[Dixielandjazz] Needles and gramophones

[Anton Crouch]

Hello all

Steve wrote (in part):
>No, Anton, just giving us the needle<

What, me? Perish the thought    :-)

In reply to Pat, I must confess that back in the olden days my parents
never used a needle only once. Both sides of a 10 inch, or one side of a 12
inch seemed to have been the norm. My memory of thorn and fibre needles is
that they were "soft" in both the physical and audio sense and only
practical in electric gramophones.

Tom's scenario of his record player being left in the street reminds me
that that was how I acquired my wind-up gramophone. It's a late 1920s HMV
"Mahogany Grand", in lovely condition and it came full of 78s and boxes of
steel needles. My uncle found it, literally, in the street and gave it to
me. It's one of my party tricks to carefully wind it up, play a record and
demonstrate the use of the doors as a "volume control".

Which reminds of the Peanuts cartoon about Linus and Schroeder finding a
washboard and not being able to workout how it functioned - they couldn't
find a socket for a power cord.

All the best
Anton