I know most of you know this, but It's new to me. And I hope you guys don't mind if I regale you with what I just found out, even if you know all about it already. I just find it fascinating.
It's about vinyl records. I knew about vinyl records. We had a record player at home. And I knew what an LP was. But I didn't know what the acronym stood for. Sorry 'bout being so clueless...
I had a discussion over the chatrooom once, about record players. And I found out that vinyl records came in different "flavors," depending on how it was recorded. Apparently you can change how fast a record spun on the player, either at 33 rpm, 45 or 78. The really old records played at 78 revolutions per minute, and "LPs" played at 33. And the smaller ones played at 45. And I found it interesting that what I know now as singles used to be recorded on these 45rpm disks, hence singles were known as "45s." Wow.
And then someone from the net clued me in. I thought "LP" stood for something technical, but when I found out all it stood for was "long playing" record, I said to myself, "you're pulling my leg." Apparently, most songs used to be issued as singles/45s, and the gimmick of having more than one song on a disk was a later innovation. And since there was more than one song one it, you can continuously play the disk for a longer period of time. Hence "LP." Hmmm... Not so wow...
I did some research on the web (yep, I got lotsa free time today... heheh), and you know how the electronics company, Motorola, got it's name? Well, apparently, it was a combination of "motorcar" and "Victrola" (Victrola being a very popular brand of record player in the '20s and '30s). Apparently, they were looking into putting a record player into a car so that you can have music while you were driving. And they literally made a few of these record-players-for-cars, but with the advent of transistorized radios, that sorta got junked real quick. So. Motorola. Now, that earns a "wow."
Anyway, just a post of no moment. Just thought to share what I just discovered but you all undoubtedly already know about...
Comments
It's wonderful ...
... how the youth of today are learning about my history :). When I started buying records they were mostly shellac and played at 78 rpm. The very first one I bough was Stan Freberg's 'St George and the Dragonet' with 'Littel Blue Riding Hood' on the other side.
The first LPs available in the UK by Decca were also known as FFRR (Full Frequency Range Recordings - I still have some) and HiFi was an esoteric hobby indulged in only by serious enthusiasts. btw some 45s were also known as EPs (for Extended Play) and had two tracks per side. In fact a very classy hifi system from the era has been cluttering my workshop/study for the last few years. I really must put it on eBay as it has some very collected amplifiers in it.
Yes, Motorola were first known for car radios. Not too easy to make then because they used thermionic valves (aka vacuum tubes) which needed a high voltage (about 90v) that had to generated from the car's 12 volt battery using an electro-mechanical device called a multi-vibrator. Things have moved on since 1949 when the transistor was invented.
Robi
Man I am soooo feeling my age !
You do realize by the time you retire, kids will ask you what is a tape recorder or maybe even what a CD is don't you ? Or why did computers have memories that actually spun? Or what is film?? Or you only had 1TB hard drives for that matter?
Your time will come.
BWwwwaaaaah! haah! haah! haaaaaaaaah!
^_^
Kim
You left out...
The old 16 2/3 rpm recordings, drum recordings, and many more.
I still have quite a nice stack of vinyl, that I need to convert to digital form (ever try carrying a stack of vinyl and a turntable with you on a walk? It just doesn't work.)...
Glad you enjoyed your research.
Annette (who misses watching 2-3 foot tall speakers walk across the room...)
... but people used to do it.
Carry stacks of vinyl and a turntable on a walk, I mean. They didn't actually play them whilst walking of course - no-one had a mains lead long enough to make it worthwhile for one thing. The most popular portable (well TRANSportable would be a better term) in the UK was the ubiquitous Dansette which kids would carry to their friends' houses together with their record collection (Bill Hailey, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard etc etc) for an evening's musical entertainment.
I suppose the first truly mobile personal musical electronic entertainment device was the so-called trannie (no, not a TG individual) or transistor radio which became popular in the late 50s.
I'll shut up. It's making me maudlin.
Robi
Wow and I thought not having a remote was strange
I still get surprized that some people have never had to get up off the couch to turn a TV channel. They've never been without a remote.
I used to love Reel to Reel tape decks. I could put alot os music on one reel. My grandfather had a wire reel to reel. The wire, if I remember correctly, was as thin as a fishing line (50+ years ago).
