White Rabbits and other strange thingz

[EWBrown]

I see someone's been listening to Jefferson Airplane again Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_01 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_08

My setup, which is pretty decent sounding: Vintage Pioneer PL-50 turntable (that I bought at the Long Binh PX back in 1971) and Bottlehead "Seduction" phono stage. The phono stage has way more capability than my turntable, maybe someday I'll get something a bit higher up the food chain...

Currently the set-up is at the NC "Southern Headquarters"
Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_07

I have Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", in LP, 8-track, cassette, CD and MP-3 "ripped" versions... That pretty well covers all the bases.

I forgot, there's the "hillbilly bluegrass" version, performed by Luther Wright and the Wrongs" called "Rebuild the Wall". It's a hoot and it is very well done.

/ed B in NH

[Shannon Parks]

Ed, I just got a free, clean Pioneer PL-10. Got any idea how I open it up? The bottom is glued on and I'm afraid to mess with any of the screws on top. Basically, the anti-skate seems wonky and I want to disconnect it.

BTW, the Airplane was one of my least favorite San Fran bands, but for some reason Marty Balin's tunes have been finding their way on my playlists of late; great songwriter, singer, and under-appreciated.

[EWBrown]

The PL-50 bottom came easily off by removing the four feet, which were screwed on. Not familiar with the PL-10... I dunno how aggressive the glue that was applied, or if in fact this was a factory job
or some previous owner decided to do some weird tweeks of his own.
The PL-50 base is spring-mounted to the bottom, which was nowhere as efficacious a "shock absorber" as the suspended platter and tone-arm on the venerable AR turntable.

Last year I found a PL-50 at the local sunday flea, for cheap ($5). Got it home, it didn't power up, a look inside indicated that it had served as a multi-family, multi-generational, mouse condo. Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_21 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_21 Strange, it that it had very little rodent-odor, so I was unprepared for what I found, once I opened it up :o

At least the plastic top cover and the rubber platter mat and its decorative trim ring were in good shape.

It was interesting to see how the Jeff Arplane, Jerry Garcia (and the Grateful Dead), the beginnings of the Eagles, etc, etc all worked together in those early days of psycho-delic-rock.

I guess one had to be a real "stoner" to truly appreciate them. Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_09



On the PL-50, the anti-skate can be "fiddled" from the top.

As I remember, there was a little weight which dangled from a side-arm at the back end of the tone arm, along with various and sundry adjustments, more adjustments than on a WWII anti-aircraft gun... . Tuning up the PL-50 was an exercise in frustration, I could never get it "perfect", only just "close enough". The original instructions were in the typical "Jinglish" of the day, which really didn't help matters much. Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_20

/ed B in NH

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[Shannon Parks]

I thought the bottom would drop out when I removed the feet, but it didn't. I think I can see a liitle glue along the edge. Maybe exacto time. The anti-skate mechanism is a knob on mine, but even when set to zero, it messes with the tonearm. Ends up skipping backward (ie too much anti-skate) at about the 2/3rds mark.

FWIW, this model seems like a clunker compared to a cheapo AR XB. My late 70's, no-name Japanese belt drive table is much better, too.

[EWBrown]

Someone over at NNETG was asking what a "record changer" was (obviously he was too young to remember those atrocities)

My reply was as follows, and part of another's is appended at the end:

Cheap record changers were also known by the highly scientific and technically-correct name of "groove grinders".

The freshly-dropped record was rotating at zero RPM, so the record below it had to act as a clutch plate, and there was a fraction of a second of some rather severe surface-to-surface grinding. Allegedly, the center and the rim of LPs was supposed to be a bit "taller" than the grooves, but unless the record was absolutely, perfectly flat, (there was always some amount of warping), the grooves got ground and erosion set in....

Throw in a cheap crystal or ceramic cartridge, and a tonearm (or something resembling same) which tracked at about half a pound, and usually had some "pull" to one side or the other (anti-skating, hah!!!) and LP records often had a short, very traumatic lifetime.

Add in the other "indignities" to which record albums of the 60s and 70s often got subjected to, and it's a wonder that there are any decent sounding vintage LPs today... :o


You've never seen a warped record until you've seen one which was left laying on the back seat of a '68 Pontiac Tempest, in the hot summer sun, for about a week ;-) Makes a potato chip look like an optically-flat surface, in comparison...

/ed B in NH


> A record changer basically is a turntable that can hold a stack of up 8 or
> so records and drops them one at time (when everything is working correctly)
> allowing you to have several hours of almost uninterrupted music at the
> expense of rapidly increasing record wear as the stack height increases..
>
> Fine examples of the genre were made by Garrard, and Dual, not so fine
> examples (aka stone crushers) by BSR and others.
>

[TomMcNally]

In the pre-CD days in 1982, I was program director of a rock station.
We were switching from an automated reel to reel format to live.
In less than a month, we hired a full staff of DJs and we decided to
play tape cartridges on the air, rather than vinyl, which was the
alternative. Our tape machines didn't arrive until two weeks
prior to the launch, so in that two weeks, we recorded 720 songs
from vinyl to cartridge, using one nice Technics SP-15 turntable
in a sand filled base to keep vibrations down.

