Radiogram

A few days ago, I came across this image in facebook and it surprised me.

Surprised not because such a record player existed but more because I had totally forgotten that very briefly in my youth - I must have been 16 or 17 years old then - my family had possessed one of this too. It was all too brief, actually, because about a fortnight after my father brought it home from the shop, he returned it. I had not been too enthusiastic with it.

You see, what had happened was that the old PYE radiogram in the house was becoming dated. We had only mono sound while all around us, stereo was fast becoming the norm. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of our radiogram but it consisted of an elegant cubic box measuring about 20 inches on each side.

The black top panel opened up to reveal a Garrard record player inside while the front panel consisted of the speakers - actually, one-and-a-half speakers - on the top half and a radio tuner on the bottom half.

This is the closest image I could find of the front of the Pye radiogram on the Internet. There was a central speaker of course, but there was also a half-speaker on the left side, half-hidden away by the plastic skirting. What could that half-speaker achieve, I did never find out. Anyway, the bottom section consisted of the radio. Two knobs on either side. The outer ring on the left knob was to control the bass and treble while the inner part was the volume control. As for the right knob, the outer ring was to seek out a radio station while the inner part was the fine tuner, very useful when it came to seeking out the radio stations on short wave. The red spindle could be controlled by the right outer ring to move across the radio waves. The number of plastic buttons on the bottom row were to switch on the record player or radio and also choosing the radio bands like medium wave (MV), medium short wave (MSW) and short wave (there were three - SW1, SW2 and SW3). My favourite station was the Radio RRB broadcasting from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) base in Butterworth. My friends and I cut our teeth on alternative pop music from this radio station which broadcast on 1445 KHz frequency.

By the time I was in Form Four, I had made it a habit of visiting one of my friends in Logan Road because he owned a stereo high-fidelity system. You know, consisting of separates like a record player, amplifier, spool tape recorder and huge humongous speakers placed across the living hall. I would go there and listen to his records. But I never pestered my father to get one, although I did tell him about my experience. My father had a close friend in the record retail business and he owned a record shop, Wing Hing Records, in Campbell Street. (On the right is an old picture of Campbell Street in the 1960s or 1970s. It was so busy then. A main thoroughfare in George Town. The Wing Hing RECORDS sign can the seen on the left.) So he was not unfamiliar with record players in the market. However, I could never understand when he brought home the record player shown in the first picture. After knowing at the record player which my friend used, I looked suspiciously at the tone arm. You lifted it up and plonked it down on the record. No lever to lower it down gently. Would it spoil the record grooves with such, to me, rough handling? My father must have felt the same too because not too soon afterwards, he returned it to wherever he bought it from. Weeks later, he brought home a Lenco L75 turntable. I was more than satisfied then. He hooked it up to a non-descript amplifier and from there, two huge speakers which he had also purchased from somewhere.

 Meanwhile, this was how the Garrard record player functioned. I'm pretty sure my family owned something very similar but the head shell, unlike this RC121 model in the video, could not be removed. [UPDATE: Just found out that ours was the RC120 model, the one without the detachable head shell.] PS. I had also written about these record players - the Garrard and the Lenco - in an earlier post some six years ago. Read it here.