The voice of the high-end audio community
The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone. The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone. The knee bone is broken, comrade, and will need to be put in a cast. And this X-ray will be repurposed into a makeshift gramophone recording of The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” And that’s how Soviets got a hold of Western music back in the day. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dancing bones, doin’ the skeleton dance …
If you’re of a certain age (and if you’re reading this, chances are that you are), then you probably owned one of these. And it didn’t do one thing to add to the music, at least not sonically. But it sure looked cool, didn’t it? Hey, don’t bogart that j, man!
Back in the early-to-mid-1990s, there was no Spotify, no Pandora, no Napster. There were albums and tapes and CDs and MTV (which still played music then) and the radio. But what if you liked a particular genre of music and there wasn’t a local station that catered to your tastes? There was an answer on the way.
Somebody came up with the bright idea of creating DVDs that you could rent and not have to return, because they would simply become unreadable after two days and you could throw them out. If that seems like a lot of waste, you have to remember that this was 2003, and you were probably getting an AOL disc in the mail every other day.
Get together a bunch of recording artists and try to develop a better digital marketplace, one where the music doesn’t sound like crap and where you actually get paid, and whaddaya get? A yellow paperweight, that’s what.
RCA had the bright idea in 1964 to reproduce video in a phonographic format. Great idea. They then took 17 years to develop the idea and bring it to market. Not such a great idea.
That’s right, not rotating platforms for displaying automobiles. Actual record turntables for vehicles. This was a thing.
When folks talk about Bang & Olufsen’s heyday back in the early to mid 1970s, they’re usually talking about this particular turntable, the world’s first electronically controlled tangential gramophone, a marvel of both function and design that floored the hi-fi community upon its release.
A few months back, we featured Koss’ classic Porta Pro headphones and asked if something could truly be “retro tech” if it was still purchased and used on the reg. Now we look at the ELP LT-1XA, the world’s first laser turntable, from the only company that makes laser turntables, a technology that has barely evolved in a quarter century, and ask, “Is it retro?”
Once upon a time, dinosaurs roamed the earth, giants that shook the ground with their collective roar. But there was one that stood above them all. That time was the Eighties, and that giant amongst giants was the Conion C-100F.
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