The funny thing was this ... we didn't own any albums ... so we
asked everyone we knew to lend us their records so we could
"dub" them to tape. One of the girls in the office had a lot
of records, including the Bob Seger album with "Night Moves"
on it. I pulled it out of the sleeve and it had a size 12 sneaker
print on the disc, in Coca Cola. Yep - it looked like a fossil.

I took it into the bathroom and ran it under warm water and
gently rubbed it until the footprint was gone. Needless to say,
the record was pretty noisy, and for those of you that know
"Night Moves" it has a very very very low spot, which wound
up being comically noisy, with a loud SCRRRRRRTCH in the
middle. We played it for a couple of years until CD's came
out ... but to THIS DAY ... when I hear "Night Moves" my mind
inserts the noise and the SCRRRRRRTCH !!

[EWBrown]

Way back around 1972-1973 time frame, a good friend and fellow music-nut had a Saturday night "oldies" show on WLTI 91.5 FM, which was then Lowell Tech's college radio station (1KW out before it hit the antennas).

I often helped out, and once in a while, filled-in when Dough was too drunk / stoned / incoherent to be on the air.

In those days, just about all the various radio programs on LTI, were "assisted" along with various adult beverages and no small quantity of "exotic herbs and spices"

I used to tape some of our shows, on the big Scully tape decks, for fun and posterity (and possible future blackmail)

As I was later playing a tape of one particularly "well-lubricated" show, I noticed a very deep bass "thump", occuring at seemingly random periods, something that would not be heard on a typical radio or cheap stereo, but was quite pronounced on a decent system.

It took a while to figure it out: someone had brought in a half-gallon bottle of whiskey (I no longer remember the brand, I'm sure it was some cheap rot-gut).
Every time someone poured themselves a drink, they placed it back on the studio console, right next to one of the two turntables. hence the mystery "thump"... :o


If subwoofers existed back then, we probably would have blown out some windows...

Then there was the show, when the entire LTI Karate Team showed up with a full keg of beer, in order to celebrate their victorious season, live and on the air. Now THAT was a really "wild" show :o One of the LTI Karate Dudes generlusly brought in the half-keg of beer (15.5 gallons) and after we all determined that it was far too warm for normal human consumption, one of the crew came up withthe somewhat warped "genius" idea of filling an empty 5 gallon water cooler jug, and then putting it on the station's water cooler. It worked very nicely, (just not too nice with the hot water tap) and for some mysterious unexplainable reason, the water cooler had a rather strange lingering stale beer flavor to it, for a few months after the fact... The hotw ater tap was never the same,

I still have some of these "incriminating" tapes, someday, I'll "rip" them to MP3 CDs... If the 35 year old mylar tape hasn't turned to dust.

Latest update - unfortunetely when I dug up the R2R tapes in summer 2008, they had dry-rotted and disintegrated into brittle and unusable oxide-coated "noodles",
I guess that they were never designed for being stored in all sorts of damp and musty sheds and basements for nearly 36 years.

/ed B in NH

[erichayes]

You sure they were mylar and not acetate?

There was one changer manufacturer that went to its own drummer--Glaser-Steers. Their changers actually stopped the platter before dropping the next record, then resumed rotation after the drop. I have one that needs a motor mount . . . maybe I'll get it out of mothballs and fix it up.

The two turntables I use are a Denon DP-35F, which is direct drive with a servo controlled tonearm that dynamically adjusts the tracking forceto follow the contour of the record surface--in other words, it tracks warped records that other TTs won't. The other is a belt drive Garrard Zero 100, which is kind of a rarie. Most Zero 100s were idler drive multiplay (changer). This one's single play only. The unique thing about it is its articulated tone arm, which reduces tracking error from the typical 4° to 90 seconds. This translates into vastly reduced record wear and inner groove distortion.

For 78s I have an Empire 398, which was actually made by Rek-O-Kut (Empire didn't make their own until the 598), but it's down right now due to a funky tonearm. Anybody out there got an old SME they want to get rid of cheap?

[wiredbecker]

Then there was the show, when the entire LTI Karate Team showed up with a full keg of beer, in order to celebrate their victorious season, live and on the air. Now THAT was a really "wild" show :o

I still have some of these "incriminating" tapes, someday, I'll "rip" them to MP3 CDs... If the 35 year old mylar tape hasn't turned to dust.

/ed B in NH

Dude, I would love to hear some of this stuff.