The vinyl resurgence shows no sign of slowing, so here's a great budget turntable for your newly thrifted LPs.
photos: Ladykiller: Elizabeth Sisson
I've been listening to "old time radio" since I was in the 5th grade. it may seem like a strange thing to have discovered as a youth in the 80s, but those old shows are just perfect for anyone who likes stories, or who likes a good laugh. I feel very fortunate to have discovered Jack Benny and Stan Freberg and Space Patrol in my formative years. If you can slow down your internal clock a little, those stories still hold up decades later.
Here at Retro Thing some of our favorite discoveries are when someone finds a new take on some cherished vintage thing that not only breathes new life into the old, but takes those old ideas in entirely new directions. The Thrilling Adventure Hour is such a discovery. TAH is a monthly live show where actors stand up on stage and perform new stories in the style of old time radio. I comment on this in the interview, but I'll say it again... the writing is so superlative, that I find it hard to believe that the two authors are able to create a fresh hour of brilliance every single month.
I had the chance to spend some time with co-writer/co-creator Ben Blacker (his is the first voice you'll hear in the podcast), and the voice of Croach the Tracker; Mark Gagliardi. We chatted about Old Time Radio and the excitement of bringing back those thrilling days of performing imaginative stories before a live audience. You can stream the interview below, or download the MP3 and take our interview with you.
Make sure to visit ThrillingAdventureHour.com to download free podcasts of their many different "shows" every week. Many of the programs carry an absurd nigh soap-opera level of continuity, but don't let that scare you. You can drop in pretty much anywhere and be as amazed as I am with every episode.
Thanks to Ben and Mark for taking the time to speak with us, and we hope to bring you more podcast fun like this in the future.
links:
Visit The Thrilling Adventure Hour to download free episodes
Shows are also hosted on Nerdist
All Things Considered interview
My studio is dotted with some classic microphones. The Shure "Elvis" mic, an old Calrad mic that looks like a cold capsule, and more. I've been lucky to have most of my treasures while thrifting or hitting garage sales, because genuinely vintage mics often come at a price.
Not only are many old mics cool to look at, but they offer a signature sound that's hard to get any other way. Then again, some don't actually sound all that great after all these years, but a handsome mic will always find a home on someone's shelf.
Pyle is an audio gear company known for budget friendly microphones, cables, speakers, and the like. The product that caught my eye is their Retro Dynamic Vocal Microphone. Instead of yet another workaday looking microphone, the Pyle PDMICR40 takes a style cue from classic Shure microphones & other 50s mics.
The microphone comes in three colors - chrome, black, and even a burgundy! The body is plastic, which I've got to think is key in bringing this mic in around $40 - which also includes a mic cable! I'm not brimming with confidence over the XLR jack since it's also entirely plastic, and I fear that one fall would shatter the body of the mic... but at this price you've got to expect some shortcuts.
I bought The Pyle mic simply to use as prop in a video project, but the mic's performance is not bad, not bad at all. Obviously you're not going to get the classic 50s sound of a genuinely retro microphone, but if you like the look of a classic mic in a good day-to-day general purpose microphone, then the Pyle Retro mic is hard to pass up - especially at this price.
Help out Retro Thing when you pick up a Pyle Retro Styled Microphone on Amazon
We've written before about the challenges of collecting vinyl - I've joked that those around us probably regard our hobby as a "lifestyle choice". There are the slings and arrows each of us face in trying to put together our ultimate music collection, but the problem that we all face is where to stow all of those damned records. They're large (okay... not along the Z axis), they're heavy, and you need to store them in a way that you can still read the spines.
Let's assume that you're beyond the ol' cinder bricks and glass blocks stage of storage solutions. You can of course build something perfect from scratch (provided that your significant other lets you touch power tools), but lots of us crave an out-of-the-box solution. Ikea's Expedit is ideal for storing a large record collection. The units are available in assorted arrangements of 12" x 12" cells - perfect for storing and browsing your favorite records.
Expedit has been much beloved by the vinyl collecting community, many going so far as to designing their listening rooms around multiple Expedit units. I have a 5 x 5 unit myself, and I can honestly say that it's changed my life forever. For years Expedit has been the standard bearer in affordable vinyl storage, which is why Ikea's announcement that they were discontinuing the line came as such a blow.
