When I was about two my father would make recordings of family members, including me. In fact, I had my own little blue microphone and I loved to talk in it. He made records using a machine he had that somehow cut grooves in wax discs. We still have these precious recordings, but no machine to play them on. You need to have a machine like the one they were made on in order to play them, as they start at the middle and play outward. What I would give to hear once again the voices of my grandparents or to hear my parents’ wedding!
My parents and grandparents collected 78 rpm records. We still have some of those as well, but again, nothing to play them on.
I got my own record player at age 3. It was a 45 rpm turntable built into a small white bedside table. My father put a speaker in it and my mother covered the speaker in soft red cloth. My aunt brought me a record every Sunday when she came to dinner; sometimes they were kiddie records, but more often right from the Hit Parade. I never have parted with any of them, from the Teddy Bear’s Picnic to the original recordings of Sixteen Tons, Steam Heat and more. I particularly remember one titled, “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.” Hmmh….just what every three year old needs to listen to! Since I couldn’t read, my mother helped me draw pictures on each of my records so I could tell what I was playing.
By the mid-1950s everyone was listening to Hi-Fi and the records starting shifting to 33 1/3 rpm. My father brought home a record called “Hearing is Believing” and we listened to the difference between Hi-Fi and regular records. The Great Gate of Kiev was amazing in Hi-Fi.
Then along came stereo; it was reserved for 33 1/3 rpm records and only the “best ones.” Everyone was rushing to upgrade from Hi-Fi to stereo and buying new stereo albums. I think one’s manhood might well have been associated with the sophistication of one’s sound system. (I don’t think this has changed!)
In 1959, we teenagers had to have our own transistor radios. They were AM only and you listened to them with tiny headphones. The sound quality was terrible, but who cared? It was a miracle of modern technology!!!
But in the late 1950s, the most important thing for me and other American teenagers was 45 rpm records by people like Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Paul Anka, Brenda Lee, Fabian, Bobby Darren and others. We could buy these albums at the dime store (aka Woolworths) for $1.00. If you got a $2 per week allowance, $1 of it went to records. We carried our records around in little metal cases. To play them on our parents’ fancy stereos, we needed little red plastic inserts that clipped into the 45 rpm record making it physically configured like its larger brother the 33 1/3 rpm album.
My junior year in high school, my father managed to acquire a tape recorder. It used paper tape and was “reel to reel.” I remember recording the movie Moby Dick and loaing the tape and the recorder to my teacher to play for my English class.
By college, 45s were passé and nothing came pre-packaged on tapes. We all bought stereo albums by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Kingston Trio, The Four Preps and, by senior year, Simon and Garfunkel. You couldn’t be a real college student without a record player; some were stereo and some very mono and it really didn’t seem to matter much. You could buy a portable small reel to reel tape recorder and by connecting your record player with your tape recorder, make an audiotape.
By senior year of college, they had come out with 8 track tapes. I told my father I wanted to get an 8 tape player in my car and he told me to wait; cassette tapes were going to become the next big thing. And he was absolutely right, but it was many years later before I had a car with a cassette player in it. I think it might have been our 1977 Pontiac Catalina.
When I married Steve in 1969, he came with a nice Ampex tape recorder, fine stereo speakers, and AR turntable and a Heathkit amplifier. We were set! But soon, we decided to replace the old Ampex tape recorder with a Sony reel-to-reel. Steve had a friend buy it for us in Thailand, along with camera equipment. In those days, you could save a small fortune by buying this kind of thing in SE Asia. We still have that old Sony reel-to-reel recorder, but I can’t recall the last time I used it!
Within a few years, we were the proud owners of a cassette deck; we could make cassette recordings from records; copy them; and play them in the car or on a small portable cassette player. There was no doubt about it; we were a wired family!
For more than twenty years, reel-to-reel tapes, records, and cassette tapes had all lived harmoniously in our family room; each in their respective individually designed containers. The cassette tapes traveled to the cars. Mostly we recorded our own tapes because the store bought ones were short and broke often.
By around 1990 it was clear; we had a have a CD player to add to our collection of equipment that we were playing less and less frequently. Then, of course, we had to start buying CDs – even CDs of things we already had in other formats. And, of course, you couldn’t record your own CDs.
Then, of course, when we bought our next cars, we had to have CD players in them. My 1998 Olds Intrigue came with one; Steve’s Dodge Caravan didn’t, but that was soon remedied by his installation of a unit he purchased separately.
Of course, the old stereo system in the family room just got bigger and bigger with more and more components as the years went by. Soon we added a VCR unit and hooked the TV up to the mixture. When we built our house in 1992, we added a cabinet for all of this stuff! A few years ago, we added the DVD player!
But the family room system isn’t portable, so soon I also had to have a boombox; I am now on my third one! With a boombox, I could play my CDs anywhere and life was sweet.
Soon, however, the boombox became less important because my laptop computer could play music; in fact, I can even watch DVDs on it. My desk top computer can also play CDs and DVDs and it has it own external speakers.
Within the last year, my husband and I bought a new cell phones and they contain MP3 players. I have even learned how to download from Napster. I can also download my CDs onto my telephone and listen to music with a tiny headphone that reminds me of my first transistor radio. I had a really nice memory card with about 100 songs on it, when I discovered that my camera’s memory card was full. All I had to do to keep on shooting in a remote location was move the card from my phone, reformat the card, and start shooting pictures. I’ve been too busy to make another card of music for my phone.
Our house has 40 years worth of sound equipment and all kinds of media. Most of what we have is totally obsolete and that’s OK. The stuff just sits there and doesn’t bother anyone!
I can listen to music on my cell phone, but I don’t! Why, because I am too busy to take the time to figure out how to make it happen using my phone MP3 feature. Sure, I did it once, but I forgot what I did. Maybe I don’t really need music on my cell phone anyway! I still have my CD player in the car after all! As for all the components linked together in the family room – too much trouble! And that’s the curse of encroaching old age; all this stuff becomes harder to do and certainly less important! Maybe when I retire I’ll organize my records, tapes, CDs, DVDs and the like…but I doubt it!
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