Not long into our marriage it became clear that Connie and I had divergent tastes in music. She had been a teenager during the 1970s while I grew up in the '50s and '60s which, in addition to being The Best Time Ever to grow up listening to top 40 radio, also carried the distinction of being the golden age of novelty songs. Included in the novelty genre was that sub-genre known as "celebrity records," where virtually any movie or TV star of the time was herded into a recording studio to cash in on their fame by cutting an album.
A good many of these records were, to be kind, not very good, and many fell into the so-bad-it's-good category. I brought my bad celebrity records into our marriage and played them all the time, which prompted Connie to say to me: "If there's any record anywhere that everybody else in the world can't stand, I can be sure that's a record you love."
I couldn't argue with that assessment. Still, I may have discovered the one celebrity record even I have no desire to hear a second time. Not to take anything away from William Shatner, whose 1967 debut album was listed by Rolling Stone magazine as "perhaps the most mocked album in the history of music." At least Shatner knew he couldn't sing. So instead of singing, he opted to "act" the songs he recorded on his album. The result were songs that were unintentionally funny due to Shatner's overly dramatic interpretations.
Not so with Burt Ward. TV's Robin the Boy Wonder was completly tone deaf, yet he still thought he his voice was good enough to launch a hit record. Here he is singing the Nat King Cole hit "Orange Colored Sky." Take a listen:
That was side B, and yes, it was produced by Frank Zappa, who did the best he could considering what he had to work with. This song was just too awful to release, but awhile later Zappa was also enlisted to produce a song that would require Burt Ward to do no singing at all. What Burt did instead was read excerpts of fan letters from some of his more adoring young admirerers, so they put that "song" on Side A and slapped Orange Colored Sky on the B side. The record got a little bit of airplay, but listeners thought Burt was being sarcastic and demeaning toward his fans. That was not Burt's intent at all; he actually thought people would want to buy a record that consisted solely of him reading letters from young girls singing his praises. Here it is, but don't say I didn't warn you. This is really bad:
There must have been something about that song that the Dynamic Duo found irresistible, because Adam West sang it in costume as Batman on The Hollywood Palace. Adam West was the host of the show that week, and though it's worth staying to watch the entire hour (Remember when George Carlin had short hair, and midget acts were not yet verboten?) you can jump straight to the three minute mark if all you want is to watch Batman croon while knocking down villainous babes in Carnaby Street outfits. Unlike Burt Ward, Adam West could sing very well, although there is still something odd about Batman singing while he's fighting:
In my last entry I sang the praises of the Crosley Cruiser Deluxe record player (suitcase style) as being a pretty decent device for anyone who, like me, just wants something to play records on without spending a fortune on a more expensive system.
Although the sound you get from a Crosley is more than adequate, due to its modest size and small speakers, the sound is going to fall somewhere short of fantastic.
So today we'll talk about how you can get much, much better sound out of this simple record player. And we'll try to show you how to do it on the cheap.
But first things first. If you happen to be a product of the last two generations, you may never have held an actual record in your hand, let alone played one on one of those ancient devices we old-timers used to call a turntable. Therefore I'm not going to assume anything about your level of knowledge. I'll start at the beginning. Better yet, allow me to turn the time over to one of the internet's most popular experts on records and record players, Mr. Record-ology, who will tell you everything you need to know to start playing your own records on your very own record player. Best of all, Mr. Record-ology will be demonstrating on a Victrola suitcase style record player, which is virtually identical to the Crosley Cruiser I own, right down to the color of the case.
Why does the record player in the video look identical to the one I showed you in my previous post? Well, here on the lower end of the turntable spectrum you may notice several brands whose insides, (the turntable and tonearm assemblies) are virtually identical. That's because their innards are pretty much the same. The various models may have been designed and assembled by American or British companies, but the mechanical parts were likely manufactured overseas -and maybe even at the same factory. (This is likely to be true of even higher-end turntables these days.)
The only real difference is the price: some of these so-called "cheaper" designs actually cost way more
than others. These entry-level record players are often referred to as "Crosley-style" record players, since Crosley, a company that has been making these things for over a hundred years, is the leader in the field. What all these makes and models have in common is that identical red stylus you see here. It doesn't matter what brand. If your record player came with this familiar red stylus, that's how you know you have a Crosley Cruiser type record player.
So, let's get started. Here's Mr. Record-ology to teach you everything you need to know:
If the video fails to load, CLICK HERE to watch it on Youtube. But don't forget to come back!
Before we go any further, I should point out that the suitcase player you see in the upper left corner of this page is not a Crosley. This one is a brand I never heard of, but as you can see, it has the same basic innards as my Crosley and the Victrola demonstrated in the video. I like the design of this suitcase player because what it has going for it is the kitch factor -it's a suitcase record player that actually looks like a suitcase.
Unfortunately, this brand, the ClearClick Vintage Suitcase Turntable, is priced at over twice the cost of my Crosley Cruiser, so I won't be buying one of these. Kitch is cool, but if I bought this I'd be paying all that extra money just for the way the exterior looks. It's still basically the same record player on the inside as the one I already have. Compare and see for yourself:
Besides, if I had money to burn what I would really go for is the Studebaker. The Kitcsh factor on this one is off the charts!
It should be noted that the one and only review on Amazon for the Studebaker record player is a negative one. The buyer claims the unit he received didn't work at all, so he returned it for another. Then he says that one didn't work either.
As for me, I wouldn't have cared. This thing would be amazing if all it did was sit on the shelf and look cool. Unfortunately, the Studebaker is priced at $129.88 on Amazon, which makes it a rather expensive knick knack. So I'll be making do with what I have, a Crosley Cruiser Deluxe which, last time I looked, currently retails at Walmart for 46 bucks. (As I mentioned last month, the Cruiser I bought at a yard sale cost me one fourth the retail price, which at the time, I think was around $39.00. So Booyah! I'm still winning.)
