Setting an Old Record
Nov. 16th, 2003 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterOne thing that my Dad showed me before I headed back for home was an old Victrola machine that he acquired in his younger days: a Victor Victrola Credenza...a 78 RPM phonograph about the size of a chest of drawers. It looks similar to the one on this page, though that one is fully restored and his isn't, and that one has the electric-driven motor and his has the wind-up motor (which, he tells me with a hint of smugness, makes his worth 50-100% more than an electric machine in equivalent condition). Dad's does still work quite well, except that he needs to take apart and clean the motor that drives it as it runs down too soon.
Anyway, we went out to the workshop and Dad wound it up and played bits of a few records...78s by the Dorseys, Rudy Vallee, Dean Martin, and others. Dad has about a zillion of them; they were packed away but now he's got them out of storage. The one bad thing about it is that the needle presses down on the records so hard that to play them just a few dozen times is to wear them out. What I'd really love to do is get ahold of a more modern phonographic setup that can play those old records and record them to WAV audio format for archival, so that they're preserved for future generations. I wonder if archive.org would be interested in doing that?
Sort of makes you think...it wasn't so very long ago at all that a reasonably mechanically competant man could repair things in all areas of life; a clockmaker could fix a Victrola, a Model T, or what-have-you...it all worked on similar principles. But nowadays, our audio entertainment is provided by printed circuits, and even modern cars are nearly more computer than engine.
Anyway, we went out to the workshop and Dad wound it up and played bits of a few records...78s by the Dorseys, Rudy Vallee, Dean Martin, and others. Dad has about a zillion of them; they were packed away but now he's got them out of storage. The one bad thing about it is that the needle presses down on the records so hard that to play them just a few dozen times is to wear them out. What I'd really love to do is get ahold of a more modern phonographic setup that can play those old records and record them to WAV audio format for archival, so that they're preserved for future generations. I wonder if archive.org would be interested in doing that?
Sort of makes you think...it wasn't so very long ago at all that a reasonably mechanically competant man could repair things in all areas of life; a clockmaker could fix a Victrola, a Model T, or what-have-you...it all worked on similar principles. But nowadays, our audio entertainment is provided by printed circuits, and even modern cars are nearly more computer than engine.