The beatles were fucking fantastic!

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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Hermit » Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:43 am

Sean Hayden wrote:
Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:11 am
That must have been a pretty cool experience.
Pretty cool? Try "fucking fantastic!", exacly as this thread's title says. People like animavore and you, who have not gone through the early sixties as tweens or teens have no fucking idea just how insufferably buttoned up, conformist, not to say oppressive the social ambience was at the time. In TV terms, think of watching an uninterrupted stream Father Knows Best, Bonanza and Dragnet.

Most of our parents loathed those unruly moptops. Even better, they absolutely hated the Rolling Stones. Their music was a rebellion against conformist stupor, and we revelled in it.

I guess you had to be there to understand.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Sean Hayden » Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:58 am

:lol: --I believe you!

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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Jul 05, 2018 7:55 am

You youngsters with your Nintendo Gameboys and Sony Walkmans don't even realise what a revolution the introduction of the 12inch long playing record was.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Hermit » Thu Jul 05, 2018 8:47 am

Brian Peacock wrote:
Thu Jul 05, 2018 7:55 am
You youngsters with your Nintendo Gameboys and Sony Walkmans don't even realise what a revolution the introduction of the 12inch long playing record was.
For me the revolution consisted of the transition from the reel to reel tape machine to the cassette recorder. I could retire my 1957 vintage Grundig TK5,

Image

which served me well after I soldered a pair of low voltage wires to the back of my radio's speaker and connected the other end to the tape recorder via a DIN plug.

The radio was a similar one to this model:

Image

The tape machine had a handle, so it was "portable", but it weighed 10 kilos, and being operated with five vacuum tubes, made it a risky affair to lug it about. Besides, a mains power supply was always a necessity.

All this changed with the release of this Philips cassette player / recorder.

Image

Tiny in comparison, mainly due to being transistorised, weighing only a little over a kilo, working on battery as well as mains power, it was the bee's knees of a schoolkid's gadgetry. Many a break between lessons was spent swapping music with other schoolkids, and I could still use the same cable I rigged up on my radio at home.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Scot Dutchy » Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:29 am

That was AFTER my school time. We never had anything like that. At the very most a kid may have a tranny (transistor radio) which gave out the most bloody awful sound.
To listen to the latest music we used to go to the record shop on a Saturday and listen in the booths.

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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Hermit » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:35 am

Scot Dutchy wrote:
Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:29 am
That was AFTER my school time. We never had anything like that. At the very most a kid may have a tranny (transistor radio) which gave out the most bloody awful sound.
To listen to the latest music we used to go to the record shop on a Saturday and listen in the booths.

Image
Whaaaat? You were 15 in 1964. That's the year the Beatles made it big. The radio in my previous post was first sold around 1952, the reel to reel tape recorder I started off with in 1956 or 1957, and the first mass produced Philips cassette tape recorder (almost completely identical to the one I got) came on the market in 1963.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Scot Dutchy » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:53 am

Maybe in your neck of the woods. You were in Germany. Christ Edinburgh was always years behind. I never saw them until I came here.
I did not waste money on trivia. Too many fags to buy, beer to drink and birds to woe and screw (I was a young starter :smoke: ).
This was our radio at home. It had one good feature which was short wave reception. I listened to the cold war.

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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Tero » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:02 pm

My parents had some Elvis, Kingston Trio and one Ventures 45 that probably came free when my dad bought the record player. So I had some idea about American music.

The record player was rugged, the speaker formed a cover to the turntable, when you closed it. I carried it with us to the summer cabin. It only played mono LPs. All 45s were mono.

My dad’s favorites were 101 Strings, my mom’s The Sound of Music.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Scot Dutchy » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:07 pm

A guy up the road from where lived had a stereo record player. The sound was terrible as the bass and drums were on one channel and the lead and rhythm on the other with the vocals hanging in between.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Hermit » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:13 pm

Almost all recordings, classic or modern, made in the first half of the 60s were mono. I still have a few featuring Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh and others made that way. Stereo recordings did not come into their stride until Dolby in 1975.

If you listen to any Beatles songs recorded under the auspices of Northern Songs, you're listening to pseudo-stereo. It's like drinking reconstituted orange juice.
Last edited by Hermit on Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Tero » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:17 pm

At the end of the 60s there were 45s that had the label ”stereo playable on mono”. They played OK on the old players.

We had a ”bring your record day” in school 1965 or 66. The music teacher played the organ in a big Helsinki church. As soon as he heard 5 seconds of Satisfaction, he ripped the needle off the record violently. He had to pay for a new record for the girl.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Scot Dutchy » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:22 pm

Hermit wrote:
Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:13 pm
Almost all recordings, classic or modern, made in the first half of the 60s were mono. I still have a few featuring Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh and others made that way.
Orchestras were a problem for early stereo recordings. They put sections on different channels making it sound disjointed. Mono actually sounded more real.
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Tero » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:38 pm

My neighbors in America 66-68 had the big console thingie and we never did. I had an actual stereo with book case speakers in 1969
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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Rum » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:48 pm

I remember 'radiograms' as a small kid with a lit up glass 'screen' and the names of exotic sounding places printed on it. You turned a dial and a pointer would move along to the required station. Luxembourg played 'pop music' before the BBC ever did. You could just about find it in the east of the UK but it went in and out of tune and you got an awful lot of hiss!

You could play records too - I remember one when I was about 7 or 8 that still played 78s!

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Re: The beatles were fucking fantastic!

Post by Hermit » Thu Jul 05, 2018 1:08 pm

Scot Dutchy wrote:
Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:22 pm
Hermit wrote:
Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:13 pm
Almost all recordings, classic or modern, made in the first half of the 60s were mono. I still have a few featuring Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh and others made that way.
Orchestras were a problem for early stereo recordings. They put sections on different channels making it sound disjointed. Mono actually sounded more real.
Tip of the iceberg. You can read a brief rundown of the trials and tribulations stereophonic sound has gone through during its development here. There were heaps more of both than you can poke a stick at.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould

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