A different fic....

[conuly]

"He took the Walkman out of his pocket and flipped through the songs in the cassette."

Oh, sweetie. That's... that's just not how cassette tapes work. Not even overseas. You fast forward or rewind - literally winding the tape again - and hope that your timing is amazing. I mean, with practice I guess you can get pretty good, but still.

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An SMBC comic about Tolkein. Seems to be a theme for today.

Found in the Archives, Seldom Seen Photos From World War II

DHS changing immigration enforcement tactics amid negative polling

A year after Assad's fall, families of missing detainees languish without answers

Gunmen kill at least 11 people in attack on Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach

Comments

[glaurung]

For music on the go, you had “highway hi-fi” in the late 50’s - a record player that sat under the dash of your Chrysler and played proprietary 16rpm seven inch records. The low rpm was to help reduce needle skipping due to bumpy roads. Compact tape cassette players were not available until 1963, and some people just could not live with whatever the local DJ liked to play on the radio.

For music you could carry with you, in the 1920’s, there was the Mikiphone, a wind up record player that folded into a round metal case that fit in a coat pocket. It had competitors (the peter pan record player, the cameraphone record player), but none were as compact as the mikiphone (sort of like how the ipod was smaller than its competitors in 2001). It played regular sized records, which look comically huge compared to the teeny player. Heres a video of someone setting one up and having it play a record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnfNBpghZzo

[kyrielle]

Huh, today I learned! Thank you! :) I grew up after we had cassette tapes, so I guess I just assumed the record players never traveled well because the ones I saw didn't. Neat!

[glaurung]

Car record players never caught on because of the high price (a $200 add on for $2400 cars), plus the proprietary format and limited music selection (only columbia artists were available on Highway hifi, due to a boneheaded exclusive deal). And there were reliability issues with the players. But from 1955 to the introduction of the 8 track tape in 1964, it was the only way to listen to your own music on the road.

The portable record players of the 20's and 30's were in an entirely different era or sound quality. All records then were not just analog, they were 100% mechanical - no electronics of any kind. Sound quality was always poor and a 10 inch record held one song on each side -- but the miracle of being able to listen to music at all, without waiting for it to come up on the radio, overrode any such considerations. Miniaturizing the player was easy, if you were willing to sacrifice volume (a smaller horn meant softer volume). But the records were still thick 10 or 12" shellac disks, 3-5 minutes per side, that you had too bring along in addition to the tiny player.

It's a testament to just how important music is to us as humans that we invented these ridiculous technologies just to be able to hear music when we wanted, making every ordinary person with a little money in their pocket as able to have music on demand as a prince or emperor with a live band on retainer.

[hudebnik]

Wow, I've never seen/heard one of those before! I've learned my New Thing For The Day.

It produces remarkably good sound, considering the "amp" is a Bakelite chamber of a few cubic inches of air.

I notice the wind-up crank is just under the disk, which means it has to not rotate while it's winding down, or it would scrape against the moving disk. Somebody decided that putting it in that specific place was worth the extra hardware to make that happen. It's amazing what people did with analogue hardware....