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Music-playing devices from your childhood

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On a wave of nostalgia last night I searched for and found a photo of the radio cassette player I received for Christmas in 1984. I was ten, and was also given a cassette of Shakin’ Stevens’ Greatest Hits, plus a blank one for taping the charts. What was your first music-playing device? And what other ones were in your family home? Photo if you can find one.

http://i1350.photobucket.com/albums/p773/minibreakfast/sanyo%20cassette%20player_zpsqn4mywu2.jpg

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Comments

  1. A few years later I swapped it with a neighbour kid for her coffee table-sized GEC music centre, which I enjoyed for a long time before getting something sleeker. Can’t believe I got away with that – pretty sure I got the better deal!

  6. My family had a mono record player with a built in speaker. I got a radio when I was about 12 I later bought an ear phone, that’s singular, so I could listen to the charts on Radio Luxembourg which was on late at night without disturbing my two younger brothers. One of my siblings got a battery powered mono cassette with a plug in mic which was used to tape off the radio or TV. Over time this was augmented by a transformer to save the cost of batteries and a cable to record directly from my Dad’s new music centre which was a turntable and MW/FM radio. I used to pick fruit on farms in the summer holidays, when I was about 15 or 16 I saved enough to buy my own stereo record player – hooray.

  8. My first Tape Player/Recorder (July 1979)

    View post on imgur.com

    To (badly) para-phrase Karl Marx: From this point on, I owned the means of recording and playback (at least within the confines of my bedroom).
    And so began the ritual of shutting yourself away from 5 to 7 on a Sunday and recording stuff off the Chart Countdown, listening to it for a week, and then recording over it (again and again until the tape went transparent, broke or mangled itself round the mechanism)

  9. My dad had a Murphy radiogram similar to this one, which he passed on to my uncle. In fact, knowing my uncle, he may still have it.

    This was replaced in the early 1970s with an Hitachi stereo record player with FM radio. It looked good with its wood and smoked glass lid and green glowing radio dial, but was obviously cheaply put together. Can’t find a photo of it online, alas.

  10. This model was our first record player, bought by our dad for my older sister, my younger brother and I. I must have been about 11 years old. Still in use 10 years later, by which time it was solely mine.
    I’d just post a photo but I’m not sure if it’s copyrighted or not. Better safe than sorry.
    Here’s a link to the source of the pic.
    http://whatkatydid.biz/product/previously-sold/emerson-hi-fidelity-box-record-player/

    The casing was rexine-covered plywood. The Rexine was white, with an overall pattern of tiny blue dots. The lid was dark blue Rexine-covered.

    • Meanwhile I had a few bits of equipment of my own.

      Firstly there was the Gala battery powered record player that came with a stack of 7″ 78s of children’s songs, manufactured in the late 1960s.

      Then I can vaguely recall having a second-hand record player in my bedroom for playing a few of my own children’s records. I’ve no idea as to where it came from, or what make it was, or what happened to it.

      Then I was given an Hitachi cassette player for Christmas when aged about 6. Soon afterwards I also acquired my mother’s old Dansette when we cleared out my grandmother’s bungalow.

  11. This wasn’t actually my first device. I had a cassette player similar to Rigid Digit’s, up there in the thread. (Like Rigid Digit, I was probably playing Stiff Little Fingers on it, too).

    No, this, this slightly later beauty hideous monstrosity is what sticks in my mind. Although I do have fond memories of discovering how if you mucked around with the high speed dubbing facility on the tape deck, you could make yourself sound like Pinky and Perky. Look, we didn’t have the internet to occupy ourselves in those days, you know…

    Amstrad Vertical Record Player

  12. I had a Phillips portable cassette player with a microphone with which I would record stuff off the radio and get very annoyed when my parents or sister came into my bedroom whilst I was recording! Later I was given an ITT portable record player – the two speakers clipped onto it and formed a lid. It had a carrying handle. Sounded awful and needed a few coins on the arm to stop the records skipping!

    http://img4.fotos-hochladen.net/uploads/philips2209trzui7dj0ehv.jpg

    • Yep, something like that appeared in our household in the late 50’s with a little box of needles. Why my parents got it I haven’t a clue. Neither of them were into music. I vaguely remember a small selection of albums including Beethoven’s 1812, Handel’s Water Music and an Elvis album without a cover which featured Wooden Heart. Musical enlightenment came to me through a little hand-held transistor radio which delivered intermittent coverage of Radio’s Luxembourg, Caroline and London, all pre-Radio One of course. My world was changed forever.

    • My parents had something similar. On it, Dad would play classical mainly. Perhaps to show off a little as in the car he would play the kind of stuff unfavourably termed muzak. Francis Lai and Bert Kaempfert and Henry Mancini.

      Mum liked singers – the smoother or more sentimental the better – Vic Damone, Jack Jones, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Barry Manilow.

      Mum: Dunhill Internationals. Gordons Gin.Dad: J&B Whisky. Rothmans.

