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Re: Tommy



-} dat93sbo@ludat.lth.se (Svante Borjesson) wrote:
-}  
-} I have the LP version, and it bores the
-} hell out of me having to change sides every 20 minutes. (But maybe I'm 
-} just lazy?) And the 2nd side isn't the flip side of the 1st, instead 
-} they're paired off as side 1 and 4, and 2 and 3! (A cheap marketing trick?)
-} 

Hi, Svante!  "Correct me if I'm wrong, but..."  :-)

I would predict one or both of the following possibilities:

   a)  You're not yet 25 (30?) years old;  :-)   and/or
   b)  You play your LPs on a "turntable", not a "record player"!

If neither is true, and since you've admitted to the possibility of being
lazy, you would likely know *why* the record sides are 1&4 + 2&3!!

No, it's not a cheap marketing trick, it's a marketing trick to attract
the legions of lazy people who played their LPs on "RECORD CHANGERS",
those wonderful machines which allow you to stack millions upon millions
of records on a spindle, which drops them one at a time onto the turntable,
for "continuous play"!!

[WOW, what a feature!  And, hey!, if your tone arm skips, just tape a few
coins to the top of the cartridge holder, and *force* that bastard to track!]

Double LPs started off being paired 1&2 + 3&4, but someone had the "bright"
idea to pair them 1&4 + 2&3 so that you could stack up sides 1 and 2 on
your changer, play them (with side 2 dropping automatically), get up when
side 2 is over, lift up *both* disks and flip them *both together*, and
then put them back on the changer to play sides 3 and 4, in that order.

Clever, eh?  Of course, people like myself who graduated to turntables as
soon as they could (heck, mine was totally manual, without even an auto
shutoff) found that not only did they have to change the record after each
side, but they could only "flip the record" once and had to go back to the
sleeve twice for a full playing of the four sides.  (I didn't find it
"boring", I found it "a pain in the ass"!  But then, I *know* I'm lazy!)
[Changers break down more often, and you pay for mechanism rather than
sound quality, and I'm damned if I wanted to have my vinyl LPs dropping
on each other all the time!]

However, for complaints about the presentation of the recorded material,
don't forget Pete's comments on the sound quality of the early Who
recordings, where he mentioned that they didn't think it was worthwhile
spending the time/energy/money to get high fidelity (especially for
singles), when most people who bought the records were playing them on
cheap record players with coins taped to the tonearms.  (My terminology,
not Pete's! :-)  [And we *know* that MCA is lazy, which may be why the
LPs are still ordered 1&4 + 2&3!! :-]

> Mike <
            "Made tinny to sound tinny."   - PT