A live in friend has a young teen age son who wanted some paper to write on. I pointed to a pile of different pads of paper and said go ahead. Later he came up to me and wanted to know why nothing was writing on the paper. He happened to get the carbon paper. Does anyone remember carbon paper?
Mt subject line should really read that I thought not having a remote was not so strange but space didn't allow. Sorry!
Vickie
Yeah, I remember.
Although I did not know it was named as such. And if anyone is interested - List of duplicating processes, or how people coped with the need for copies without scanners, digital technology, printers and xeroxes.
Faraway
Big Closet Top Shelf
Where you can fool around like you want to and most you get is some bemused good ribbing!
Faraway
Big Closet Top Shelf
Where you can fool around like you want to and most you get is some bemused good ribbing!
Remotes go WAAAY back
For some time in the seventies and eighties I had my grandparent's floorstanding Phillps am radio, with police band! It was aprox the size of a small kitchen range.
In the late thirties when they bought it police used the am band just above the commecial sations.
It had a wireless remote with it. It used a triode tube, a three electrode valve to you brits, various capacitors , resistors and the like and a *B* battery .
There were various B batteries in the past for vacumn tube devices. The were like a small book wih a plug-in connector and typically provided six volts for the heater filament of the tube and 45 to 90 for the circuitry. You held down a bar to turn it on and warm up the tube then dialed a rotary dial like a telephone to chang channells or rais and lower the voluume.
The radio worked fine until san electrolytic capacoitor failed but I couldn;t afford a B battry so I never could test the remote.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
Atchooly ...
12 inch 78 rpm records usually had more than one song, and for that matter, 45 rpm records could quite easily hold 2 or even three of the short songs that were usually recorded on them. But 45s sold more easily to young people, who might not afford a full 12 inch 'disk' yes, we sometimes called them disks, and since they would pay for only two songs, ( The second, or B side, also called 'the flip side' was usually not considered as important as the A side ) they raked in extra dough. Sometimes, they 'cheated' even further and put 2 copies of the same song, one on each side.
The 45s also often came out ahead of the larger albums with 12 or more songs, and were used to hype them.
Also, the faster a record spun, the better the fidelity, and in the early days, it took 78RPM to get any decent fidelity for music.
But because they could not get as much on a disc as the later 33 1/3 LPs, originally, record sets were a book of several 78 rpm discs, hence the name 'album' which was later applied to a 33 1/3 rpm disc with many songs.
As electronics improved, the 45s , and 33 1/3 pmm discs began to take over, and eventually 33 1/3 rpm not only matched or exceeded that of most 78 & 45 RPM records, but became capable of recording stereo, whereas most 45s and all 78s I ever saw, were strictly monaural.
Because fidelity was not as important, there were even 16 2/3 rpm records for just speech, such as talking books, ( usually just for the blind, in those days), and even some 8 1/3 rpm records for the same purpose. The lower speed let them play much longer. At 8 1/3, and using both sides, it was possible to get around 2 hours on one disc.
Someone mentioned shellac. Yes, very early records used a shellac because the plastics of the time could not be pressed as finely as required for even the best fidelity of the time, so they were pressed into shellac, which wore out fairly quickly. Shellac records were also brittle, and broke easily when dropped.
But with the advent of vinyl, a master could be made and metal coated, and then used to literally press, or stamp the groves directly into the vinyl, and get both better fidelity, and longer life. And vinyl allowed around 2 1/2 times as many groves per inch.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
And Even Older
The origional recordings were on cylinders. The oldest cylinder recording is by Tom. Edison, the inventor of these recordings. The first president to have his voice recorded was Theo. Roosevelt. The first 45 sterio was "Any One for Tennis" by the Cream (c 1969 I had a copy).
There were at least two slang terms that came from these records, both coming from the fact that these records gave sound from the grooves:
"In the groove" a term origionating fron the 1940's had two meanings:
1. Having a good time.
2. doing things perfect. also "in a groove"
Song from that era: "In the Groove," an upbeat swing song
"Groovy" a term from the 1960's had two meanings
1. great, fantastic
2. mellow
Song from that era: "Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovie)" It was a mellow song.
shalimar
Here comes the man with the jive- groovy!
I guess the term groovy can be called a 60's term because that's when it became widespread, but it predates
the Flower Power era by several decades. I have heard Cab Calloway and Stuff Smith use it on their records
(what they called "race records", which our local music store wouldn't carry so we had to go clear uptown),
from waaaaay back, when hip was "hep". The 60's was just when white non-jazz-musicians discovered it.
