I BOUGHT a turntable recently - after coming back from Japan, and sorting through some of my old stuff stored in my parents’ garage, I found my old record collection - some good stuff in there I’d completely forgotten I had! My old stereo was long gone - I lent it to my sister, and I think her ex-husband walked off with it - so I bought a new turntable at Dick Smith’s {they’re now marketing them for people to burn old vinyl on to CD…} I have to say, Led Zep’s Houses Of The Holy sounds a whole lot better on vinyl. And yeah, Little Case is fascinated by it. Mind you, all he wants to hear is “Yellow Submarine”.
They’re heavy because they’re made of bakelite {an early kind of ur-plastic} rather than “vinyl”. Pick up an old telephone sometime and see how much that weighs.
:: raises hand re: stereo 8-track player/recorder, ‘portable’ 8-track player [about the size of a briefcase and twice as heavy], and 5 foot long console stereo with LP/45 turntable, AM/FM stereo and 8-track player, complete with monster-sized stereo headsets [parents bought it from Reader’s Digest (yes, the magazine) in the early 70s], all now housed in the parents’ basement ::
:: points to collection of RCA Victor 78s (opera excerpts), multi-speed (monophonic) record player [16, 33-1/3, 45, 78] with adjuster knob (could tweak the rev speed of each up or down (45 becomes 46, 47 or 48-ish), a couple of 16rpm records (minus read-along books they came with, especially “The Little Engine That Could!”, my favorite back then :mad: ) and a small collect of records cut from the back of cereal boxes ::
:: looks at computer, wondering about Ebay ::
My hubby fixes all of that old stuff at his job.
He just got done repairing an old reel-to-reel tape player yesterday and is all the time working on old turntables and such. Apparently that old stuff gets used a lot more than I realized. If you ever need any of that stuff worked on, fishbicycle… 
Actually, my tape deck with the dbx NR has, I believe, a solenoid that’s gone bad. I could use it otherwise, but it won’t engage in play, or stay there, or something (it’s been a long time since I turned it on!). If he’s interested in having a look at it, maybe we could get together and work something out. It’s a Technics M275x with logic control. What does he figure something like that would cost to fix?
Oh yeah, and I have a nice turntable that just died on me one day. The record I was playing was “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye.” The tonearm lifted up, returned to home position, and the turntable died on the spot. Fitting, no? I need that fixed, too.
When he rolls out of bed I’ll ask him. 
I’m sending you an email.
I think turntables have been his favorite thing to fix.
Lordy, that reminds me…I told my dad about two months ago, I’d ask my husband about some needles for his turntable. :smack:
Actually, I mis-spoke. What we had were indeed 78s. Whilst typing, I had some doggerel going through my head:
Platter, platter, spinning slow
Victor 45 must go
Push the switch and turn the lever
Presley can’t go on forever.
-Ronny Graham, “Upstairs at the Downstairs”
Raises hand!
It was on a combo unit I got when I was 14. Turntable, AM-FM radio, and 8-track player/recorder.
Biggest pain in the ass to use.
*::: raises hand ::: *
I had one. The first stereo I ever got (must have been '76 or '77) had an 8-track tape player and recorder, a dual cassette deck and a turntable. That thing was tricked out, let me tell you!
I had it till I went off to college and bought myself a boombox with a cassette player, and I recorded all my albums and 8-tracks onto cassettes to take with me.
I bought my “State of the Art” component stereo in 1983. I’m convinced its remains the state of some are somewhere. 
ART
I think there may have been an 8-track in my dad’s car growing up. Those are the things that look vaguely like Atari game cartrdges, right?
Indeed, dose are dem, but to have a device that could play them is one thing; to have the more complicated device that could also record them was significantly more unusual. (Most folks who had 8-track rigs just bought and played the commercial 8-track tapes. Don’t know why, but recording your own from record or radio or live or whatever didn’t catch on for 8-tracks the way it did a bit later for cassette tapes).