LOOKING IN THE SQUARE

An old record player

Those of us who may be over the hill and gaining speed on the other side should remember these machines.

They played fragile records made of some type of breakable plastic and were about 2 mm thick (nearly 3/16 inch), required winding up by hand to make them go, and the needles that picked up the music or sound track from the record grove had to be replaced with a new one at frequent intervals as they became blunt and spoiled the sound. There was only one groove that ran from the outside beginning of the track to the end near the record's centre.

By today's sound quality standards the reproduction left much to be desired, but we had good imagination in those days and were interested in the music, not the scratches or wows.

To me, those were the days!