Vinyl collectors were aghast. Vinyl is on its first upswing in many years, and this is the time Ikea chooses to cease production on the perfect solution so many of depend on? One of the deciding factors in my investing in Expedit furniture was that I could always get another piece to match it a few years down the road. My current Expedit is almost full, and soon I'll need to swell ranks with another unit. But I really really don't want to start hoarding furniture because now that Expedit is on the outs. What am I supposed to do?
While news of the the discontinue Expedit has traveled wide, what is less widely reported is Ikea's response. They say that while Expedit is going away, it'll be replaced by Kallax (which I keep mistyping as "klaxxon"). The new line will have the exact same vinyl-friendly compartments in the exact same sizes, and take the exact same weight. The only difference they say is that the slide profiles will be thinner and will be more rounded. Okay, that's a partial reprieve, but to my eye the thicker sides are what make Expedit look like real furniture instead of budgety slapped-together dorm room furnishings. The big shocker is that Ikea's new Kallax line is also quietly being introduced with the largest unit being four by four compartments. Expedit sports a five by five choice, and believe me, those extra rows make a huge difference. When you're shelving a lot of vinyl, you need that extra height to make the most of your stroage space. I'm sure we'll all find ways to stack multiple Kallax units, but it's sad to already have the perfect solution in place right now, and we're just expected to stand by helplessly as it disappears.
Vinyl collectors are taking action. You can join the Facebook group "Rettet das Ikea Expedit Rega" (The Expedit extinction was first announced in German Ikea stores, hence the German Facebook page) where record enthusiasts are posting photos of how Expedit keeps their collections wrangled. Astonishingly, the page has garnered some 24,000 likes in just a month. Some hopeful fans have pointed out that the line changeover is happening on April 1st, and hope that this is merely an April Fool's gag... but that would definitely mean that Ikea is playing the long game.
It's nice for the vinyl crowd to be recognized by the furniture giant, but I stand with my Expedit brothers in voicing my unhappiness about the forced move to the new smaller Kallax. Those of us who have made the lifestyle choice to collect vinyl aren't ones to exactly welcome change.
This may be a dangerous topic to bring up, but the youth simply doen't know how to party. I've been to get-togethers thrown by well-intentioned millennials who don't seem to understand how exactly a party is supposed to jam. Maybe I should be grateful since I live in a building filled with college students, but... man! We really need to drop some serious knowledge on what music is supposed to sound like.
I'm not even talking about their music choices (though I'll say that dubstep is for when you're all up in da club, not sitting around playing X-box). I'm talking about amplitude. Too often I've seen an iPod connected to a standalone dock with speakers the size of a nickel. Or music hissing out of laptop speakers. That's not a party. Sure, those solutions are far more portable than my 4 foot high speaker towers (which one of the millennials in my life laughingly labeled "old school"), but it pretty much sounds like you're taking your favorite tunes and frying them up in a pan.How about a compromise? Sony rolled out these portable speakers something like 30 years ago for around $100US. The Walkman revolutionized portable personal music, and these little speakers are the other half of the bargain - sharing your mixtapes with rest of the world.
The APM-090 speaker pair plug into any 1/8" jack (sorry - these speakers are decades too early for bluetooth), have a nice weight to them, and feature those mysterious square Sony speakers from the 80s. We've written about similar speakers before, and my conclusion wasn't a good one. Our readers wrote in to stick up for Sony's unusual square speakers, and they were right. There must have been something wrong with that other pair, because these little guys sound really good an they get really loud.
If you plug a music source into the speakers, you'll hear a little something, but the magic happens when you switch to using the internal amplifiers. The APM-090 can run off of wall power (so you hipster kids have to use your artisinal AC adapter), or four C sized batteries. There's even room inside to tuck away the cords - nice touch. What looks like a second battery compartment on speaker #2 is actually just spare battery storage (which also meant that Sony could cheap out and use the same mold for both speakers.)
Small minuses - no volume control on the speakers themselves, and no off switch. The speakers automatically power down after a few minutes of not receiving a signal (a trend that a lot of current devices follow, and I dislike). Also the foam inside the battery compartments has turned to tar, but that's true of a lot of electronics from the era. These little boxes kick out the tunes, and with the square speakers look sleek doing it. Ebay has these (and many other styles) pretty often in the $30-60 range, and I'd say it's money well spent.