I should also note here that if you're inclined to run out and buy a Crosley Cruiser or equivalent, don't buy the exact model I own. I own the Crosley Cruiser Deluxe. What you Want is its successor, the Crosley Cruiser Plus. When Crosley put out the Cruiser Deluxe they included an option that would allow users to connect a device such as a phone through their record player so buyers could hear music through the Crosley's speakers. Turns out nobody really wanted that. What buyers really wanted was to be able to cast the sound from the record player out to an external bluetooth speaker. So the Crosley people put that capability into the next iteration of the record player, the Crosley Cruiser Plus. If you have the unit with that kind of bluetooth capability you've already gone a long way toward pimping out your Crosley because now the sound quality is pretty much limited only by how good the quality is on your Bluetooth speakers.
And this brings us finally to the topic at hand: how do we make an entry-level record player sound a whole lot better than it does right out of the box?
The Answer Is In Stereo Separation
I must be missing something because most Bluetooth speakers I've seen in the stores and online are one piece units that lack stereo separation. Sure, most of these bluetooh speakers appear to have two speakers built in, but who wants that? What you want is two separate speakers you can arrange so that you have left channel sound firing into your left ear and right channel sound in your right ear. Apparently if you want a decent set of two separate stereo Bluetooth speakers you'll have to pay well over a hundred dollars each for them. So let's put Bluetooth aside for now and go old-school, which means we'll be abiding by The Hipster's Code and heading out to the thrift stores. That's where we're likely to find real 1970s style bookshelf speakers like in the olden days: the kind with wires trailing out the back.
Now, I should reiterate here what I wrote in my previous post about headphones, and that's this: headphones are my favorite way of hearing music in stereo. When I originally went trolling the thriftstores in my new hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho, I found a set of headphones at Goodwill that looked brand new and only cost me a few dollars. When I got them home and tried them out on the Crosley, the improvement in sound was like night and day. As I've written previously, the sound coming through the Crosley's built-in speakers is more than adequate, but with these headphones everything was so much louder, clearer, and brighter. I figured I must have scored an amazing deal on an exceptional pair of headphones with these puppies, so I looked up the model number on the internet (Sony MDR-ZX110) and learned these things were actually pretty ordinary priced as headphones go, at only $19.99 on Amazon. Here are the specs from the Amazon page:
The wide frequency range—spanning 12 Hz to 22 kHz—delivers deep bass, rich midrange, and soaring highs. Hear the detail in every track, and stay in tune with all your music.
Enfolding closed-back design seals in sound: The closed-back, enfolding design wraps around the ear, sealing in music and keeping out distractions. Acoustics are reflected back toward your ears, so you hear even the subtlest sounds. You also feel every beat, as the closed-back design maximizes the bass signatures in your music.
None of that was an exaggeration. My grandson Nate and I were testing out the Crosley on the living room floor, sitting cross legged like teenagers in the '50s, but after a while I wanted to sit on the couch like a grownup. Sadly, the cord on these headphones isn't long enough to be comfortable. So I rummaged around in my bin of cords and cables until I found a ten foot extension cord that would reach from the Crosley to the couch. I like stereo speakers as much as any other baby boomer, but these days I prefer headphones because of the nuanced detail you can't always get with external speakers. In short, Headphones are really all I need when I'm listening to records. But we do have an inexpensive Crosley Cruiser on our hands and if we're gonna pimp this puppy out, we're still going to have to thrift some decent bookshelf speakers. So off we went, Nate and I, to a thrift store run by the local animal shelter.
And......GOLD MINE! There were plenty of speakers at this location from small computer desktop sizes to bookshelf speakers over a foot tall. I scored these 9 by 15 inch babies in like-new condition, and paid only six dollars for the pair:
Okay, so let's imagine you've also nabbed a boss pair of speakers of your own. Ready to get your groove on? Well, no, because we're not done yet. Although your Crosley Cruiser has a built-in pre-amplifier, it probably won't have enough power to send the music from the turntable out to your speakers. You're still going to have to shell out for an amplifier. An amplifier does just what you would think it does: it amplifies the sound so it can be heard. Makes it louder, clearer, and sharper in other words, so your music better fills the room.
The good news is you might be able to thrift a nice used amp. The even better news is an amp that will power speakers like these can be found brand new online for less than twenty bucks.
If you're lucky enough to find any kind of stereo amplifier at a thrift store, then by all means grab it while you can, because America is crawling with newbie vinyl afficionados hoping to pounce on the same electronic treasures you are on the lookout for. If you happen to come across an entire stereo system at a thrift store you've hit the mother lode. Although it's rare to find stereo components at thrift stores these days, it's not unheard of. Baby boomers are now dying off at the rate of over five thousand cantankerous souls every day, and some of those boomers have ungrateful kids who are dumping their parents' stuff at thrift stores.
So you never know, it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. You just have get to those treasures before some punk wannabe audiophile sees them first.
The alternative is to buy a new amplifier online. I happen to already have a small amp similar to this one you can find on Amazon for $17.99:
This amp doesn't have all the bells and whistles, and mine can only handle 20 watts for each channel, but that's plenty good enough for these speakers. As you can see, you can adjust bass and treble while your music is playing, so that's awesome. What it doesn't have is a headphone jack, or something like 200 watts of power, so if you find you really like playing records and you're thinking of ever going full-out and replacing your Crosley with a higher-end turntable, you might be better off spending forty or fifty dollars on a stereo amp that can handle more sound, like this one, for instance:
This Pyle amplifier has more than you'll need for your Crosley, including apparently the capability of letting you plug in two microphones for singing karaoke. It includes bass, treble, and balance knobs and, most important to me, a headphone jack. With a headphone jack you won't even have to be near your record player; you can control everything from your amp. The primary reason you will need a good amplifier if you're ever going to buy a better turntable is because a turntable is useless, per se. A standalone turntable will not let you hear anything through your speakers unless you first hook it up to an amplifier. Without an amplifier that music stays on the record and never reaches your ears.
