Technological Distraction

[stormdog]

I love elegant technical solutions that exploit existing properties of systems in ways that were not planned by the system designers. I'm thinking about this because I'm playing an LP on a turntable with stroboscopic timing marks intended to work with AC mains frequency to allow you to precisely set the speed to 33 1/3 RPMs based on the number of dots around the platter and the frequency at which the lamp flashes.

(Maybe clocks that keep time using mains AC frequency probably predate this kind of stroboscopic turntable timing method? So you could argue that it's just an extension of using mains frequency for timing some arbitrary process rather than a whole-cloth invention.)

That kind of clever trickery just makes me really happy.

(No, I'm totally not avoiding doing my school work by drifting along with various tangents that pop up in my brain. Why do you ask?)

Comments

[cmcmck]

I think the most elegant turntable I ever saw was one where the playing arm tracked across the LP without having to make an arc (the same way they actually cut LP's) and used a laser stylus.

Unfortunately, CD's killed that particular development.

[stormdog]

My turntable is a linear tracking model, where the tone arm moves like that! But it doesn't have a laser stylus, just the plain old physical one. Which probably needs to be replaced since I bought the unit at a thrift store and I have no idea how much use it's had. Came with the original manual though! It cost me about $10 or $20.

It's a Realistic Lab-2000, which is a store brand for a company called Radio Shack. They did have some stores in the UK, but I don't know how well known they were there.

https://www.vinylengine.com/library/realistic/lab-2000.shtml

[cmcmck]

The system I saw was a Revox.

[basefinder]

I remember being amazed at the high-techedness of the turntable timing marks when I first saw them.