Music systems I have lived with
Music systems I have lived with
For those who do not know me personally, I was born in 1964 and grew up in a very middle-class family in India. My father is an electrical engineer by qualification and was an officer in a government-owned power generation and distribution company; my mom is a housewife; I have a brother six years younger than I. I still live in India. I am from Bengal --- this means that there is a high likelihood that my parents will like both music and books. In my case, both were correct, though I suspect my mother loves music more than my dad.
I am going to go on a flashback journey here, recounting all the music systems I have seen, used or otherwise lived with as part of my life. When I look back at the story in totality, I can see that my family, and later, I, upgraded our music system roughly once every decade.
HMV Star
My earliest memories of a music system was a record player called the "Star", made by the Indian arm of HMV. HMV was, and is, a household word in India, but I didn't know at that time that this was originally a British company.
This record player's chassis was made out of some sort of thick synthetic substance: it did not appear to be metal, though it might have been. The body was square, perhaps 12" per side, and there was a lid on a hinge. With the lid closed, I will guess that the height of the resulting box-like shape would be eight to nine inches. You had to open the lid and keep it open while playing records. The turntable was bigger than the 7" discs, and 12" discs would project outside the chassis when placed on the platter. The tonearm was heavy by modern standards, and had no counterweight. If I were to guess, I would say that the tracking force of that tonearm was not less than 25 grams.
The chassis below the platter must have had an amplifier, because sound came out of the box when a record was played. Thinking about it now, I guess this was a valve amplifier. I do not remember anything of the sound quality, because it was with us only till I was about ten.
I do not have any memories of how my parents used to sit or walk about while playing records on this record player. I only know they used to play it often, and had quite a few 78 RPM and other records. I have a dim sense that playing music on this device was one of the things my parents found interesting.
Comments
HMV Star
Aha the HMV star!
HMV India had a whole lot of them around then. Some even had a radio (Tuner) built in.
The body was actually made of wood and lined with rexin. Quite fine piece of workmanship actually. The turntable (record player) platter and chassis was made of some sort of AL alloy. It had an AC motor, the winding of which also provided voltage taps for the amplifier section. So when you have a liberal amount of a very funny rumblining type of AC hum being reproduced faithfully by the amp. Tonearm was built to last. It would have a high output Crystal stylus. You needed to flip yej stylus to play 45RPM and the new fangled 33RPM “LP�s. The TT had additional speeds of 16RPM and 78RPM so that your grandpa didn’t miss out on those Bade Ghulam Ali records.
The amp was a simple transistorized contraption, employing a Push Pull pair of AD178 and AD179 Germanium transistor giving approx 1 watts. The “speaker box� was actually the lid of the turntable, which would have a 3� X 5� elliptical driver.
The above was the standard plot, which would fit most of the HMV record players of the time. These were produced around 60’s till about mid 70’s in there Dumdum plant near Calcutta.
Ashok Satpathy
Thanks, Ashok
It was good to really learn more about this piece from my past. You are right about that flip-type stylus... I remember it clearly, but I forgot to write it in the article. I don't remember that 16RPM, though, probably because we never had any 16RPM stuff. And I hadn't realised that transistors were being used that far back. I know that in 1962, when my parents got married, there was a Sony transistor radio which figured in the story of their wedding saga somewhere, and this was a "new thing", small and built using transistors. I have clear memories of that transistor radio. Apparently it was extremely expensive in 1962.