A Brief History of Recorded Sound
 

https://youtu.be/LSkwqUAfoJw?si=mUKeoq27j5tR5U3J

Pretty interesting stuff. I am old enough to remember 8 track tapes and I have a Panasonic 8 track player that looks like a dynamite plunger. My daily driver has a cassette and CD player and of course I have a few albums as well.

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My great aunt had a Victrola with a lot of 78 RPM albums. It was interesting to see it and play with, but the sound was pretty poor and very scratchy.

In 1960 we lived in Hawaii and dad was a Air Force pilot. He made regular trips to Japan in a C-124 cargo airplane. They always had room for the crew to bring back inexpensive Japanese products. Dad bought a stereo that had two huge speakers and separate tweeters and woofers. When he came home from some long missions he would play the 1812 overture loud enough the neighbors knew he was back. He bough a large tape deck to record music, and then put on a tape when guest were over and it would play for several hours.

When I bought my first car in 1970, it had a AM radio only. I went to the audio store that sold car stereos and listened to all of the devices on the market. All were too expensive for me at the time. About 1972 I went back and I had a $1,000 budget to get a home stereo. I bought a Dual turntable, and a quadraphonic amplifier with 4 Advent speakers and a 8 track recorder. I made mix tapes for my car and had a large box of 20 tapes I kept in the car.

Now I have 140 CD all recorded on a thumb drive. Both cars have stereos that can accept the thumb drives and I put it in random mode. Or I can plug in my iPhone and listen to Pandora. At home, and even right now, I have Pandora playing om my computer.

Fan of the history guy

Me and your dad would get along fine. I don't always play Whippin' Post or Run Like Hell, or Monkey Man, but when I do, I make sure that all the neighbors enjoy the experience, too.

Way back in the early 1960s he was playing a game of scrabble with friends. He used the word tweeter and no one would accept it. And it was not yet in the dictionary. he learned it from reading the manuals for his stereo.

We had a phonograph and alot of records with it. It was in my grandmothers attic forever probably came from her parents I dont know. It had a big brass horn and everyhing

Some of my earliest memories are of our family stereo when I was 3-4. I don't remember it all, but we had a turntable and reel to reel. Then Dad went back into the Navy and we got stationed in Japan where Dad got some really killer stereo equipment. My parents always had stereo gear until my dad passed. I bought my first "real" stereo (separate components) when I was 14/15 and we were in Japan. I had a combination of old gear and new gear for many more years, but eventually, (2014) sold off the last of my gear. I rarely used it. Now most of my music listening is via headphones streaming to PC or phone or in the car.

I remember my parents having a couple of cars with 8-tracks, but upgraded to cassettes. I've always had records, cassettes, or CDs.

My parents had a stereo made by a company called Electrophonic and you could make your own 8-track tapes.

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One of the young ladies I worked with long ago was the daughter of a local life long DJ and he did a lot of voice over commercials for radio and TV. He had a home living room much like this. He had two shelves that circled the room, stuffed with albums.

His daughter had one funny story, she was out at the local lake "watching the submarine races" and enjoying her boyfriends attention, with heavy kissing and some petting. Her dad's voice came on the radio for some commercial, and she just all of a sudden could not continue, and asked that he drive her home. Just dad's voice was enough to put her back on the straight and narrow.

Nice vintage gear. Looks like something from a Playboy magazine "tech we like" spread from 1977.

I got into audio gear at an early age (9) when I got a portable cassette tape recorder for Christmas. It was amazing to have such control over sounds/music, especially as a pre-teen in 1969...If you're old enough to remember, there was a time with only 3 TV networks, and some shows would only come on once a year (10 Commandments, Wizard of Oz) and the one I really wanted to record was A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was sooooo cool to be able to record the wonderful Vince Guaraldi tunes and play them back any time I wanted. I was soon out in the carport, in the front seat of our Chrysler Newport Imperial, playing back my parent's late 60s adult comedy 8-tracks and making bootleg cassettes of them. Ah yes, my first experience with being a pirate/bootleg audio outlaw! :p

Later in high school, I got a decent stereo system with a nice turntable with platter speed/strobe. One day, I was experimenting and started out with two stereo cassette decks and the preamp output from the turntable. I put on a K.C. and the Sunshine Band album on the turntable, then took the LEFT channel out of the turntable and the RIGHT channel out of a prerecorded cassette of the same album, and fed them into the second cassette deck. It took a few tries, but after a while, I was able to 'sync up' both recordings and engage the second cassette deck to make a new, 'hybrid' master tape.

The cool part was discovering I could create a side-to-side 'pan' effect by speeding up or slowing down the turntable. A tiny bit faster would cause the sound to 'start' milliseconds sooner in the left channel before the right channel caught up. Go slower on the speed control, and the right side would playback an instant sooner that the left. This was really noticeable with headphones; once synced up, I just gently adjusted the platter speed up and down to create the left-right pan effect. I wonder if this is how Tom Scholz of Boston got started?

Seems vinyl is making quite a comeback. Some of us never stopped. Lots of great gear out there that can wring out amazing sound quality often from old (clean) records. Current rig:

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^^^ nice. Is that a VPI Super Prime Scout?


My family room looks like the pic Glen posted. I’ve been collecting vinyl since 1980 and only now am slowing down. There just isn’t enough time left to listen to it all..and without having any kids to leave it all to…..

Good eye!

Love my vpi too!

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1983. I believe this shop was in Australia and the reels would spin. Anyone here ever been there?

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Really cool. I see a Fleetwood Mac Rumors LP but don't recognize the other one.

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Quite a good choice for the photo, give how popular it was; from Wikipedia:

It won Album of the Year at the 1978 Grammy Awards and received Diamond certifications in several countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and the US, in where it is certified 21× Platinum* by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). As of February 2023, Rumours has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the sixth best-selling album of the 1970s, and the 9th best-selling album of all time.

*Platinum = 1,000,000 certified unit sales. Figure each album is one square foot, so laid out flat that is just shy of 500 acres! :eek:

One of my business partners collects mechanical things. Clock, watches, cars...

But he has an Edison cylinder player and several wax cylinders. He also collects music boxes. These are not small things, they use disc's that look like sawmill blades. They were used in bars like player pianos.

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If anyone gets the chance to see the documentary Desperate Man Blues about 78 collector Joe Bussard, I recommend it. I was saddened to learn that he died last year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Bussard

https://iubfesa.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/joe-bussards-basement/

https://joesvintage78.com/

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