      • I remember thinking “how could anyone ever fill all those compartments with LPs? That would be the best thing in the world if that ever happened”

        And as Van said:

        I am down on my knees
        At those wireless knobs
        Telefunken, Telefunken
        And I’m searching for
        Luxembourg, Luxembourg,
        Athlone, Budapest, AFN,
        Hilversum, Helvetia
        In the days before rock ‘n’ roll

  16. I had ye olde traditional mono cassette player and my parents had ye olde traditional oak cased stereogramme which were fab. But the first bit of kit I loved was this bad boy, a cassette recorder you could overdub on. You could record one side of the stereo, then the other. Also you could plug in a guitar and mic at the same time, thus effectively getting 4 parts down. The little buttons on the top are a primitive drum machine, which you could plug several buttons down at once and get mad cross genre rhythms (“Pop beat” / Samba, anyone?). I recorded a whole album on the bugger which some bastard stole out of my car along along with all of my tapes, the cassette player and my steering wheel FFS (a nice red leather sports job, in a knackered Triumph 13/60…) while I was watching a band in Croydon. Barbara Thompson’s Paraphernalia IIRC.

    http://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i449/charlieboy14/e8223da1.jpg

  17. I can recall a mini reel to reel tape recorder and portable record player, white speckled plastic covering, arm as heavy as fuck. I attached some plasticine as a counterweight, though, when my big brother played Magic Bus too close to the stove and warped the start of the single I tried a 2 cent coin to improve “trackability”. Didn’t work.

    This is probably more important to development. When they came in I could record radio shows like Chris Winter’s Room To Move on ABC and replay. Critical to my musical development.

    View post on imgur.com

  18. I think the first was a mono tape player much like the above – which did some interesting things if you put on a Stereo tape of Beatles Band – usually it would mix both L/R but occasionally you’d get a very weird dub mix of just Bongo and a vocal track etc.

    Various devices passed through including a 60s Dansette type thing with autochanger ‘borrowed’ from Nana which played old 60s 7″s fine but struggled with the Nik Kershaw and Amazulu we tried to feed it.

    The Walkman however was the ultimate luxury – an actual Sony Walkman was out of reach but I think I got a Phillips one in 1985 – and that’s the thing that probably set me off as a serious music fan – suddenly being able to lie on my bed and immerse myself in music and not have to turn it down or explain what the tuneless rubbish you’re listening to is, gave you the space to “get into it” – something I treasure to this day.

    • When I was a student I had a stereo but only one speaker worked – making it less than mono. It was years until, upon playing it on a friend’s stereo, I realised that Costello’s Goon Squad actually had a sung third verse – on my player it was a weird, bass-led instrumental passage!

      • This is fantastic! You could do a whole thread about tracks that the members of the Afterword unwillingly “remixed” thanks to a faulty disc/cassette or device to play it on, thus only ever heard in that version by one person (um, and family and friends, possibly).
        I mistakenly thought that Level 42 was seriously funky after my late 80s cassette deck had a funny spell and recorded some tracks off the radio at the wrong speed – but not wrong enough to be obvious – and they sounded faster, and also sort of “dirtier”. I bought the album and was seriously disappointed. At first I thought perhaps it was a single version I’d recorded, but when I went back and listened to some other tracks from the same taping session that I knew what they should sound like, the penny dropped.

  19. So many to choose from! This was my parents’ Pye radio that I first listened to music on in the late sixties. It used to emit an alarming electrical hum, and was probably a death trap…..

    View post on imgur.com

    After several years of pestering, this is the radio I was given as a Christmas present. It was a great little set, which sadly got lost somewhere along the way.

    View post on imgur.com

    When I was revising for my O-levels, one of my friends told me that he used to record information and then play it back to himself as a means of remembering it better. My Mum fell for that one, and as a result I was bought this beauty, which gave me many years of loyal service, plus some cassette tapes that I still have.

    View post on imgur.com

  25. My dad had a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder that nobody else touched. Somewhere (maybe the skip) there are tapes of me and my siblings talking and singing as kids.
    Then we had the fantastic stereo system that we all used from an early age after being taught to be careful with both equipment and records. It was German, but I can’t remember the name of the manufacturer. I’ve tried image-googling, but can’t find any that looks exactly like it. Anyway, it was outstanding and as the years progressed it ended up in my posession by appropriation, but when I was in England in the summer of -82 my brother more or less moved into my room and promptly managed to kill it (a speciality skill of his). Leading to a string of more or less unsatisfactory replacements.
    We also had a small green transistor radio that my dad bought for my mum to have in the kitchen, but again mostly used by me. Carrying it with me from room to room and into the garden listening to the radio all day long before the horror that was school dragged me away from my carefree existence…
    My brother had one of those cassette recorders that Rigid Digit and Junior Wells posted photos of. Mostly used by us to tape improvised sketches.
    When the transistor died mum bought a primitive cassette radio, but at least you could tape the latest hits from the radio chart shows on it, which I did from 1978 onwards (when I was eleven and music started to take ove my life and grow into an obsession). The legacy of the taped sketches showed up in the obligatory spot where I’d tape the intro to my least favourite tune in the chart that week, pause, run into the bathroom and hit record before shouting “Flush of the week!” and flush the loo. You made your own entertainment in those days…
    I got my first job (albeit a shite trainee one for a set period of time) and the print machine that I often had to operate made such a loud soothing noise that I’d almost sleep-walk after five minutes in that room, so I bought my first Sony Walkman with my first paycheck (after paying mum for rent and food, natch). This was in 1983 or -84, IIRC. By that time I had a better cassette recorder to make the tapes to go into the Walkman (and the Flush of the week was left off the tapes, thankfully).
    I’ve never bought an mp3 player, I don’t have a smart phone (not a dumb one either), but I still use CD Walkmans (or “portable CD players”, since it isn’t a Sony product). Not daily, but handy for long busrides to dad (otherwise the noise of the tyres agains the road have the same effect as that printing machine had, and I step off the bus like the walking dead). Also on other short trips when you have to stay at a hotel or similar. They are, surprisingly, still easily available at your friendly neighbourhood electronics dealer!

