One day recently my 16-year-old daughter came home from a friend’s house and reported that she had seen the most amazingly strange contraption: a phonograph.
“You set an arm on top of a spinning disc,” she said.
“It’s called a record album,” I said.
“The arm has a mustache,” she said.
“It’s a brush to catch dust,” I said. “So the needle won’t skip.”
“What needle?” she said.
She is a girl who has always loved music, and so it was inevitable that one day she would discover the treasure in the closet. As soon as she started flipping through some of the more obscure items in her father’s album collection–like Professor Longhair’s “Crawfish Fiesta” and “Beat Street” by Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five–she said she was interested in using them on the soundtracks of the student movies she will be making in high school this year.
This was how I found myself shopping for an anachronism on the Internet. As I visited sites–like RecordPlayersPlus.com, SoundInvestments.atSpace.com and OakTreeEnt.com–that sold vintage record players from the prehistoric predigital age, I couldn’t have felt any greater sense of technological paradox than if I had been trying to send a text message from my cell phone to a rotary dial telephone, which, incidentally, my daughter doesn’t know how to use.
I scrutinized a Dual 1009 turntable (“old grease has been cleaned out and replaced, drive idler resurfaced, motor oiled, mechanism adjusted, and the speeds calibrated $20) marked “Sold” at Vintage-electronics.cc. A refurbished Decca suitcase record player ($125) at the All Unique Web site (www.all-unique.com) had a jaunty retro diamond pattern on the front of the case.
Around this time I caught myself getting nostalgic over an RCA Victor 6-JY-1 45-r.p.m. record player ($445) at EverythingRadio.com.
I stopped. Where would this lead? What would I buy next, a typewriter ribbon?
I couldn’t figure out whether to buy a reconditioned four-speed Hamilton Electronics Model 910 phonograph, which reminded me of the record player my sixth-grade teacher had in the classroom ($179.95 at PrimeauMusic.com), or if I would be better off hooking up a modern turntable like, say, the two-speed Sony PS-LX250H ($89.99 at Amazon.com) to my stereo system.
I was dealing with recovered memories of after-school afternoons spent playing records on little phonographs that folded up into boxes with plastic handles so we could carry them to one another’s basement rec rooms?
As luck would have it, I have the good fortune to live around the corner from expert advice. I walked to Village Music, a store in my town that has been selling and celebrating the LP for decades.
The owner, John Goddard, was sitting by the open front door, amid a vast collection of albums, concert posters and autographed pictures of musicians.
“Get your daughter an entry-level record player,” he said. “Because you don’t know how far she is going to take it.”
“Phonograph or a turntable?” I asked. “And new or old?”
“The old ones sound fine,” Goddard said. “The new ones sound fine. … If you want an old one, get it from Craig’s List. That way you can go look at what you’re buying first.”
Then he added as an afterthought, “A portable phonograph she could carry around might be good for her.”
“Thank you,” I said, and rushed home to tell my husband that Goddard said a little phonograph that folded into a box with a plastic handle was the answer.
“He said that?” my husband asked.
“Or words to that effect,” I said.
CraigsList.org, an online bulletin board where local buyers and sellers meet in communities around the world, listed 117,977 items for sale in the San Francisco area, where I live, with 20 described as phonographs and 155 described as record players. But I didn’t see any portable suitcase phonographs.
A quick search showed that CrosleyRadio.com was selling some. Crosley, one of the early makers of portable turntables, was a company that started with radios in the 1920s. Now the Web site’s models included an updated reissue of the Collegiate and the Traveler, with a handle, although at 18.5 pounds I wondered how portable it really was ($179.95).
Keith Starr, the vice president of the company, said a less expensive suitcase-style turntable (Model No. CR-49) was available at LinensNThings.com for $99.99.
It had a handle. I bought it. I told my daughter it will play 33s, 45s and, if we ever stumble across them in some dark closet, my mother’s 78s from the 1950s.
She said, “What’s a 78?”