Of course, you could purchase powered speakers, which essentially means the amplifier is built into the speakers themselves, so your music goes directly from your turntable to the speakers. But those tend to be expensive and they deprive you of the versatility you get from controlling everything through your amp. Plus with an amp you can upgrade your speakers as often as you wish rather than being at the mercy of one set of powered speakers.
One more thing to remember: when searching for an amplifier on Amazon or Ebay, regardless of whether you're looking for a cheap and simple amplifier or a more expensive, high wattage one, you will come across lots of preamplifiers listed. Be careful; you don't want one of those. The Crosley already has a preamplifier, which is made to power the sound to its built-in speakers. If you hook up another preamplier you'll just confuse your machine and it won't work. What you want is called an amplifier, plain and simple. So nix on the preamp, yes on the amp.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's finish pimping out that Crosley, shall we? So you've got your speakers and your minimalist amplifier. Now all you need to do is hook everything together and you're done. So now you'll need stereo cables, more properly known as RCA Audio Cables and they look like this. Your local thrift store probably has dozens of them on hand, or you can find them at amazon:
I recommend buying the longest cables you can afford. These are listed at 12 feet long at only $6.97, so they should do the trick. But let's put those aside for now because first we're going to hook the speakers to the amplifier using the wires that are attached to the speakers. These RCA cables will come after we do that.
Adding the Speakers So here we go. The back of your amplifier will look something like this:
The speakers you thrifted should have generously long wires coming out the back and splitting at the end into two wires. Those wires are usually red and black. Each speaker will have a pair of its own. See where it says "R" and "L" just above those tabs? What you're going to do is take one of the wires from the speaker you wish to have channel the Right speaker, push down the tab under the "R" (it may also have a + sign as in the photo above), and feed the bare end of the red wire into the red slot. Then release the tab and that locks the wire in place.
Now, you still have a black wire attached like a siamese twin to the same wire you just inserted (this same wire pairing is attached on the other end to the same speaker). Do the same thing with the bare end of this black wire, putting the black wire into the black R (-) slot next to the red one. Then release that tab to secure the black wire in place.
Good for you! You have now hooked up one speaker. You just have one more speaker to go, so do the same with the wire coming out of the other speaker, this time putting them in the "Left" channel slot, black in the black (-) slot and red in the red (-). This is how your system will know how to make the music come out properly in stereo. Don't worry if the speaker itself isn't marked Left or Right. You are the one who makes that decision based upon which speaker you want to be on the left or on the right. I used a magic marker on the back of these Sonys to mark R and L just so I wouldn't forget which is which. It helps to keep them straight when I'm ready to arrange them, but you don't have to.
If you scroll up to the picture above where I showed you my Sony speakers, you'll notice there is no red wire. No problem. For some crazy reason not all wires come in red and black, but they will have some kind of identifying features so you can tell one from the other. In the case of these Sony wires, one of the wires is black and the other is a slightly lighter gray with an even lighter stripe along the entire length. If that's similar to what you have, consider the lighter wire to be "Red" and make that be the wire that goes in the red slot.
Here is what speaker wire generally (but not always) looks like:
As you can see, each strand is coated all the way up until the end; the bare end is what you will feed into the slot. In this picture one wire is red and the other is clear. I've seen some wires where one is clear and the other is blue. The only thing that matters is that on each channel, you put the "black" one in the black slot and the "Red" (or whatever it is) in the red slot on each side so they are the same on both the R and the L sides. Red to Red and Black to Black, or whatever different colored wires the universe has seen fit to bestow upon you.
And don't worry if you get one of the wires wrong; nothing is going to explode. It just isn't going to sound right, is all. In that case you'll just go back and set things right.
The wire ends are usually copper as in the picture above, but not always. If the wire ends are all screwed up and you want a fresh new half inch or so at the end, feel free to strip the end off, clip the old bit of wire and start with a newer looking piece. If you have wire strippers, that works best, but you can also gouge your thumbnail in there and peel it off. Or use a knife or anything else at hand. That vinyl or rubber (or whatever it is) coating is fairly soft. Often your fingernail can cut right into it.
Also a good thing to remember: most thrift stores these days will give you a a couple of weeks or so to return electronic equipment if it isn't working, so ask them if that is their policy and by all means listen to what your father taught you and save the receipt.
Almost Done!
Now that you have the speakers hooked up to the amplifier, the only thing left to do is hook the amplifier up to your record player. See the back of that little amplifier again? Take those RCA cables and plug them into those round pluggy things, the white plug into the white hole and the red plug into the red hole. In electronic parlance we refer to these things as "male" and "female" plugs and outlets, but not everyone is familiar with that terminolgy. True Story: back in the early 1980s I managed a Radio Shack store in Salt Lake City when a young girl of about 17 came in to ask for some part or another that she wasn't sure about. I asked her if she needed a male or female plug. She didn't know what I meant, so I demonstrated to her with some parts on hand, showing her how the male piece fit right into the female. For some reason she turned all read and then ran crying out to the car and told her mother on me. (Her mom came into the store and thought it was hilarious, by the way).
So anyhoo. Take the other end of the RCA cable and plug the red male into the red female and the white male into the white female. And stop that sniggering. What are you, a child?
