Items from My Dad's 78 Collection
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Westerly Wood
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once the tax season woes for me pass, i plan on investing on an affordable turn table and speakers. start buying vinyl again and making a hobby out of it....
Nuuska
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Those here are 78:s - RPM that is - not really vinyl - they need different needle/ cartridge - but yes - it is very good to have a vinyl record player handy - I have some Bossa Nova on my turntable waiting for me to hit the PLAY-button.
Westerly Wood
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my wife thinks it will be a good hobby for me to get into...i am just slow getting started. thinking late spring for sure 
Canard
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I have maybe two to three thousand LPs. A bit of everything but mostly Jazz.
I have maybe four or five hundred 78s. Stuff from the 1920s up to the mid 50s, most of it post-WWII. My dad's collection, which is mine now, forms the core of this. I have old-timey country, 20s British dance bands, Swing bands, Jazz, Rock and Roll, and DooWhop.
For 78s the best cartridges are Stanton 500s and their Pickering clones. Esoteric Sound offers some the best and most affordable 78 styluses for the Stanton 500s. They are truncated (no point) elliptical styluses of varying sizes. They ride the grooves in an area where the old steel styluses did not. The truncation means they don't bottom out down in groove where all the decades of rubble lie. The varying sizes are because sometimes you have try different spots on the sidewalls of the grooves to find the sweet spot with the least amount of wear and also because 78s are anything but standard - no standard groove widths, no standard (exact) diameter, no standard speed, and no standard roll-off equalisation curve. Esoteric also offers an affordable entry level phono preamp for pre-1955 recordings, 78s and Microgrooves - it has a generic one size fits all roll-off curve but it is quite effective. Nice. I have not gone off the deep-end with multiple styluses but just have the most generic one - good enough for me.
https://www.esotericsound.com/index2.htm They are the descendants or purchasers of Rek-o-Cut, a company who made reasonably high-end HiFi turntables up to the 50s or 60s. They also made the cutting lathes for cutting the lacquer masters for records.
Old Dual 10 and 12 series turntables make good platforms for 78 playback. I used to rebuild them myself until my eyes grew too weak for the small close work. There is seldom a lot wrong with them - mostly it's just cleaning contacts, lubrication, and new rubber parts. If you like doing this sort of thing, there are a lot of online resources. If you don't, there is almost always a Dual turntable freak in any town of any size who buys them, refurbs them, and sells them on. Look on Craigs List.
I have maybe four or five hundred 78s. Stuff from the 1920s up to the mid 50s, most of it post-WWII. My dad's collection, which is mine now, forms the core of this. I have old-timey country, 20s British dance bands, Swing bands, Jazz, Rock and Roll, and DooWhop.
For 78s the best cartridges are Stanton 500s and their Pickering clones. Esoteric Sound offers some the best and most affordable 78 styluses for the Stanton 500s. They are truncated (no point) elliptical styluses of varying sizes. They ride the grooves in an area where the old steel styluses did not. The truncation means they don't bottom out down in groove where all the decades of rubble lie. The varying sizes are because sometimes you have try different spots on the sidewalls of the grooves to find the sweet spot with the least amount of wear and also because 78s are anything but standard - no standard groove widths, no standard (exact) diameter, no standard speed, and no standard roll-off equalisation curve. Esoteric also offers an affordable entry level phono preamp for pre-1955 recordings, 78s and Microgrooves - it has a generic one size fits all roll-off curve but it is quite effective. Nice. I have not gone off the deep-end with multiple styluses but just have the most generic one - good enough for me.
https://www.esotericsound.com/index2.htm They are the descendants or purchasers of Rek-o-Cut, a company who made reasonably high-end HiFi turntables up to the 50s or 60s. They also made the cutting lathes for cutting the lacquer masters for records.
Old Dual 10 and 12 series turntables make good platforms for 78 playback. I used to rebuild them myself until my eyes grew too weak for the small close work. There is seldom a lot wrong with them - mostly it's just cleaning contacts, lubrication, and new rubber parts. If you like doing this sort of thing, there are a lot of online resources. If you don't, there is almost always a Dual turntable freak in any town of any size who buys them, refurbs them, and sells them on. Look on Craigs List.
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Canard
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The company, Project, makes reasonably inexpensive, entry-level audiophile grade manual turntables. Most of them come with a basic but OK Ortofon cartridge. Some of them have a USB interface (so that you can plug them into a computer) and/or a phono-pre-amp built in. After the demise of vinyl, stereo equipment manufacturers stopped putting phono-pre-amps in their gear. You can't connect a turntable to the AUX input; its output won't be high enough without a pre-amp.
Canard
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The young Oscar Peterson on 78, an album when album meant album. My dad had all of the titles here, but I broke some of them when I was five or six. I loved them too much. My dad, no longer a young hipster, but a young man with a family, a house, and mortgage was too busy keeping everything afloat to notice or care that I broke the Peterson 78s. I rather think he was pleased that I was digging them.
I still have most of the titles in this album. All of them with a lot of snap, crackle, pop and hiss from being excessively loved.
Edit: If you hear a guitar in any of the tracks, it's Herb Ellis.
I still have most of the titles in this album. All of them with a lot of snap, crackle, pop and hiss from being excessively loved.
Edit: If you hear a guitar in any of the tracks, it's Herb Ellis.
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Canard
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The wife and I have consumed a 1 litre bottle of pleasant Chilean wine while we listened to my dad’s collection.
Some items from this evening's menu:
Some items from this evening's menu:
Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys - Roly Poly
Killer band but the clip here is using the RIAA roll off curve with a 78. Just wrong.
Spanish Two Step – ditto on the wrong EQ.
Dinah Shore – Daddio
Canard
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Billy Strange - studio musician (Wrecking Crew – Beach Boys, TV Shows, etc), Rock-a-billy guitarist, song writer (with Mac Davis), arranger/conductor (Sinatras, Dean Martin, etc), and actor.
en.wikipedia.org