Week Thirty-One 78 rpm shellacs and 1980’s HiFi

As regular readers will know, my being pukka middle aged has meant that apart from no way getting away with being ‘˜down with the kids’ and becoming more like a badly behaved uncle character, I have now finally lost both parents and am going through the whole horribly grown up process of dealing with all that. Thankfully I am being allowed to coast, really, with big bossy sister taking over, largely.
But its funny, we all have different takes on things and for me, their house itself, which I hold dear, had been alive through music. The dining room, full of antiques, also houses an antique wooden case, needle-upon-shellac gramophone. A purely clockwork and mechanical device, it has its own glorious sound, amplified acoustically by the horn that reaches from behind the needle and uses a membrane of mineral mica sheet to take the needle’s vibration and directly couple it to the air at the horn’s distal end.
But it was the going-for-it-in-its-day Bang & Olufsen HiFi that got to me. Maybe ten years back, the local B&O shop guy (35 years old, then) came and repaired the multi room Beosystem 5000 umbilicus system with parts he had kept for years. A stack of separates with three remote zones. It had been installed twenty years and he had done the professional-needed part earlier, aged 17. In an era when multi room was unheard of, it had two special four-pin plugs in the rear. These joined to a fat wire that went off to the remotes, taking power with them. Each remote box had a plug in from the fat wire that went around the outside of the house and reached the kitchen, my mum’s study where she would listen to classic FM and thence upstairs to the master bedroom. The speakers plugged into it as did the remote three button infra red receiver and on/off and source buttons. It was remarkable in its day and a full system with the CD (my folks never got that as they wanted a multi disc) is still getting half a grand on e-bay.
There to choose heirlooms, I needed it not and big sis’s household will give it a new home. And yet, I can recall like it was yesterday, getting a special continental style mains multi-adapter, and installing it all. Doing the speaker placement and wiring-in. With joins that never failed in thirty years, the system just kept on chugging like a Volvo. But taking it out again was something I had never imagined happening. I found myself in a teary mess all of a sudden. Like I said, it’s the odd things that get to you
For that act of disinstalling it was when the place’s soul left, along with my parents. Now that classical music cannot be brought to life at the press of a button, somehow, it has died, too. I just felt an ineffable sadness.
Back in the sunshine, for I shall not dwell in shadows, I have a short week since I shall be off to the International Mini Meet in the Kent Showground on Friday. Plus, awfully real and ‘˜now’, it is freelancers’-pay-the-taxman-week as well, so I shall see what I can get posted here this week.
Yet summer’s here, so remember
WINDOWS DAHNTUNES UP!
Adam Rayner On Line Editor