Electric Banana

I recently found this... Supposedly it was inspired by the work of an Andy Warhol. It's based on his painting of a banana that served as album art for the Velvet Underground. The Warhol Foundation has reported that it was not officially licensed.  They are rare as you might imagine, but they do have one at the International Banana Museum in Mecca, CA.  The image above comes from an old issue of  the Speigel catalog. Regardless.. one of the strangest record players I've ever seen.

Zenith Operating Guide

Do you know how to operate your turntable?  This is a manual for an early series of Zenith solid state radios, models D924, D921 and D922. I assuming this dates to the mid 1960s. Zenith's last tube consoles were phased out in 1965, so it's likely between 1965 and 1975. It's difficult to be certain.. these units aren't considered "classic" by anyone.

Record players of this era still used a high tracking weight which was a compromise between the needs of 78s and vinyl records. But it's an interesting doc filled with retro diagrams, and nwo comic sounding descriptions of FM radio and 4 speed turntables.

You can download it  

HERE

Stroboscope

In radio today music is most often played from digital files. Sometimes CDs are still employed but the turntable has largely been phased out. Modern turntables deliver consistent speed, and require little maintainence. A good Technics 1200 if not abused, will last decades without a single adjustment. In turn the records themselves have become more consistent, now standardized at 33 and 45 rpms. In the past variations were a problem. Victors LPs were 71 RPM until the teens. Then both Brunswick and Edison LPs were recorded at 80 rpms well into the 1920s. What is a DJ to do?Previous to this era of high torque direct drive motors, turntable speed was irregular. Shade-pole motors were inappropriate for this. In that type of motor variations in voltage cause variations of speed. Modern turntables use an induction motor, that is tuned to the 60 cycle alternation of our AC power supply. This allows them to produce consistent rpms.

The Belgian professor Joseph Plateau invented the stroboscope in 1832. Plateau created the first Phenakistoscope by cutting slits into a disc which he turned while viewing images on a separate rotating wheel. It was almost simultaneously invented by the Austrian Simon von Stampfer. Stampfer called his a "Stroboscope"the nomenclature we use today.

The older hand crank spring motors required adjustment even during the play of a single side of a single record. An experienced user could do this by ear, but sometimes a Stroboscope was employed. A stroboscope is an instrument used to make a cyclically moving object appear to be slow-moving, or stationary. The light gun used to adjust your timing belt works on a similar principle.

A stroboscope for phonographs is a paper disc placed at the center of the platter. On the disc is a circle of equally spaced lines. When viewed under an electric light the record is spinning at the correct speed (in this case 78 rpm) the lines on the stroboscope appear to be still.

What is happening is that the electric light is actually blinking on and off 3600 times a minute (3000 at 50Hz.) Each time the light goes on, the black lines on the stroboscope have rotated one space if the stroboscope is running at the proper speed. The book The Compleat Talking Machine by Eric L. Reiss has some simple instructions on making one or you can just print out the one on the W.A.M.S. webpage here.

The Record Player

I have written about parts of the history of records many times. I covered the invention of shellac, paraffin, vinyl and all the speeds at which they spin. Today I cover the history of the record player that spun them round and round, the turntable. The device has been changed a lot by many different pairs of hands so I'll just his some highlights...

When Edison first invented audio recording, it was on a wax cylinder. (as opposed to when other engineers invented it) From the start, the recording device was also a playback device. It was hand-cranked and for all intents and purposes is was the great grandfather of all such devices that followed it. But like all things, the beta is many steps short of the production model.

It had huge design flaws, including irregular playing speed, the labor of manual cranking, and the wear that irregular torque can have on motorized parts and steel needles wore out quickly. It had no amplification, and was thus difficult to hear and the fidelity... well, it was the best there was at the time and it worked. It worked well enough that thousands of Americans were willing to turn the crank to wind it up. A battery-driven model didn't debut until 1887.

But Edison didn't patent the record player. Even though he had developed the cylinder, it was Alexander Graham Bell ( who was working on a similar model.) Bell made it to the patent office first in 1876. But at that time Edison wasn't seeing it's future too clearly. He still saw it as an office dictation machine. It wasn't until 1890 that he began to record musicians with the intent to sell pre-recorded music. But lacking a patent never slowed down Edison. He kept at it, and his name was on patents for almost every improvement to the device for the next three decades.

He added the aforementioned battery, then in 1895 Edison added a horn to amplify the signal. It was to be the only amplification until 1925 when electrical amplification as invented. The significance can't be emphasized enough. Previous to the horn, the records were essentially only listened to on headphones. More here.

The including irregular playing speed plagued the device until Emile Berliner worked on improving the playback machine with Elridge Johnson. Elridge Johnson patented a spring motor for the Berliner gramophone. The motor made the turntable revolve at an even speed and there was no more hand cranking. The spring was wound and then the record played. More here

It was this version that played records for us on the earliest experimental radio stations. But thank goodness it wasn't the one we were stuck with. Models continued to improve.  In my radio days, I used an old 3-speed direct drive GE model. But at the end the Technics 1200 had replaced it as that third speed (78 rpm) became totally unnecessary.