~~now excuse me Gate, this viper's got her some gage and she's gonna get tall! Laika
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
B (flip-side) Good
Here is a list of B-Side songs that made good.
http://www.forgottenhits.com/your_top_200_favorite_forgotten...
Many of them became "standards".
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
More detail
I always thought LP (long playing) was meant to distinguish between the 33 1/3 vinyl records we all remember from the earlier 10" versions. The smaller ones were about the same size as a 78 and when they came out the manufacturers had already had a bit of time and had starting building in a "33 1/3" setting on most players, but the "need" for portability required the case for the player to be as small as possible, so the larger format wouldn't fit these players. Sometime mid-fifties during this 10" period "high fidelity" records became available for audiophiles that were willing to pay the extra money. Prior to this time records were "cut" using a vibrating needle on a very heavy arm, so most of the variations in the groove were in the bottom. When Hi-Fi came out the technology allowed them to cut the sides of the groove instead. If the player's needle was shaped correctly it wouldn't drag the bottom of the groove as much and the hiss from that was much reduced. And, since it was cut with a much lighter head, the cutter's needle could vibrate faster, hence higher frequencies. The sound was much more realistic, but since most home players had cheap amplifiers and speakers the extra fidelity often sounded screechy. There was a rousing debate for a couple years about whether high fidelity was even a good idea! It was finally settled by one of the audio magazines, which did a blind listening test with a bunch of people in an anechoic chamber. It was finally decided that people loved high fidelity, but the study pointed out the need for better home players.
When stereo came out a few years later, it was just an extension of the recording on the sides of the groove thing. They merely cut the left side on one side of the groove and the right on the other. Then in the 60s a revolution happened. Cheap industrial diamonds became widely available, and an inexpensive way to grind them into an elliptical shape was developed. Hence, the availability of relatively inexpensive elliptical heads for your turntable! Ellipticals were even better at avoiding all the scratches and dust at the bottom of your grooves. Prior to this time only professional turntables, like those used by radio stations had them.
When digital electronics got fast enough in the late 60s to actually consider for audio sampling there was another debate over quality. Again, people complained it was "scratchy", that playing it loud sounded like someone in the background was breaking glass with a hammer. That was resolved however when the sampling speed got high enough. You still hear the "broken glass" complaint from musicians occasionally when die hard guitarists (blues players mostly) defend their tube amps over solid state.
Okay, enough about all that. Anyone here remember 4-tracks? :-) Did you know that the four and eight track players were invented by Bill Lear, of Lear Jet fame?
Or that one technology the Allies made sure they got out of Germany during WWII was their magnetic tape recording technology? The Americans and Brits had been making do prior to this with recording on wire!
Or that none other than Bing Crosby was instrumental in revolutionizing the quality of recording in America, and was one of the big investors/partners in Ampex Corp?
Amazing isn't it?
Hugs
Carla Ann
Setero on a LP
It is actually the depth of the grove was for one channel and the width of the grove for the other.
As the needle move up and down was for one channel and as it moved from side to side in the grove was the other channel.
Hi-Fi
My Dad had a cousin who was a Hi-Fi enthusiast. He was an electronics whiz. He could look at the inside of a vacuum tube radio and recognize all the components and individual circuits on sight. He used to use fairly cheep speakers to build very high quality sound speaker boxes by routing the wiring a combination of series and parallel so that each speaker got just the right signal to produce a particular part of the combined sound.
His Hi-Fi set was something to behold. Each record was treated as though it was a valuable antique. (Today they would be.) It was to be handled only by the edges and before it was played the turntable was turned on and a special velvet covered tool was pressed lightly to the record surface to pick up any minute dust particles that might have jumped onto the surface between the time it was removed from it's waxed paper envelope that protected it from being scratched by the cardboard album cover. Then the arm was placed on a device that would slowly lower it into place far more gently than the human hand could possibly do so. When he played a record, I, as a small child, would have to sit on the couch. I wasn't allowed move while the record was playing, lest I cause a vibration in the floor and cause the needle to jump and scratch the record.
No joke this guy was serious about keeping the sound quality at it's highest.
Hugs
Patricia
([email protected])
http://members.tripod.com/~Patricia_Marie/index.html
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper ubi femininus sub ubi
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
For those a bit younger...
