that 16 RPM records (actually 16 2/3, IIRC) were mainly used for spoken word recordings due to the lower fidelity and increased space (the faster it spins, the greater the fidelity, and understandably the lesser the space).
There were some 45s that had two songs per side (EPs?). I have also seen the odd 45 with a 1/4" hole in the center.
So, fishbicycle, is there actually a cassette tape-deck at your station? Are cassette tape decks still at (or were they ever) at radio stations?
Posted too soon:
Also, when looking through a relatives collection of 78 rpm records, I learned firsthand the origin of the term “album”: An album was exactly that; a thin scrapbook-looking affair in which four or five records (thus, eight to ten songs) of the same recording session were inserted.
EPs (extended play) didn’t catch on in the US, although there were quite a few of them made here. They were big in Britain and Europe. I have one of the first catalogue numbers of Columbia 7" records. It ran at 33 and had a small diameter hole. They were used again when 45 came in, but only infrequently. There was a trend in the late '80s when the format was dying out to press them again. Island Records had lots of singles with small holes, and Atlantic made some, too. Many indie 45s were the same.
Yes, we have cassette decks in all the studios, and a high-speed duplicator, although they are hardly ever used for anything anymore. The news people used to record location interviews on cassettes, up until 2001. That format was supplanted by minidisc. Radio stations never used them for the serious reproduction of music, though, unless they were tiny, budget-strapped outfits - but even then it was unlikely. There are too many problems with cassette format, namely that the speed and head alignment of every deck was different, and the Dolby calibration levels were off from deck to deck, and they were impossible to edit on. For professional use, even though there were (and still are) decks that cost much more than $1000, cassettes were pretty much useless.
Raise your hand if you’ve got an 8-track recorder. Heck, raise your hand if you ever had an 8-track recorder.