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Get your vacuum tubes, vinyl LPs and turntables here!



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:
 
http://www.audio-nova.com/Innehall/tubesite_ooc.htm
 
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