VCR's often had multiple modes for recording like SP, LP, EP, and SLP
SP = Standard Play
LP = Long Play
EP = Extended Play
SLP = SlowRecord Long Play (Same as EP)
Just a bit more techie nonsense :)
-P/KAF/PT
That's pretty interesting!
I actually didn't know that about Motorola. That's kind of an interesting little fact of the day. As for the records, the speeds and terminology I know but I'm a bit of a nostalgic. I got my parents to buy me a brand new record player a few years ago and before that was stuck using their old one from the 70's, that needle sure was worn.
I think I might be a bit of an odd-ball 19 year old but I really love putting on my parents old records, some of which are older than them. Most actually have an interesting story behind them. One good example, and one of my favourites, is the three sided Monty Python record. That was one of the craziest things when I saw it, I thought it was hilariously clever. Now that is one of many things you could do with a record that you can't do with a CD.
Actually, one of the things I miss is the interesting Album art, not only on the Album casing but on the record itself, like the little story book that was attached to The Magical Mystery Tour album. Also, how the White Album actually *was* all white, including the record itself. I also remember seeing an amazingly intricite piece of artwork on a record, I only wish I could remember what the album was!
As much as I love technology and can't wait for the next, faster, better, cheaper, innovation. I almost think we've lost something special from our abandoned, older, technology.
The 1972 eclipse of the sun!
Ah yes, know that Monthy Python album well.
I have it in the basement near my B&O Tangent tracking turntable and Tandberg receiver.
Come to think of it all three are from the 1970s.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
wow, blast from the past...
My copy of the White Album was plain black, but I do recall seeing white, red, blue and yellow/gold disks from that era.
Some copies of Meatloaf's 'Bat out of Hell' had the cover art duplicated on the vinyl, for one. You had to pay a premium for that version, and they were hard to find. If I recall correctly, Grand Funk Railway's 'We're an American Band' also had a vinyl art version, as well as the Eagle's 'Hotel California', and I know there were many others. I never had the extra cash to pay for one, although they looked extremely cool. There was some talk that putting the picture on the vinyl affected the quality of the sound. I have no idea if that was correct, but who'd risk their hard-earned cash to find out?
Premiums
Yeah, I think you're right about those "premium versions". I suppose my dad must have spent a bit of extra money for the "special editions" but then again he is a huge music buff. We do have a couple records with designs on them though and I don't think I've noticed a bad sound experience for them, could be I'm just lucky though.
As for the record with the artwork, I can barely remember what it looked like. I *want* to say it was a picture of a South American Step Pyramid but that's all I really remember.
I also can't believe I forgot to mention Thick As A Brick. It's a great example of something that can't carry over to CD's. It's album art was a newspaper, with silly articles, and complete with a puzzle. They tried to do it with the CD as well but they had to seriously cut down on it's content. =(
Picture records
Picture records preceded the vinyl age: Not sure how they did it, but a lot of big band 78s from the '40s had pictures on them. Some I remember were photos of the band or vocalist and some illustrated the record. Usually each side had a separate picture. Most I remember were sepia tint monochrome, but a few were color. One color picture I remember illustrated the song "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea."
Bob
And don't forget the earliest Victrolas
were wind up. No electricity.
So that brings up the oldest joke when an old man goes into the classic Luddite boasting competition:
.... Electricity? You had Electricity? Why in my day, electrons were but little nippers!
Kim
Fire? you had fire? Well, I remember...
Fire? I remember when that up-start Prometheus brought that down from Apollo, got hisself in a spot of trouble for it too...
Here's a bit of off topic trivia that might be interesting to some. I always knew the fax machine was a very old invention but acording to http://inventors.about.com/od/bstartinventors/a/fax_machine.htm the first iteration of it even predated the invention of the telephone. 1843.
with love,
Hope
with love,
Hope
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
If I remember right,
the original fax idea spun your original on a cyliner (very slowly) and somehow sensed variations between light and dark. These were converted to electrical pulses (digital, can you believe it?) and sent over telegraph lines to the receiver. The receiver spun a piece of paper on the drum and a pencil mounted to an electrical actuator moved the pencil in and out as needed to recreate the dark areas. Very much like pre-high def TV signals are painted on the screen. I think Popular Mechanics magazine actually published plans to make a crude fax machine in the 1960's using this technology, except the light and dark was sensed by a photocell and amplified by a tube circuit, which changed the signals to analog tones, and used an acoustic coupler for your huge old phone handset. I saw the plans in a book published during that time. My granddad had the book in a set and was really proud of it.
