My old Garrard player

While I'm on the subject of old turntables, I've been scouring the Internet hoping to come across a photo of my old Garrard record player. No such luck, but this is as close to mine as I could possibly find.


The Garrard was housed in the top half of a sturdy squarish box with a lid. I believe this was called a radiogram because the bottom half of the box consisted of a Pye tube radio - covering medium-wave and short-wave, no long-wave on this radio while frequency modulation (FM) was still unheard of - which could get very hot and an array of seven or eight piano-like keys along the bottom row that enabled the user to switch the set on and off, select the wave band or the record player. There were two big main dials as well: the left dial was a basic volume control without treble or bass while the right dial was to tweedle a scanner needle to tune for a radio frequency within the wave bands. There was an inner dial which was used to fine-tune into a short-wavefrequency. The radiogram came complete with an eight-inch speaker and the sound was monaural.

The spindle in the centre was about five inches long and could hold maybe six or seven records at the top. They were held in place by the long, white bar. In the old days, records came in various sizes but notably the seven-inch 45rpms, the 10-inch 33rpms, the 10-inch 78rpms and the 12-inch 33rpms. You could stack them in the central spindle.

But how on earth could the record player detect the size of the records? That was where the unique L-shaped size-detector came in. When the record player was started, the first thing that happened was that this detector would move inwards and hit against the stack of records. The way it was pushed back when a record fell onto the turntable platten would signal the record's size to the tonearm and tell it where to settle onto the record.

At the end of the record, the tonearm would return automatically to its initial rest position and the size-detector would hit against the stack of records again. A record would fall and the tonearm would move in again. The process was repeated until the last record was played.

Of course, you could not mix records of different speeds together but usually I would play either my 45s or my 33s. The neat feature of the multi-stack record player was that in the case of double vinyl albums, I could stack the two records with Sides One and Two together and after which, I could reverse them and Sides Three and Four would already be stacked together. Cool.

My only regret was that the tonearm could not be calibrated properly so I could not even estimate how much was the pressure exerted by the stylus on the grooves. Many of my records were spoilt in the process and even today, when I play them on my Rega Planar 3, the crackles are too loud to ignore. Does anyone have a solution for me?