I want to say something about music during my life.
Okay.
Sports, radio, and reading were my main interests at first. Music wasn’t a big part of my life until age 11, when my family moved into a new home. In getting to know my new neighbors, I noticed they had an old acoustic phonograph.
It had no electronics and no motor. You wound up a spring with a hand crank, and, at 78 rpm, the vibration of the needle transferred to a diaphragm and the sound went through a baffle and then out into the room. Pretty neat, I thought. Would I like to have it? they asked. Oh boy, yeah, I answered. Thanks a lot. So, without a record to my name, I took it into my basement.
Notice that I said needle, not stylus. Just a plain steel point, like a small nail, that I clamped into the phono head with a setscrew.
And the head was relatively heavy by today’s standards. A record that I played quite often would be worn down in time, making the sound noisy.
Another problem was that this was during World War 2, and steel was needed for the war effort. So phono needles were scarce. One substitute the industry tried to promote was cactus needles.
They worked?
They were adequate for a few plays, but they wore down quickly, producing a muffled sound.
Through my teen years I collected quite a few 78s. They were by performers such as Tommy Dorsey, Dick Haymes, and Johnny Mercer. I even had an album of humorous songs by Morey Amsterdam. He was big on radio before TV was popular.
That collection of 78s served me well during high school. However, I knew it would be impractical to carry them away to college, so I started to collect 45 rpm records, which were smaller and lighter. At first I had a simple mechanism that plugged into my table radio, but eventually I bought a standalone record player.
And the 45 rpm records fit nicely into a carrying case.
When I went into the Army, stationed in Chicago, I decided to keep in touch with family in New York and California via a 3-inch audiotape recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
And there was a local radio program that played the popular songs of the day, so I recorded them and replayed them instead of records. Actually I would tape an entire program and then cut and splice together the songs that I wanted to keep.
For each year I would have a 5- or 7-inch reel of audiotape. For instance I compiled “The Best of 1956.”
By the time I came back from the Army, my parents had moved to a small apartment and had either left behind or thrown out my 78s along with my stamp collection, coin collection, and baseball cards.
Where have I heard that one before?
No big deal. I donated my 45-rpm collection to charity and began collecting LPs.
The 33-1/3 rpm records could hold entire albums, so they were even more efficient than previous records from a space standpoint.
The LP was great for home use, but what if I wanted to take music to a club meeting? And I did. Fortunately, another medium became available at that time: the audio cassette.
On my stereo system I could play an LP and record the songs on a cassette at the same time. Then I could take the cassette to my movie-club meeting and play the music on a boom box.
That worked out very well for carrying music to another location, but I stuck with LP’s for home use. At least for a while. Then the compact disc came along.
The CD could hold the same amount of music as an LP but in a smaller space.
I know that some people consider the quality of sound coming from an LP superior to that coming from a CD. Personally, I don’t hear the difference. So I’ll stick with my CDs.
At least until the next new medium comes along.