A Driving Force For Records
September 3rd, 2009 by ComputerBob
A couple of generations ago, popular music came on phonograph records that were played on a record player whose turntable spun at 78 revolutions per minute (rpm).
By the time I was old enough to know what a record player was, long-play albums with stereo sound were popular. They held much more music and were designed to spin at 33 1/3 rpm.
By the time I was a teenager, “45s” were very popular, even though they only held one song one each side of the record.
The one thing that all of those record formats had in common was that the record itself spun around and around, while a needle that was mounted in a tonearm moved over the record as the needle followed the continuous groove of music from the outside to the inside of the record.
I remember holding one finger against the spinning edge of our Alvin and the Chipmunks LP, to slow it down so that I could hear what the original singers sounded like. And I remember feeling very disappointed that they sounded like a barbershop quartet of old men, singing four-part harmony very, very slowly, while over-enunciating each word.
I also remember taking some of my parents’ 33 1/3 albums and playing them at 78 rpm, to make their “crooners” sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
And in the 1970s, like most kids my age, I manually spun some records backwards by hand, to try to hear the “hidden messages” that The Beatles and other bands had reportedly recorded. I have to admit that I never heard any such messages very clearly at all, despite one of my cousins repeatedly playing them for me and insisting that he could hear them — the whole idea seemed to me to be just a clever marketing trick by the bands and their record companies.
I had a lot of fun experimenting with record players back then. But, knowing how easily the record player’s needle could slip out of a record’s groove, I’m really surprised to see that someone figured out a way to play a record without using a turntable.
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