The coolest thing about these speakers (besides the square speaker cones - I did mention that, right?) is they tote around on a special custom bracket. The speakers are really locked in there with a screw mechanism that you undo with a coin. Youth of the world, if you're going to bring the tunes to a party, and you can't be bothered to do the right thing and bring along a giant 80s boom box, won't you at least the AMP-090 speakers? You'll look SO indie rock, while actually enjoying your music at an audible level.
-signed,
the bald guy with the good speakers in 2A
link:
Get your own square-shaped Sony speakers, and help keep Retro Thing rockin'
This brand new Electrohome HiFi system looks incredibly cool and I've wanted to mention it here for a while. But as the old saying goes, looks are only skin deep. I don't recommend it because you can get far better gear for much less.
If you're in the market for a budget turntable that offers decent quality with readily available replacement cartridges, check out the Audio-Technica AT-LP60 ($90 on Amazon). This belt-driven automatic table runs at 33 1/3 and 45 RPM and accepts affordable ATN3600L cartridges. It also includes a built-in phono preamp, just in case your modern amplifier doesn't offer a turntable input.
Finding an affordable amplifier on Craigslist or Kijiji is fairly easy these days, but it's hard to find a better new deal than the Lepai LP-2020A+ Class-T mini amplifier (under $30 on Amazon) that we've raved about in the past. I no longer recommend Dayton Audio B652 speakers because of drastic component cost-cutting, but Sony SS-B1000 bookshelf speakers are an excellent compact replacement for under $70.
So there you have it. For about the same price as an all-in-one Electrohome HiFi system, you can own a belt-driven Audio-Technica turntable with Sony speakers and a surprisingly good Tripath-based amplifier. And if you can get your hands on a second-hand amp and speakers, you can put together a sweet vinyl playback system for under $100.
This one-off console stereo combines vintage and modern audio technology in a magnificently handcrafted case.
On the vintage side, the turntable is a late-1970s Yamaha, an elderly JVC equalizer lets you tweak frequencies the old-school way, and a vintage 5-inch CRT has been hacked to display Lissajous waveforms that throb and twitch in time to the music. Oh, I almost forgot the funky analog VU meters.
Don't despair if your musical collection is solidly in the 21st Century, because a Raspberry Pi single board computer is built in, running an Air Play compatible app that streams music over Wi-Fi from your mobile devices or computer.
Creator Todd Kumpf explains how the Audio Infuser 4700 came to be:
"To capture the vibe of something old, the best way to do it is to use stuff that's actually old. Gathered off of eBay, Craigslist, pawn shops, and from my own arsenal, most of the components came with a few years behind them.
The turntable mechanics are from a Yamaha YP-D4 (1978), the equilizer a JVC SEA-10 (1976), and the CRT is an Emerson from the 90s. Creating something new with second hand items is half the fun of it. Re-imagining how they're used and giving them a second life is a fun challenge with a great payoff.
The aesthetics, with the wood, brushed aluminum, and braided cloth cords, are also heavily inspired by vintage Hi-Fi gear. The knobs authentic, coming off of an old Peavey mixer.
At the heart of the device lies a Linux driven Raspberry Pi. It operates as the Wi-Fi receiver, allowing music to stream wirelessly from any mobile device, laptop, or desktop computer. Compatibility extends across most digital libraries, including Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora.
The Pi serves as a platform for many possibilities. It can also operate as an output device, streaming music from the record player out to other WiFi enabled audio speakers.
The speakers here are powered by a Klipsch ProMedia amplifier, feeding two stereo channels and an 8” subwoofer. Both channels have two mid-range drivers and a crossover splitting out a high frequency tweeter."
Todd's website has a brilliant 'Process' section that highlights various aspects of the design and construction. If he can build something like this on his coffee table, maybe you can, too!
Audio Infuser 4700 - Not your grandpa's stereo [via Synthtopia]
I hate to break it you bedroom record label impresario hipsters out there. You didn't invent releasing albums as cassette-only exclusives. Reach Out International Records was founded in 1979, the same year as the Sony Walkman. The New York centric label concentrated on local acts that have since become important milestones in hardcore punk, no wave, and ska.
I imagine that ROIR's choice to release on cassette (I love their broadsided attack on buying records in this ad) had to do more with supporting this new portable music platform and the DIY support (on a budget) of the bands that they loved, rather than some misguided statement on consumerist irony. Okay, okay... I'll lay off ranking the cassette-waving hipsters for a minute.