Now you're done! Turn both the amplifier and the record player on and bask in that blast of sheer, loud, stereo enjoyment. But don't forget to turn the volume down on the record player because now your sound is controlled by the volume knob on the amplifier. And if you have a fancy amplifier that has a headphone jack, you can plug your headphones (male) directly into the amplifier jack (female - so I guess it's a Jaqueline). When your headphone jack is in use, the sound will no longer come from your speakers; just your headphones.
And there you are. Now, if you want to go further there are a couple more things you can do to improve your listening experience. You can upgrade your ceramic sapphire stylus with a diamond styluswhich is far superior than the needle your record player comes with. This one from TurntableNeedles.com will run you $25.00, and though there are cheaper diamond needles available, many are not that dependable. This one, the 793-DEM, will give you the best groove contact and increased sound quality available. One thing is for sure: a diamond needle will last a lot longer than the ceramic needle your record player came with.
You can also get much better sound quality on 78 rpm records by temporarily replacing the existingstyluswith one that is specifically designed for playing 78 records. When you're playing 45s and 33s, the standard LP needle scoots happily along in an imperceptibly tiny groove only1 milliliter wide, while a 78 record has grooves 3 times as wide as that. What this means is that when you play a 78 using the needle that came with your Crosley, you're not getting the full sound as the needle tries to negotiates those grooves. The needle doesn't get the chance to follow the curves properly, it just sinks right down to the bottom of the track and scrapes along at the bottom, causing you to often miss the full sound of the record. On the other hand, a needle that was designed to be played on 78 records actually tracks along both walls of the groove as well as tracking along the bottom, so you get to hear everything that was recorded onto the disc.
Of course, it would be a nuisance to take your stylus on and off if you're constantly alternating between playing 45s and 33s on the one hand and 78s on the other, but it might be worth it to dedicate a block of time with your record player where you only play 78s maybe for a day. That way you only have to take your regular stylus off and swap it with the 78 version once in awhile. Alternatively you can shop around on the internet for a "flip" stylus which will allow you to play both kinds of records just by flipping the needle from LP to 78. You may have to do some digging to find a crosley style 78 flip stylus, but they do exist. Search for the reviews, because one particular brand of 78 flip stylus is said to be not actually the proper width.
The nice thing about pimping your Crosley is this: if you ever decide to upgrade to a better turntable, now you already have the amplifier and you already have the speakers. Get yourself a high-end turntable and voila! Now you're an audiophile.
It may surprise you to learn there are bullies on the internet.
I've had my share of encounters with such people in the past, but what I didn't expect to encounter was such mean-spirited killjoys in the audiophile community. Getting bullied by people who like to listen to records seems incongruous to me because back when I considered myself something of an audiophile -this would have been around the late 1970s-we record collectors were a friendly and supportive community.
But now that vinyl records have been making a comeback, some audio snobs see themselves as inclusive and oh, so terribly special, and anyone else who discovers the joys of vinyl had better well enter the club on their terms. Which pretty much translates into "you're going to have to spend a lot of money or you're not good enough."
The Way We Were If you were heavily into vinyl records in the sixties and seventies (and who wasn't?) it was de rigueur to own a stereo system that was made up of various individual pieces, the purpose being so you could swap out your older components for the latest models as the technology improved.
This component system replaced the "Hi-Fi sterophonic console" of the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, which was a big, heavy piece of furniture. Although rich and impressive looking, the bachelor-pad Hi-fi couldn't keep up with the quickly moving advances in sound technology. An additional negative with the furniture Hi-Fi was that the speakers were incased inside the console; they were immovable. The Hi-Fi owner couldn't arrange his speakers the way he wanted, a frustrating situation for the 1950s bachelor-pad hepcat.
A bit later, the stereo component system that succeeded the Hi-Fi was more malleable. It consisted of an amplifier, a receiver, an equalizer, and a cassette deck (preferably dual), all stacked one on top of the other. You might also have an eight-track tape deck, because even though that platform went out of favor once cassette tapes took over, many music lovers still retained their massive 8-Track collections because that format had been The Big New Thing at the start of the seventies. At the top of this stack of components would be the star of your system: a primo, super cool, out-of-this-world, top-of-the-line turntable you could show off to your friends. That is, if you even had any friends. Because let's face it: audio nerds back then were just as insufferable as audio nerds today.
Completing your groovy stereo system would be two large wooden floor speakers set on either side of the stack of components which you could arrange to face however you wanted. And if you happened to be especially obsessive-compulsive, you'd buy a pair of tweeters, one to set on top of each speaker, each of them playing sounds so high-pitched that the average human ear could barely hear them. But that's how you were during the stereo era if you had money to burn: you became obsessive about every tiny detail.
By the late 1980's, Compact Discs replaced records as the superior format, and by the 1990's the record player had gone the way of the dodo. Cassettes held on a little longer with my generation, but they couldn't compete with CDs. Prior to the collapse of old-school media I myself used to have a massive stereo system with a state-of-the art record turntable, though I don't recall what eventually happened to it. Sold it all off to get money for diapers and baby food, I guess.
Everything Old Is New Again 2007 saw the start of an interesting phenomenon: a generation of young people who had only experienced music that magically floated to them over the ether, suddenly began to take an interest in seeing, holding, and actually owning music in its physical form, the way we geezers used to do in the olden days. This interest set off the 21st century Vinyl Revival, resulting in the sale of millions of long playing 331/3 records featuring modern artists as well as new pressings of classic albums from the past.
I have not been a part of that revival. Musically, I'm stuck in the past and have little interest in the work of current artists. But I do have a couple of boxes of old records left from my younger days, mostly novelty records and hits from the sixties. Sadly, those boxes are buried somewhere in storage and not easily accessible. Still, I've thought of one day finding and playing those records before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but even if I did come across them it wouldn't matter since I no longer have anything to play them on.
