Yeah, you young guys had all those fancy stereo units to start out with.
Myself, I started out by playing around with 78's that were around the house, and then got into 45's with an RCA Victor 45 record changer I picked up (attached picture of the exact model).
I loved that thing, but only for the music. I didn't know or care about fidelity. I was lucky that our fancy black and white TV set had a nice mono jack on the rear that was specifically for phonographs and that's where I plugged my 45 player into. Drove my mother crazy.
Speaking of nostalgia, in the mid to late 1950's I remember being at a big city fair/exhibition where my Mom took me to a pavilion that had a demonstration of the newest thing in audio, called stereo sound.
They had a bunch of headphones hanging down from the ceiling that you would put on and listen to what they called hi-fi stereo music. It was claimed to be the future of audio sound.
I wish I had a picture of my face when I lowered those bulky headphones onto my ears. I'd never heard anything so wonderful in my life. Seriously, as a 70+, I've lived through all the different mediums, and all the quadraphonic and multichannel nonsense. I still believe nothing beats stereo, although the stereo recordings of today seem to be a lot more homogenized that years ago when they seemed to isolate the sound from each channel much more.
brucek