Astonishingly, the label still exists today. Many of the cassette-only releases like those listed in this 1982 ad have since been re-released on LP, CD & MP3. I'd love to hear their stories of late night dubbing sessions, ganging together multiple tape decks, but mostly I want to know who drew the gorgeous creature in the ad with the shoulder-slung Walkman, and a ciggy in a holder that fumes lightning bolts. I miss you, the 80s...
Given the 8-bit retro gaming vibe that is all around us, in can be a little embarrassing when you run across an object that you can't tell is actually a vintage gadget or a modern retro repro. I found these headphones at a thrift, the cord held together with ancient and sticky electrical tape. They are in the style of cheap 80s headphones, but you can still find this styled on discount shelves today.
These phones exhibit no appreciable wear to reveal age. They sound pretty crappy, but poor headphones are a curse of every portable music era. Oddly, the 1/8" plug is mono. The only other identifier is a sticker crediting Midway games for the image of Pac-Man.
For some reason, I feel like this sticker is the best evidence of the real age of these phones. I feel like today it would be more customary to print the credit permanently next to the character. Plus I think that on a modern branded novelty the copyright would be credited to Namco, not Midway.
What do you think of these retro Pac-Man headphones? Old or new?
That title is a joke, you see... Ya can't rewind 8 Tracks. That's just one of the things that makes 8 Track a format that's hard on music lovers, and yet there's an undeniable nostalgia about the format.
In the retro biz, you can't intone the number "8" without pretty much everyone remembering 8 track tapes. In fact whenever anyone asks me about Retro Thing's popularity, my pat answer is "who knew you could make a splash with a website about Ataris and 8 Tracks?"
8 Track was just one of several early attempts at a format for pre-recorded music. You can't really listen to a record in a moving car (not that a couple companies didn't try...). 8 Track was a reuse of the pro cartridges used in radio stations called the "Fidelipac CARtridge". It was designed for DJs to use for commercials, jingles, and even single songs. It was Bill Lear heading a consortium of electronics manufacturers who thought of putting more tape in the cart and offering 4 separate "programs" of 2 track stereo, hence the name "8 Track". As the man responsible for the luxury Lear Jet, Lear imagined the convenient cartridge format as being ideal for in-flight listening.
The cartridge was much simpler to load up than threading up reel to reel tape. By including the pinch roller inside the cart itself, the actual mechanism of the player could be simplified. The cart has a clever endless loop system where all of the tape is wound around a single reel inside, the downside being that rewinding is impossible. Overall it was a (sort of) hardy and affordable system that found its way to regular consumers. You didn't have to be a member of the jet set to enjoy music in your car.
"Enjoy" might be a strong word as the format was anathema to loving music. Songs were sometimes re-sequenced (or omitted!) from the original album to fit more songs on less tape. Sometimes songs were split across tracks, so right in the right in the middle of your tune... ka-chunk! While the format was a fairly efficient idea, in practice both players and tapes failed all the time. How many of us remember the sight of a shiny black spaghetti of 8 track tape discarded in the street?
Thankfully Philips was able to squeeze more fidelity out of the Compact Cassette which then became the mainstay of portable music listening for decades. 8 Track stuck around the US from the mid 60s to the early 80s, so there's a lot of history there. Misguided history. So it's no surprise that Retro Thing fans have given the following 8 Track posts a lot of love.
· In pop culture, 8 Tracks were a 70s staple, yet stubborn freaks for the format continued to get albums via mail order into the 80s. You could get Michael Jackson, Madonna, and even this 8 Track by Phil Collins.
· 8 Track players weren't just built into cars. You could find the format supported by literally tons (ever try to move one of those things?) of hideous console systems, but here's what must be the weirdest one. An 8 Track built into a fake fireplace.
· 2-XL is a little plastic toy robot. He's an interactive toy with a clever use of the beleaguered tape format. He doesn't run on bits and bytes (though here's an actual computer that reused the format... sorta...). He's a robot who runs on the power of 8 Tracks of garbled stereo sound.
· How about a crazy collision of 70s ideas? Just plug this gimmick into your 8 track player to turn it into a CB radio.
· Finally, a crowd favorite. A tongue-in-check feature comparison of a portable shiny white 8 track player versus a shiny white iPod. I'm still not sure which is better.
