Record Disaster

This Saturday afternoon started with excitement and anticipation, as I finally found a record player that fit my expectations and budget. I had been looking for several weeks and had decided I could not justify paying $500 for a new audiophile turntable as I only had a few records left and I probably wasn't going to spend hours listening to them like I did in the old days. Also, the iPod has made us so lazy that flipping over a record every 20 minutes seems like a lot of work.

I set my budget at $200 and started scouring record and audio equipment stores for a good used record player. There are a lot of good places out there, Echo Audio on SW Washington in downtown is very helpful. They have all the best new stuff as well as a good section of used equipment. Fred's Sound of Music on SE Hawthorne is also a very interesting place. It looks like a pawn shop from the outside, but they have a lot of high end stuff. Unfortunately I think the prices are a little on the high side. I ended up finding a great 90's model Denon player at Clinton Street Record & Stereo. The guys there are a little quite, but they obviously enjoy buying old players and fixing them up, and their prices are great.

So, I get my new (to me) record player home set it up and start playing Never Mind the Bullocks by the Sex Pistols, which I got with the player, and it sounds pretty good. Here is where things start to go horribly wrong. Barbara comes down to pick out one of her records to play and it's pretty badly warped. This is upsetting, so she picks out another and another and so on until we go through all 50 some records and only three are playable. Needless to say this is a sad day. At one time I had several thousand records, but I got sick of carrying them from move to move so I sold them all of in a big garage sale when we left LA. When I was loading up the moving truck I found a few records that did not make it into the sale and Barbara's collection. I thought they had been sitting safely in a closet for the last 17 years, but it turns out there was some water damage, or heat damage somewhere along the way and we are now down to three.