And then a year or two ago I found a small portable "suitcase" style record player at a yard sale that was still brand new and in the box, and I paid next to nothing for it. That's the record player you see in the upper left hand corner of this page: the Crosley Cruiser Deluxe. This model comes in a boatload of colors and designs;The one I found at the yard sale was a pastel turquoise style popular with women, but I didn't care. A bargain's a bargain.
The Crosley company has led the market in making available this retro-style record player, a model similar to the one my mom bought us when my brothers and sisters and I were little. These portable suitcase record players are ideal for first-time record buyers who have neither the funds nor the inclination to invest in an expensive stereo system, since the Crosley is an all-in-one: there are no additional components to buy. You just plug it in, put on your record, and voila! You're groovin' it old-school.
After I brought my yard sale Crosley home I tossed it into the back of my closet, figuring I'd pull it out if I ever came across my elusive LP collection.
This is where my criticism of some of those online audiophiles comes in. I did a Youtube search to see if I could find any reviews on the Crosley Cruiser, and I did. Quite a few podcasters recommended the Cruiser for first-time record buyers. It had a good number of positive reviews.
But I also watched other podcasters insult their viewers for even thinking about buying a Crosley Cruiser. According to these audiosnobs, apparently you shouldn't even bother listening to records unless you can afford a high-end system to play them on. Here, for example, is musicologist Michael Fremer, a key figure in promoting the joys of record collecting who has been aptly dubbed "the Pied Piper of vinyl." Yet for some reason he thought it would be a good idea to dump on many of his own followers:
"Crosley record players are very bad for this business. Kids are gonna buy these cruddy turntables, they're gonna play 'Dark Side of the Moon' five times and then the grooves will all be chewed up and then they'll say 'this is a stupid hobby, why did I get into this?'"
I lost a lot of respect for Fermer when I saw him deliver that rant. In the first place, his assertion that Crosleys will chew up your records is a flat-out lie, and he's supposed to be knowlegeable enough about records to know that. Fermer seems to be echoing the opinion of other self-anointed audiophiles who warn their followers that Crosley record players will "destroy" their records, "plow through their records leaving a wake of destruction," or "carve up the record grooves like a samarai sword through a watermelon."
That's worse than hyperbole, it's extremely dishonest. Sounds to me as if all these guys are operating in an echo chamber where they repeat what they keep hearing from each other without ever having any actual experience with the product they're panning. Michael should be ashamed of himself for stoking such fears in his younger followers. Chewing up your records? If that were remotely true, your parents' records would have been rendered useless decades ago because the typical brand-name record player of the seventies and eighties -Magnavox, to cite one example- often tracked heavier than the stylus on the modern Crosley Cruiser of today.
The fact is, the surfaces of all records are microscopically reduced over time through repeated playing, but it's really no big deal. As friction operates between the needle and the groove, eventually there is going to be tiny molecular wear to the record. But here's the thing: the natural teeny-tiny wear on LPs and 45s is so negligible as to virtually never be a problem. The needle on the Crosley Cruiser will wear out long before your records do, because those needles are typically made of saphire or ruby, a softer mineral than a diamond stylus. Your Crosley was manufactured that way in order to keep the price point down; such needles will not wear your records any more than a diamond stylus will, and you can easily replace the cheaper needle with a diamond one if you want to.
By the way, there is a distinction between "wear" and "damage." Record wear is a normal part of the life of your records and really nothing to worry about. Damage to your records is something else entirely, and will rarely occur simply by playing them, as long as you're not playing them when they're dirty or smudged. Vinyl records are designed to handle in excess of nine grams of weight from the tonearm. A high end cartridge puts about 1.8 grams weight on your record while the Crosley leans down at about 5.8, which is still well within the range of safety.
Your cassette tapes are wearing at a faster rate than your records ever will, and if you've played any of your old cassettes lately you may notice little discernable difference in sound quality with them, either. Most of mine are over fifty years old, and guess what? Pretty much everything that's ever been recorded on my cassettes has long ago been converted to CD or digital, either by the recording industry or by me, so I own little that is not replaceable. Besides, almost any record I may feel like listening to has by now been digitized by someone somewhere and posted on Youtube, including the very first record I ever owned as a child. So record wear is not something I waste time fretting over.
The real damage to your records comes from mishandling them or neglecting to keep them clean and as free of dust as possible. Experiments have shown that you would have to play each track of a record at least a hundred times for the miniscule wear to be noticeable with the kind of instruments they use for measuring such things, and even then any infinitesible difference in sound would be very difficult for the human ear to notice. Nevertheless, use some common sense. If you're spending five hundred dollars on a rare first pressing of the Beatle's Sgt Pepper album, you shouldn't have to be told not to play it on an inexpensive turntable. Play that one if you must on a turntable that has an adjustable tonearm, and use your Cruiser for records that you only intend to last over the course of your own lifetime.
Besides, when was the last time you played any record a hundred times, anyway? Actually, many years ago I played one particular track over and over again hundreds of times night after night while sitting alone in the dark after Marie DeVries broke up with me. And yet, 49 years after I got over that heartache, that same record remains perfectly intact, without a chewed up groove in sight. (My heart survived as well.)
So when you hear some goofball audiophool telling you that your records should only be listened to on high end audio equipment, remember this adage: "normal people listen to music; audiophiles listen to their audio equipment."
Fermer seems to have forgotten that there would be no vinyl revival if not for the Crosley Cruiser, since that company was responsible for producing the affordable, popular retro record players that were instrumental in launching the revival in the first place.
Take a look also at this one and a half minute clip titled "How To Set Up A Crosley Cruiser."