Back in the late 1980s, the lowly audio cassette ruled dashboards around the globe. Most people made do with factory decks, but a sizable minority stepped into the often expensive world of aftermarket audio, which was dominated by brands such as Kenwood, Alpine, Blaupunkt, Panasonic and Sony.
Lyle sent us a link to this wickedly high-end Kenwood KRC-999II deck from 1988 that features a servo-driven pop-out panel for adjusting EQ and radio tuning, zillions of blinky LEDs, and DBX and Dolby B & C noise reduction. The microprocessor-driven design with brushed metal buttons mirrors the look of expensive home stereo components of the period, although everything is miniaturized.
I'd love one of these electromechanical marvels, if only I could figure out a way to stylishly hack an extra hole into my modern car's swoopy dash.
Kenwood car cassette player KRC999 mark II [YouTube, thanks Lyle!]
75 years ago, Superman started his humble pulpy life. Something about his story quickly outgrew the funny papers and he became an icon of "the American way" (to use his own words). Here in this anniversary year, there's yet another big-budget film that re-tells his origins. At this point, is there anyone left who doesn't know this modern fable? Escaping the fate of his doomed home planet Krypton, baby Superman ("Kal-El" to his friends) gained super-human strength when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Everyone knows THAT story.
Superman isn't just a hero to comic book shop owners and movie studio impresarios. Superman is a 75 year old media giant that has made enough green to make Kryptonite jealous. There are still plenty of untold tales of how the Man Of Steel conquered the world outside of comic books. All this week, Retro Thing will unearth a few of Supe's lesser known media adventures - no X-ray vision required.
After Superman was a hit in comic books in 1938, the next move was to the funny papers where Superman's creators fleshed out the character's otherwordly origins. In 1940, Superman hit the airwaves in a daily 15 minute serialized show called The Adventures Of Superman. The radio show cemented even more elements of the Superman mythos; the hero's weakness to Kryptonite, and his co-workers Perry White and Jimmy Olsen. The show ran in various forms (mostly with the same cast) for more than 10 years and over 2000 episodes. Bud Collyer (a name familiar to game show fans) was the voice of both Superman & Clark Kent, and the narrator was Jackson Beck who later provided the voice of Bluto in the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons.
I happen to love "old time radio", though contemporary audiences will often criticize the pace of the shows - especially serialized adventure show for children. Those radio shows have an aesthetic of their own, and yes... we may have to slow down our internal clocks a little, but these adventures are enjoyable in their own right (especially on long car drives or cleaning the garage). You can find lots of episodes online, including the origin story. What will surprise you is that even in those early episodes, Superman comes off (and I usually don't talk this way on RT) as an exasperated dick. That alone might be worth the price of admission.
Turning away from Superman's fictional powers, the radio show flexed some genuine muscle when it took on a serious issue in the real world; racism. Stetson Kennedy was a noted human rights activist who infiltrated the KKK and other terrorist hate groups. Kennedy feared that the Klan might have people in positions of influence to act against him when he went public with his findings, so he attacked the group another way. He approached producers of the Superman radio show, and proposed a storyline where Superman battles against the Klan. Since the radio show was in constant search of new enemies (radio Superman often battled rather prosaic bad guys rather than later fantastical super villains), the producers agreed.
"The Clan Of The Fiery Cross" was a string of 16 episodes that took on the issue of racism head-on. For years, the story has been that Kennedy provided details of the real-world Klan's rituals and codewords, which found their way into the radio show. In reality there are no such secrets spilled, but that doesn't blunt the impact of this important story.
The hope was that by trivializing and demystifying Klan goings-on, there would be some impact on the hate group's recruitment and membership. Klan leaders reportedly denounced the show and called for a boycott of sponsor Kellogg's "Pep" cereal. As it turned out, the story returned spectacular ratings, and Kellogg's stood behind the producers of the show.
We've linked to MP3s of "The Clan Of The Feiry Cross" so that you can also enjoy this unique moment in radio history. Certainly there are those hokey plot contrivances that come with the territory in any serialized show that needs a cliffhanger ending every 15 minutes, but in this case there's much more than that at play. Superman ultimately saves the day, but the show gives its intended young listeners the tools to understand what's wrong with racial stereotypes and fear-mongering. It's amazing to hear how this decades-old radio show battles an important issue that still plagues us; a battle that still can make heroes out of regular people every day.
link:
Download all 16 chapters of "The Clan of the Feiry Cross"
More fun MP3s of Superman
Classic Retro Thing |
