Times-Standard, dateline September 24, 1977:
Tokyo (AP) --- “Laser sound,” A futuristic record player without a needle, was heard in public for the first time Friday at the 26th All-Japan Audio Fair. The machine uses a powerful laser beam instead of a needle to pick up musical sounds.
The machine went on to become today’s CD technology. Who would have ever thought that something so complicated would surpass the simplicity of the needle in the grove record player?
Nobody in 1977 had even heard of the concept of the cell-phone, let alone the fact that you can download the worlds supply of music onto a micro-chip and listen to it on your cell-phone.
Are we better off?
e
The world was introduced to the concept of indoor lavatories at the 1848 World's Manure Spreader's Concourse in Dodge City, Kansas. "It a far cry from using a corncob and hunkering down in the cold outhouse on a February blustery night" said Amos Bradbury, the foundations chair. "I see this as a step toward civilizing our societies to defecate indoors and to rise above the animal species." The coming years showed an increase in water closets and the invention spurred by John Crapper's porcelin wonder device.
ReplyDeleteAre we any better off today? Ernie, you're a country boy, you tell me? Personally, I prefer madrone leaves.
Oh, come on, I'm being way too smug as I wonder what to do with my nearly 4000 vinyl records that I only end up enjoying a rotating 500 or so. But, geez, I can get 10,000 songs of my choosing onto a device the size of a cigarette lighter. But honestly? The vinyl records sound better. And mostly it's all about the covers anyway.
Yes, we had an outhouse on our property.
About ten years ago, I went to a house fire that was particularly hard to put out. After we got the fire under control we found that the man had an extensive collection of priceless L.P. albums. Most of them were virgin un-played albums, then he had duplicates of the ones that he wanted to listen to.
ReplyDeleteHe was also a gun collector, so there was a lot of ammo going off.
As you might guess, he was more distressed about his record collection than the house.
I had some old "classical music" recordings. One I remember was the "FOX TROT". Is that classical?
ReplyDeleteThey were only recorded on one side and were smaller in diameter and thicker than the vinyl records of modern times ( late 50's and on ).
I used them for skeet and looking back on it, if I had it all over to do again, I would use them for skeet.
Oregon
We have family voice recordings from the mid-fifies on thin green plastic "records" the size of a 45 rpm record with a square hole in the middle. Somehow we recorded onto the disc, but I don't remember the technology.
ReplyDeleteI don't even remember why they recorded records at 33, 45, and 78 rpms?
Sound quality has gone down with every one of these advances since records... Remember High Fidelity sound? Compression of many tunes onto little cigarette lighters is convenient but the sound is inferior music.
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In Savage Henry this month there is a page title "You Might be from Sohum if..."
The first one is "You might be from Sohum is peeing indoors just seems wrong" and
"You might be from Sohum if you are proud of your outhouse".
To Oregon,--those smaller diameter, thicker records were for the Edison Phonographs,long before the 50's. I can remember my Mom and Dad had one, this was when I was 4 0r 5 years old, like 1927 or 1928. Long time ago.--Elsie---
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