I don't like this guy. I've watched a handful of his videos, and he always comes off as smug and smarmy as he does here. Neither do I care for the way he insults Crosley owners, most of whom are kids who wouldn't be able to afford the high-end systems he insists are the only acceptable medium.
Here's the truth: the Crosley Cruiser is not a high-end turntable. But it isn't junk, either; it's actually very well suited for the market it was intended for. The problem I have with these self-anointed gatekeepers is articulated by the sensible audiophile below who discusses how tired he is of seeing grown men picking on kids:
Suppose some teenager inherited his grandfather's Iron Butterfly and Monkees records and he just wants something to listen to them on. Does this kid really have to spend $500-$1200.00 on a high-end turntable, and then also spend hundreds more on an amplifier and speakers? Or can he simply pick up a $46.00 Crosley Cruiser at Walmart and get it done? Is somebody afraid this kid is going to mutilate grandpa's records worse than his grandpa already did during his teens?
Or consider my situation. Do I need to spend a fortune on a system similar to the one I had back in my lonely bachelor days? No, I do not. All I really want to do right now is listen to the four Allan Sherman records I found at a thrift store in 2001. The Crosley should be adequate for that. And, as it turns out, it's more than adequate.
Applying The Teenager Test
Recently I came across a box of my old lost records and grabbed the first 7 or 8 albums I could reach. Then I brought the Crosley Cruiser out of the closet to try them out on.
My 13 year-old grandson happened to be visiting and it seemed like an ideal time to introduce the lad to music the way it used to be enjoyed. Nate was very enthusastic, as most kids are when finally given the opportunity to see, touch, and actually play an actual long playing record album. My biggest challenge was in selecting which records among the few I had on hand that might interest Nate. I skipped the four Allan Sherman records for now, since Nate wouldn't have been familiar with the songs being parodied. Likewise the Big Band records, a genre Nate is unfamiliar with.
Then Nate Saw that I own The Album Of The Soundtrack Of The Trailer Of The Film Of Monty Python And The Holy Grail, and he couldn't wait to play that one. So after I showed him how to hold the record by the edges and place it carefully on the platter, I let him lower the stylus anywere on the record so we could get an idea how this record player is going to sound.
I had not known Nate was familiar with that movie, but as the record played, he joined in, reciting whole sections of dialogue by heart, indicating he had seen that movie way too many times for a kid his age. (I'm going to have to have a word with his mother.)
What really surprised me, after hearing all the criticism of Crosleys, was how truly decent the sound on this record player actually was! I had been expecting the audio to sound a bit thin and tinny, but it was actually pretty good, not only in the parts with dialogue, but within the songs as well. We skipped around on the record in order to hear snippets of "Brave, Brave Sir Robin" and "Camelot" and they came off just fine. Of course, the true test would be in how the orchestral theme would sound, so when I had Nate lay the needle down on that track, we found that the music was perfectly clear.
Those snooty audiophiles had lied to me. The Crosley Cruiser was proving to be a pretty decent record player after all. The volume can be turned up pretty high, and although the sound might not be loud enough for a record hop at the high school gym, it would be plenty good enough in a teenager's bedroom. More importantly, the sound on this thing is more than adequate for my purposes.
Next, Nate and I put on The Temple City Kazoo Orchestra and played their version of Also Sprach Zarathustra(to you youngun's, that's more popularly known as the theme from 2001: A Space Oddysey). Nate went wild over that one, but his Grandma yelled from the next room for us to turn it down. You'll know why when you hear it for yourself:
Believe me when I tell you that even I can't endure this entire album in one sitting
Next we put on "War Between Fats and Thins" by Harvey Matusow's Jew's Harp Band (hey, I didn't say these were my best records!) I chose to try the cut titled "Afghan Red" since it contains the most variety (vocals, Jews Harp, and some kind of chimes I don't recognize). Someone posted this cut on Youtube so I can share it with you here:
Harvey Matusow was a commie-hippie-weirdo-banana back in the '60s, and someday I think I'll write about him on this forum while including some additional album cuts.
But for now I'll just tell you that once I put on a pair of headphones, this number as played on my Crosley sounded quite comparable to the link above, dispelling any reservations I had about the possibility of the Crosley being worthless. I was finding I actually like this little record player.
Still, I found myself wishing I had my hands on some of my heavier record albums from the 1960s like The Electric Prunes, whose "I Had Too Much To Dream" features a psychedelic oscillating fuzztone that repeatedly moves back and forth from the right to left stereo channels. It would be interesting to find out how that revolutionary sound reproduces on the Crosley's small speakers. Here's how it sounds on a higher-end system with great stereo separation (listen with headphones to get the best effect):
Lacking the Prunes, I would have liked to hear my old Cream or Vanilla Fudgealbums in order to get an idea how well deep bass and pounding tom-toms might sound on this thing.*
*For some reason I suddenly have an odd craving for a bowl of prunes covered with creamy vanilla fudge.
Alas, I had none of those albums on hand. But The Osmonds "The Plan" was in this batch of recent rescues and the cut "Last Days" would be ideal for a test of how well the Crosley reproduces loud deep bass low notes. So Nate and I played a couple of cuts from that album, "Last Days."and"Mirror, Mirror."
Not surprisingly, you're not going to hear an outstanding thumping bass line from the Crosley Cruiser, but that is deliberate. It's by design. In order to produce an inexpensive record player that has the speakers built in, the engineers at Crosley had to make sure the speakers would not vibrate too much, because the record sits right on top of the speakers and a pounding bass could cause a record to skip. So as far as I'm concerned, lack of a heavy bass sound is the only shortcoming found in this player, but of course that's not really a shortcoming; it is to be expected. You're not going to hear pounding bass coming out of speakers that measure less than 2-by-3 inches each, anyway.
