I am going back to old school gadgets, the type of gadgets you had to have to listen to the music besides the radio. You know that thing in the car, on the wall, the clock radio. Yes, those existed. I had one growing up and I just got rid of my clock radio this year. I am talking about a record player that played vinyl records.
Vinyl records
The phonograph disc is what It was called in the late 1800s, it was the primary medium for music reproduction in the 20th century and it co-existed with the phonograph cylinder. In 1912 the phonograph passed the phonograph cylinder and it retained the largest market share until the compact discs came into the picture in the late 1980s, and left the market in 1991. Even with compact cassettes came around. Records were a big part of music when I was growing up.
Records
Here is what a record looked like.
The 45’s looked like these
You had to put one of these in the middle for the 45 records to work:
Growing up
We had stacks and stacks of these records, and yes I have them now. In order to listen to music you had to do the following:
- Take the record out of the shelve
- Place it on the record player
- Put the needle on it and then listen
- Once side one was done you would have to flip it over.
Hopefully, it played the music. Yes, you would have to replace the needle as it would wear out. But you could listen to your favorite band. Once in a while, the record would skip and then it would be painful to listen to as it would cause you headaches as the music wouldn’t flow as nice and smooth as you wish it would.
If you wanted to buy singles you could buy small 45’s and listen to those over and over again, instead of buying the record for a couple of songs right.
Back in those days the gadgets where simpler I guess.
Record player
The player looked sort of like this one.
The one we had a radio, tape player and an 8 track player and on the other side the record player. It had sliding doors on it where you could store the records.
Future
Now I have boxes of the records however they are boxes and at this time I can’t remember where I put them. I know, I know. I need to be better at that.
I am thinking of getting a record player to start to play these records again and maybe moving these over to MP3’s so I can play the music I grew up listening to.