My brother and I got tickled at the detailed plans for building a message recorder for your phone when we noticed that for all the detail they left out the heater circuit for the tubes. Knowing nothing of electronics he decided we were just being uppity for questioning something we saw in print! Well what did I know? I was twelve at the time.
Hugs
Carla Ann
Rocks? You had rocks?
When I was a kid the Earth was still molten, we thought crust was something only bread had. :) And we didn't have any bread!
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I'm really young
I never got to see the times when dirt was still experimental. Unless you are talking about some special modern developments, of course. ;)
Faraway
Big Closet Top Shelf
Where you can fool around like you want to and most you get is some bemused good ribbing!
Faraway
Big Closet Top Shelf
Where you can fool around like you want to and most you get is some bemused good ribbing!
You had matter?
Back in my day ....... well okay it wasn't a day, I don't even think it was a second, we just didn't have ROOM for all these crazy newfangled things like compact disks and fire and rocks and hydrogen, and we got along just fine. At least we didn't have to worry about proton decay. I tell you this matter is just a fad. It'll fade...
~~primordially, Laika
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
I learned many interesting
I learned many interesting things today. Nothing better like ancient history.
Agestalgia...
...isn't a word of course but I'm making it up anyway, since that seems to be what kids are doing nowadays with all their texting and chat lingo and while I am definitely not in the child category none whatsoever, well you get the idea.
I'm having a bit of the cold weather bug going around at the moment so spending some time rereading Danny and even the music and references to 80s pop culture that I lived through makes me feel old. My Husband is older than I am and he makes me feel old. Sigh.
I remember when using my first computers with tape recorder cassettes for backup and one of my still favorite games was Dungeons of Daggorath on the old Tandy CoCo. My favorite SciFi shows back then was Space 1999. I soooo wanted to be Maya.
Ok enuf said. Crawl back under my moldy moss covered aged rock.......
.....!!!!!!!
Wait a darn cotton pickin' minute! Where did my rock go! ERIN! Did you take my rock again? I told ya to stop melting my rocks!!!! Just because you miss your childhood and wish things were still the same doesn't mean you can go around and take a woman's rocks and keep melting them down!!
Beverly Colleen
Beverly's Balcony
**********
I am a leaf on the wind, but someone turned the fan off.
Wire Recorder
This is so fun! :)
There were still a very few wire recorders around in the early 50's and I barely remember them. They were made up of a spool of wire that recorded voice for Sectretaries. Short hand was still very big, and all the Secretaries wore tight skirt suits and heels, or full skirted floral dresses. Every thing was Mr. this and Mr. that, and of course the Secretaries were Miss this or Mrs that. And when they replied to their bosses, it was "Yes Sir".
When I was in the presence of adults, I was to be,"seen and not heard". It was usually quite overwhelming for I, a small child. There of course was the old fashioned switch board with the woman who talked to everyone very formally, and then the stackado clacking of the Remington manual type writers. It remains a matter of great astonishment to me that the women could type so fast on them; it seems they were in the 50 to 70 WPM range.
Everyone was so tall then. I didn't know much about what was on desks because I could not see the tops. When something frightened me or I needed a hug, I'd try to hide in my Mother's skirts. My older siblings all thought that I was a right pain in the bottom, and called me sissy or Sunny Jim. I wonder if any of you will remember Sunny Jim. Little did they know that um sissy was prophetic. :)
Khadijah
Indulging nostalgia
How 'bout this for nostalgia: the Sony walkman, the Motorola Startac, slap bracelets, Fran Drescher, scrunchies, combat boots with sundresses, wayfarers, tha Banana Republic and Gap.
Record players for cars.
Yeah, I was around for that. The one we had played 45's. You stacked them upside down on the spindle and the arm came up from the bottom by spring tension. This prevented the arm from bouncing when you went over a bump. As the record finished the arm moved out of the way and the record dropped to the bottom of the case.
Hugs
Patricia
([email protected])
http://members.tripod.com/~Patricia_Marie/index.html
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper ubi femininus sub ubi
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Record player in the Trunk?