That being said, the sound overall was not bad. I expected the audio to be merely adequate, but it was better than adequate. I'd have to say it was surprisingly good. You may not get all the very highs and very lows from every record you own through these speakers, but this is a player with darn good mid-range audio, and when you play a record on it you won't feel as though you are missing anything.*
_________________________________________________________ *Nate's mother, who was properly raised by her dad on a diet of '60s garage rock and psychedelia, was listening from the kitchen and really took to"Mirror, Mirror,"even without hearing it through headphones. But because there is an enjoyably wide range of audio effects in that cut, I showed her that with headphones it sounds even better.
As for a finger-snapping demonstration of the Crosley Cruiser's midrange capabilities, Lionel Hampton's vibraphone handles the sound quite nicely. Hampton's signature song "Flyin' Home" from 1940 comes off very well on this record player, and we also get to hear some cool hepcat honk & skronk from the saxaphone player:
The limitations of the Crosley Cruiser don't have to be limiting, as there is a remedy, and it's a simple one. If you are like me and like to hear a lot of bass in your music, just do as I did with the records above: simply plug a decent set of headphones into the headphone jack that's located right under the record player's on/off knob, and you'll be amazed at how much better any record sounds.
Coming Up In an upcoming post I'll show you how to upgrade a Crosley on the cheap so that the sound derived is much, much better than one might expect.
Meanwhile, do yourself a favor and watch the joy and excitement on the face of this young girl as she brings home the first record player she's ever owned. As you can tell from her opening comments, she's bought into the blatant lies (that this brand sucks and will scratch her records), but even believing that nonsense she doesn't care! She loves owning it anyway. So what kind of jerk would you have to be to want to ruin this sweet girl's joy?
The song considered by many to be the first surf record was released in 1959 and, oddly enough, had nothing to do with surfing. It was about howling at the moon. Here's that record, Moon Dawg by The Gamblers. Give a listen:
The identity of the members of this group are shrouded in mystery, but pop culture detectives have managed to ferret out some details. I quote here a greatly truncated section from Andrew Hickey's, California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s:
Nobody knows for sure who the Gamblers were--the passage of time has added to the legend, and sources conflict as to who did what, but let's listen and try to hear who the players are at the start of our story.
It starts with the drums, of course. [Sandy Nelson? No, that sound is the sound of Rod Schaffer.]
It's a primal, rolling sound...Then the rhythm guitar enters. [Has to be a young Elliot Engber, who was a member of the Gamblers when they called themselves the Moon Dogs.] This is surf music, and we've been hearing it again and again and again.
Except this is a year before surf music, before Dick Dale and His Del-Tones start playing music like this to surfers, gremmies, and even the odd hodad, and before the sound of a reverbed Fender becomes synonymous with the waves.
Then enter the Bass, just a low rumble here from Larry Taylor, no hint yet of the virtuoso who would play with everyone from the Monkees to Tom Waits, just holding the low end down, adding a bit of throb.
And then those staccato piano chords come in [Howard Hirsch? No, this has to be Bruce Johnston, who later wrote "I Write The Songs" and whose distinctive voice is apparent once those harmonies come in, a three chord block following the rest of the track.]
And forty seconds in we finally have the lead guitar, from Derry Weaver. This is the birth of surf guitar right here. It's not born fully formed -it's a thin, wiry sound, without the reverb and distortion that would define the genre- but the phrasing is all there, paving the way for Dick Dale that is to come. And then the final element--producer Nik Venet, howling at the moon.
The Other First Surf Record
Okay, so that record is considered by many pop music historians as "the first surf record" even though it didn't have anything to do with surfing. Then a year later, Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, clearly inspired by the sound of Moon Dawg, cut an instrumental they named Let's Go Trippin' which wasn't strictly about surfing either. But that hasn't stopped other pop music historians from claiming Dick Dale's was the first surf record. Why? Who knows, other than some kids who surfed seemed to feel that the fast guitar and rolling drums of that single gave off a feeling of excitement, risk, and speed. You know, like surfing.
Third Time's The Charm At around this same time, a garage band from Hawthorne, California with no performing or recording experience who called themselves the Pendletons (because the boys' father hoped maybe Pendleton Mills would sponsor the nascent group) found themselves auditioning for Candix records. They played acoustic guitars and sang in the style of The Kingston Trio, like pretty much everyone else was doing at the time. The producer didn't care for their material and asked if they had any other songs, and one of them said, "Brian and Mike have been writing a song about surfing."
Brian and Mike had been writing about no such thing, but the boys fibbed and told the executives the surfing song wasn't finished yet and made arrangements to come back with it the next month. These guys knew absolutely nothing about surfing, but one member of the group, Dennis, spent a lot of time at the beach, so Dennis helped Mike and Brian with the slang. They came up with a number they called Surfin', which didn't sound anything like the supposed surfing music typified by the instrumental styles of Moon Dawg or Let's Go Trippin'. The song actually owed more to the Kingston Trio and Doo-Wop than anything else ("Bom Bom dit di-dit di-dit" in repeat).
But at least you could tell by the lyrics that it was about surfing. So according to still other music critics, that record was actually "the first surf record." So take your pick. After that the deluge began, and surf music ruled AM radio for almost three years until the Beatles hit the scene, followed by the British Invasion, which spawned the garage band era. Tastes had changed, and the reign of surf music was at an end.
