Turntable

 

        When my dad was getting rid of things in preparation for his move to this area he had a Technics turntable that he no longer wanted. He offered it to me and I accepted it. For nearly a year it sat in the basement until the upstairs TV finally died. We put the turntable where the TV used to sit. For several months it sat there until last night when we finally had time to hook it up to my stereo.

        At this point a bit of backtracking is in order.

        After I got my first job and apartment, my first big purchase was a stereo. I didn't have time to watch much TV and music was my chief form  of entertainment. At that time my small music collection was on cassette tapes. CDs were just starting to become available. My stereo consisted of two large speakers, a receiver, twin tape deck and a CD player with room for five discs. I didn't get a turntable because it seemed that form of music recording was on its way out.

        The reason why Dad had one was so that he could play the collection of records he amassed during his younger years and a few he bought after he married. There was Glen Campbell, Engelbert Humperdinck and several Christmas records with songs by various artists. There was a record by Burl Ives of children's songs and a few operas on records. Dad used to put on a record in the afternoon at naptime in the hopes that I would sleep longer. At some point I remember being told that I learned to read from the notes on the backs of the album covers. I'm not sure if this is true.

        When I was older I used to play my brother's records on the turntable he had with his stereo. The first one I remember was George Carlin. I don't know the album, but it did contained The Seven Words You Can't Say On TV. I loved listening to it over and over and had most of it memorized. (I don't remember most of it now.) Once in awhile I'd go to Woolworth's and purchase a 45 of a song I liked. 

        Back to the present.

        C and I finally got tired of seeing the turntable and not being able to use it. I had the 45s from when I was younger and C had some records he was given and we wanted to be able to play them. We had to cut out part of the back of the entertainment center so we could hook the turntable to the receiver. It wasn't easy as we had to be careful not to cut any of the wires that were back there. Once we got access to the back of the receiver it was easy to plug things in.

        We vacuumed the sawdust pushed everything back into place. We took the cover off of the needle and put a record on. We chose 'Jessie's Girl' by Rick Springfield as it was the song I new best so we could judge how things were working. After a bit of fiddling with speakers and tone knobs, the song played. It was defiantly too fast even though we had it on the 45 setting. 

        I listened with awe and amazement. The sound was very good, better than I expected. After so many years of CDs and digital music, I expected it to sound scratchy and coarse, but it wasn't. C found an LP that we had and played it. I was amazed at the thought that grooves on vinyl could sound that good.

        We'll need to figure out how to adjust the speed do some clean up work on it. I'm looking forward to enjoying music played on our turntable.