Didn't there used to be a juke box like thingie that was in the trunk too?
BTW, I was going to add a, um one of those real low speakers that makes the pavement shake; Boom Box? Sub woofer? It was $800! Gee, that is about 8 perms. :(
Khadija
Learning something new everyday: So that's what "LP" means
Heck, My Mom used to have an old victrola, but the darn thing was broke. Had to replace the wind-up gear. Yes, it was 'powered' by kinetic energy, NOT electric. Well, anyway, did you know that the very same basic technology is used in computers, today? The compact disks use the technique of 'reading' grooves in the disk, just as the needle 'reads' the grooves on a vinyl record?
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
actually
Actually...
Information is recorded in pits and lands in a pre-recorded CD. A laser will be reflected in a certain way or pattern, and is meant to represent digital data. The pattern will be interpreted depending on the code. As for recordable CDs, a layer of dye is covered by a reflective coat of either silver or gold, and these are overlaid with a protective lacquer or plastic coat. Here, the laser of the drive will heat portions of the dye enough so that its reflective properties are changed in the spot hit by the laser. To play it back, the disk reader's laser will be reflected back differently when it hits areas of changed dye, and reflected another way when it hits unchanged dye, and again, like the pits and lands of a pre-recorded CD, the pattern will be interpreted as digital data based on th code used.
The groove on a disk is only there so that the laser will have a path to trace and does not read the groove itself: the groove is just a guide.
For vinyl records, sound waves are impressed into the record as grooves. A sound will make a diaphragm vibrate, and a needle connected to the diaphragm will vibrate along with it, and this vibrating needle etches the groove in the recording disk. The resulting master disk is then used to mold or press grooves in the molten vinyl material of the record you'd be playing. When you play your record, your player's needle runs through the groove previously etched/pressed/molded. The needle vibrates similarly to the original cutting needle, vibrating in an almost identical way. The vibration is then used to alternate an electric current, which is the basis for the music coming out. (In reeeeally old players, the vibrations of the needle directly vibrate the diaphragm of a gramophone's speaker, and the only way you can make the tinny sound loud enough to be heard is by cupping the diaphragm with a cone, eh viola - turn-of-the-century speaker! Hence you see the cute little RCA dog peering into the big cone of a Victrola player.
The vibrations themselves are therefore analogs to the sound, i.e. a direct representation of the sound. Hence analog music, as opposed to a CD's digital data.
Now, how's that for a nerd? heheheh
Yep
... but just to get even more geeky here. There is out there ( I think ) a record player that uses a laser pickup system to read those grooves on a record(!)
Talk about never having to replace needles. If I were rich enough I would buy one as it will never ever wear out your records.
Kim
really?
Several years ago, I'd heard that some university researchers were working on this; their goal was to preserve the many thousands (millions) of hours of vinyl recordings that have been archived. All that vinyl (or shellac, or whatever, for the earliest) won't last forever, and every play causes physical wear.
I had not heard that they were successful, but if there's a commercial version out there, then DAMMIT I NEED ONE!
It's probably being suppressed by the giant phonograph-needle conglomerates...
And you can't find a good old-fashioned buggy whip around, neither. Not since the electric kind put 'em all out of business.
And I have to do all my errands during the day!
I can't drive at night anymore because I can't find carbide to power up the headlights on my car!
Hugs
Carla Ann
Nipper
The dog's name was Nipper and he was painted by an English artist. In the UK it was used (I think still is) by the HMV (His Masters Voice)record company. I hadn't realised that it was also used by RCA.
More information here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice
I still own an HMV wind-up gramophone dating from the 1920s. It's a very handsome thing, standing proudly on 4 Queen Anne legs looking like a drinks cabinet. It has a built-in loudspeaker horn which has doors that allow some adjustment of volume. I used to play it as a child but, unfortunately, my destructive youngest brother wrecked it long after I'd left home. He's now very respectable and brought his own children up with a rod of iron :) More junk I should discard.
Geoff
Perhaps,
what the Stanman was getting at was not that data was actually cut into grooves but rather that the spots on a CD are arranged in a single spiral, like a record? I know that those silly laserdisks that RCA marketed and sold for a while actually did that and I had heard that audio CDs were like that. Hard drives and floppies (remember them?) lay the data down in concentric circles. If it's true that CDs are like that, it certainly accounts for why seek times on them are so long!
Hugs
Carla