But let's back up a bit and hear from the author of California Dreaming again:
When the Pendleton's new record came out, Candix records had made the unilateral decision to rechristen them. The only question was what to call them. "The Surfers" was considered for awhile, before Russ Regan hit on the perfect name for the band, and had it stuck on the label of Candix single 331 when it was released in November of 1961. The first time the band knew about their change of name was when they opened a box of their singles. And since the song was a big local hit, and a minor one nationally, reaching number seventy five, the name stuck. The pendletons were now the Beach Boys.
Previously: Mr. Acker Bilk Got Here Before The Beatles
If you spend enough time on Youtube tracking down obscure musicians, you may eventually come across 60-year-old amateur drummer Ole Rosssillly. (That's right, he spells his name with three 'S's and three 'L's.) Ole was a roadie for all the great rock bands back in the day, and now that he is (presumably) retired, he spends his days honoring the musicians he used to set up for by enthusiastically doing drum covers of their hits.
But Ole doesn't go halfway. Oh no. He has an almost ridiculously massive drum set; if a kit this big was actually on stage at a concert, it would probably crowd the other musicians off the stage. Yet somehow Ole manages to utilize every piece of percussion in every recording I've watched him play so far; I counted ten tom-toms and 20 cymbals of varying sizes, plus several cowbells and other doo-dads. And I'm sure I still missed a few.
For each song Ole covers, he films himself from four separate angles, because you can't see all of the equipment from only one camera. After I watched his first cover of the Monkees' Pleasant Valley Sunday, I'm danged if I couldn't keep myself from clicking on and watching it from the the other three cameras! Then I watched him play to several other hits, also at four angles each. Couldn't help myself; I kept on watching for hours! A drum kit like his would have been my teenage dream.
So now Ole seems to be living his dream by spending what must be his every waking hour playing his heart out in tribute to his rock heroes. I say good for you, Ole!
Be sure you click on the video so you watch it directly on his Youtube channel because you won't want to miss ole's introductory comments. to his videos. because part of the charm. is that he tends. to overly punctuate. his sentences. a lot.
And for heaven's sake, give this poor guy a "like." A cat who dedicates this much time to his passion deserves to have more than the mere two this video has garnered so far.
Here's a trivia question for you: What British musician had the first number one single in America in the early 1960's?
If you thought it was the Beatles, you'd be wrong. The first artist from England who had a number one hit in America was a person whose name you may never have heard. You may not know the name of the record, either, but it's a sure bet you've heard it many times. Acker Bilk was a clarinet player, and his hit record, Stranger on the Shore, was all over the radio in 1962 and has been a staple of elevator music for more than 60 years. Acker's instrumental topped the charts in America three years before anyone had even heard of the Beatles. Don't tell me you've never heard this one:
Stranger on the Shore has been covered by practically every instrumentalist you can name, and just when it was starting to wane, someone put words to it and every singer in the day recorded it on their albums, from The Drifters to Slim Whitman to Patti Page. Here's Andy Williams, who seems just barely able to hit that low note:
In Andy's defense, you'll remember the song was originally played on a clarinet, which has a greater octave range than most humans.
And just in case you're wondering: yeah, Acker Bilk says he's sick of hearing that song too.
Okay, I admit it: I was a bit disingenuous with the title of this piece. Strictly speaking, this is not the first rock & roll song. It isn't even about rock & roll dancing and it doesn't have a rock & roll beat -far from it. This is actually a song from the swing era.
But it is the first known rock & roll record, in the sense that the title of the song is "Rock And Roll" and the phrase "rock and roll" is sung over and over. And over.
And this isn't even the Boswell Sisters' best work. In fact it was the B side of their recording "You Oughta Be In Pictures" which later became the unofficial anthem of the American film industry after Rudy Vallee covered it and turned it into a bona fide hit. But the song does have a place in rock & roll history, if only as a footnote.
Here is the scene from the movie Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round where the Boswell Sisters are part of the entertainment on a cruise ship, singing about how they'll somehow be dancing and romancing "in the rolling and the rocking of the sea":
The film itself belongs to that genre of musical-comedy-whodunnits that were popular at the time. The story revolves around the murder of a gangster on a cruise ship, and features Jack Benny as the director of a company of entertainers on said cruise. Is the movie worth watching? It is, if only for the chance to see Jack Benny before he was funny:
I was about 15 years old before I started taking an interest in songs on the radio. I found I really liked this song I was hearing that had just hit number one on KHJ radio's top forty, "96 Tears." I recall the disc jockey saying the name of the group was unpronounceable and that made me all the more curious, so I went down to the Anaheim mall and bought the 45. But the record label just listed the artists as "? and the Mysterions."
I didn't know how I was supposed to pronounce that question mark part so in my head I silently pronounced the band's name to myself as "huh?" and the Mysterions. This was the sixties, and that pronunciation made as much sense to me as anything else those days.
It was many years later -decades, actually- when I finally learned the group's name was pronounced "Question Mark and the Mysterions."
Duh.
Glad I never pronounced my version of the name out loud among my peers. I was in 9th grade and wouldn't have been able to bear the shame.
Anyway, by listening to the record over and over I found I could learn to play that riff by ear on my little sister's toy organ, as the song simply slipped from a C chord to a C minor and back again repeatedly. The church janitor happened to be my neighbor, and one weekday I went to work with him so I could sneak into the chapel and practice that song on the massive church organ while no one else was in the building. Teenage heaven, my friend. Teenage heaven.
Here's that record, which I probably shouldn't have been playing in church, as rock historians have since dubbed it one of the early precursors to the Punk Rock movement:
By the way, you may have guessed that the lead singer's name wasn't really Question Mark. It was Rudy Martinez. And Rudy wants people to know they are a Mexican band. “We lose our national identity when we say Hispanic,” he said. “People don’t connect the good things we do with being Mexican, and that hurts our image as a people.” -Fifty Years Later Question Mark and the Mysterions are as Mysterious as Ever.
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