    The only photo I’ve found where my first beloved stereo is shown (partially, and from the side/back) is one of me reading the morning paper in bed shortly before that trip to England in 1982. I’ll try to post it, but last time I used Imgur they had changed and the only option for sharing the uploaded images didn’t work here. Hopefully you won’t only see a grey space here below:

    View post on imgur.com

        • It was the haircut to have that year, and also the first actual haircut I’d had since my earliest years on this planet. For many years I simply refused to have a haircut, and for some of those years I refused to brush my hair as well! I did wash it though, I hasten to add! 🙂
          My suspicion of having my hair cut came from the many years in my childhood when an incompetent Italian barber would come to our house and cut the hair of the entire family in one cheap and ugly go…

  26. Aged 10, I got a Bush stereo* FM radio/cassette boombox so I could stop recording records in mono with the condenser mic of my mum’s old mono piano-keys tape deck from my dad’s Garrard record player. One very similar to this: http://thumbs3.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/pict/201625803350_1.jpg

    (stereo if you pressed your nose up against it).

    In 1981, Santa brought me an Amstrad tower system with turntable (it was shit) and double cassette deck (even shitter) but the speakers (not too shit) could be run from the Bush boombox.. A bit like this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/30/63/c4/3063c49a07a82de91aeda70f33c654bf.jpg

    I sold it in the local paper, without consulting my parents, before the summer was over, saved up my odd-job, Christmas and birthday money and splashed out on a Rega Planar 2, Creek Audio 4040 amplifier and a pair of Sennheiser HD420 headphones. I had to wait another year until the speakers (a pair of Wharfedale Diamonds) arrived.

    Then started the upgrade bug – it’s all Alan Sugar’s fault.

    • I had a Creek 4040s2 for many years, eventually upgrading when I needed more inputs and the balance control got dodgy. Put it in the roof and forgot about it, found it again a year ago and had no trouble offloading it untested on eBay.

      • I had a Creek 4040 too. Then upgraded to an Exposure XV which I’ve had for over 20 years and am about to need to find a home for, as I’m upgrading to some Linn stuff.

  27. I’ve been digging around in my memory and the internet and have found the following:

    First up was the large wooden HMV 1633 radiogram that my parents had in the lounge http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/hismasters_1633.html

    Then my grandfather was given this Ferguson 3224 reel to reel tape recorder when he retired in 1964. http://www.electrofarm.co.uk/shop/parts/ferguson-3224-reel-to-reel-player-vintage/
    It’s still in the loft with a selection of tapes and was still working last time I tried it about ten years ago.

    On the personal front, my first radio came in 1973 and was a small Sharp AM/FM jobbie that was last seen in the decorating box in the garage some time ago. I don’t do much decorating – it may still be there.

    Finally, my pride and joy and my first cassette player bought with my own money was this Sony CF-1760 https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ef/99/9a/ef999a2f4d16208d6119061ecdc6fa27.jpg

    Alas it went to that big component bin in the sky about fifteen years ago.

  28. My first cassette player in about 1971 or 1972 was this – a Philips 2205.

    http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-philips-cassette-recorder-2205-/322255939896

    Someone is attempting to sell one on eBay for £16.99. Ha!

    It was only a small machine, but it weighed an absolute ton. It came with a leather case with a shoulder strap. It was like carrying a full set of golf clubs around.

    The little circular dial on the top of the cassette hatch was there so you could put a figure to how far through the tape a certain song was. So you could fast forward ‘directly’ to a certain song. A totally hopeless function. I never used it once.
    Also, the ‘Tone’ knob on the left was totally useless.
    The 2205 did not like C120 tapes at all. It just chewed them up and one was left with a bedroom full of mangled, flimsy brown tape spewing out everywhere. I never had one of Twang’s fancy tape hand winders (see above). That’s a gadget I’ve found out about nearly 45 years too late…

    • C120 tapes were crap anyway. To get that length of 1/8in tape into the limited space inside a cassette shell, meant that the tape had to be really thin, compared to what was used in C60 or C90 cassettes. They stretched, they tangled, they sometimes snapped. No matter how much you spent, they could never be relied upon.

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