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If my post
yesterday has inspired dozens of you to throw out all your transistorized stereo
equipment and switch to the infinitely superior vacuum tube (valve) amplifiers
and pre-amps, here's just one of hundreds of links to get your amazing new tubes
and equipment:
Of course
once you Go Tube again, you can't just feed your $10,000 amplifier/pre-amp those
highly inferior and psychiatrically dangerous digital CDs anymore, so after you
throw out all your CDs, you'll need a source for new audiophile analog vinyl
LPs. This site will start you on your search. It wouldn't surprise me at all if
you can find some brand-new Glenn Gould LPs!
By the end of the Age of Vinyl, I seem
to recall an average price for a new LP was about $8 or $9. These audiophile LPs
-- prepare your MasterCard for typical prices of $25.
Turntables? You're on your own, but
somebody's still making and selling them. Radio stations still need them to
access their huge stash of vinyl, and radio-station turntables do lots of nifty
tricks that home turntables never could. Also, manual tricks with vinyl records
are a characteristic mainstay of rap music, so rap DJs are also keeping
turntables alive.
I saw the handwriting on the wall about
eight years ago and bought a brand-new Technics SLQD33 before home turntables
extincted. It's still all hooked in and ready to go at a moment's notice, but I
confess it's rather dusty. I certainly never threw out a single vinyl LP. Maybe
we should all decare one day a year World LP Party Day, and those who still have
turntables should invite all our friends to bring their favorite LPs
over.
The invention of the 33-1/3 LP itself
was an act of musical love. For decades, a brilliant engineer named Peter
Goldmark ran Columbia's audio technology laboratories, usually concentrating on
the recording end, improving microphones, etc. One night in the early 1950s he
visited some friends to hear their new recording of a symphony. It was lovely;
he was entranced ... when suddenly WHIRR KLIK KER-THUNK!!! The next disc of the
four-disc stack of 78 rpm records brutally dropped onto the turntable. The next
morning Goldmark stormed into the lab and announced to his minions that within a
year, they were going to find a way to save beautiful music from this
interruption and torture by greatly expanding the playing time per side (a
33-1/3 side holds about 25 minutes, n'est-ce pas?) -- AND greatly increasing the
fidelity of the recordings.
A very special treasure of mine is a
thick black heavy Bakelite disk that claims to be the last 78 rpm record ever
manufactured and sold: "Wisconsin Wiggle" by R. Crumb (the famous
underground cartoonist and blues enthusiast) and His Keep-On-Truckin' Orchestra.
(I forget what's on the B-side.) Of course it only works on turntables that are
old enough or retro-fancy enough to still offer the 78 rpm motor speed -- the
whole project, circa 1975, was clearly Crumb's Angry Insult to Progress, and
also his hommage to the wonderful heritage of "race records" -- tiny
obscure record labels from the 1920s to 1950s that recorded African-American
pop, blues and jazz artists.
(I also own "Monty Python's
Three-Sided Record" -- a truly uneek geek treasure.)
Anybody have any particularly precious
78s or 45s? Anybody still have those cheap/free brightly-colored plastic inserts
for the centers of 45s so they can fit on thin-spindle turntables?
About seven years ago I took a
wonderful ferry/freighter trip up the coast of Labrador. Our first stop was a
tiny isolated fishing village called Red Bay. In the tiny general store, on a
table, was a marvelously preserved Edison cylinder grammaphone, entirely
mechanical, nothing to plug in or turn on, with a huge sound horn sticking up
into the air. When she saw me drooling over it, the storeowner floored me -- she
said it still worked perfectly! And she put on a cylinder (she had dozens of
them) from about 1900, wound the crazy thing up, and damned if it didn't play
the dandiest Fox Trot!
"Trapped & Lost in the
Past" Elmer
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