Re: Absolute Phase brings Music Hall Turntables to India as sole distributors.
I think this thread has strayed far from the product announcement of the opening post. Maybe the mods might like to move these 78rpm posts to a new thread with an appropriate title? That would also help people who need this information to find it.
The 78RPM shellac disk was a very different thing from the LPs and EPs that followed it. By comparison, its grooves were simply
enormous. The "needle" with which it was played really
was a needle*. In fact, it was chunky compared to needles from the sewing basket. Needles came in various grades, from soft to hard, which gave different sounds. They also had differing longevity: I think that there were once needles that were meant to be used once only! A far cry from today's diamonds!
I don't think I ever experienced one-use-only needles, but we did have to replace them fairly regularly. Sometimes we were lazy about this, which was bad for the sound and worse for the disk itself. Many a disk came to the end of its life by cracking or breaking, but even without that, it was quite possible to wear out a 78RPM disc. I recall that I wore out Harry Belafonte's
Island In The Sun!
The actual needle survived the wind-up acoustic gramophone, long into the days of electrically-powered and amplified machines. As my parents were not particularly interested in music, I was stuck with their ancient record collection (and the handful of review copies that my father, in the newspaper trade, got hold of) and really missed out on the beginnings of the micro-groove revolution. Our
Radiogram broke down, and it was some years before I had a record player again. I don't actually remember if it played 78s, I have a feeling that it did not.
Anyway, during the shellac/vinyl transition period the needle became a thing of the past, and people began to play record with chunks of gemstone (not always diamond: IIRC, they were the expensive ones).
I seem to recall that the cartridge might have been called a
ceramic cartridge**. It was still on the end of a tonearm that was pretty chunky, and I don't think anyone bothered with tracking weights and such. It had a double stylus, with a lever on the arm that stuck out to either right or left. One way, a very small stylus for playing vinyl pointed downwards; the other way, a much larger and thicker stylus for playing 78s.
I know that we have members who still play 78s: I'm sure they know more than I vaguely remember from 50 years ago. Also, perhaps someone else can add more about the ceramic cartridge and how it evolved into the moving magnet and moving coil cartridges of today...
*kid's trick of those days: hold a pin between your teeth and apply to rotating disk, hearing the music in your head. I don't suppose that did much for the longevity of the records
**missed this is previous post
...uses a ceramic mono EEI cartridge.
