John B. Marek is a storyteller with dirt under his nails who weaves tales inspired by a lifetime immersed in nature. His insightful essays and award-winning fiction delve into the complexities of sustainable living, the heart of rural communities and the thrill of outdoor adventure. You can find more of his writing at johnbmarek.com.
As I navigate the holiday season, the ghosts of Christmas commercials past often come to mind. I always knew Christmas was approaching when I saw a cheerful, animated Santa riding a Norelco razor through the snow and the Clydesdales pulling a beer wagon through a festive mountain town. Of course, memorable Christmas commercials extend beyond the television screen.
During my late teen years, my radio station of choice, WIOT (Toledo’s Best Rock!), frequently aired a hilariously cheesy ad for a stereo store, which included an off-key audiophile-specific rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” that ended with the oddly memorable line, “… and a cartridge in a pear tree.”
For those who grew up with CDs and streaming, that reference might seem peculiar: Did the stereo store also sell ammunition or printer ink? Well, no. To high-fidelity connoisseurs of the 1970s, a cartridge was the component that was attached to the turntable tonearm and held the stylus. If this seems to you like an unnecessarily complicated way to play a record, then you understand the audio scene of the ’70s.
Lost in today’s retro-nostalgia for vinyl is the near-religious fervor surrounding turntable equipment in the ’70s. The cartridge-and-needle debate reached levels of intensity usually reserved for theological arguments. Audiophiles would speak in hushed, reverential tones about their Shure V15 Type III cartridges or Ortofon moving coil setups while casting judgmental glances at anyone who dared to play their precious vinyl on anything less than NASA-grade equipment. The conventional wisdom held that playing a record on a low-end turntable was akin to using a nail file as a stylus – each play literally carving away the music’s soul, one groove at a time.
This vinyl vigilance created a peculiar social hierarchy among music enthusiasts. At the top sat those with precision-balanced tonearms, cartridges that cost more than a used car, and styluses so fine they could presumably read the grooves’ thoughts. These lucky few maintained their equipment with the dedication of brain surgeons, carefully calibrating tracking force to the nearest tenth of a gram and cleaning their styluses with solutions that cost more per ounce than vintage champagne. Meanwhile, the rest of us lived in perpetual fear that our modest setups were slowly turning our album collections into very expensive drink coasters.
At the apex of my vinyl period, I had a halfway decent Technics turntable with a mid-range cartridge and stylus. To protect the integrity of my precious grooves, I would generally play a new album only once, recording it onto a chromium oxide cassette tape for general listening, then slide it carefully back into its sleeve like some Egyptian artifact at a museum. I still own vinyl that is 40 years old and has only ever been played once or twice. And it is likely to stay that way since I haven’t owned a turntable since the early ’90s.
Looking back, it’s easy to chuckle at these audio adventures, but they represent something extraordinary about the era – a fanatical focus and dedication to something silly and pointless. In our age of seamless digital streaming, maybe there’s something to be said for the character-building absurdity of tracking the number of hours a stylus has been used or calibrating the exact speed of the platter with a tiny strobe light.
On the other hand, I see that Aldi is selling a “record player” this Christmas season for $29.99, which wouldn’t have covered the cost of a stylus cleaning brush in 1979. The cartridge alone on my old Technics setup cost three times that much, and it was considered mid-range at best. For the price of one high-end turntable back then, you could now buy enough Aldi players to supply every home on your street and make any surviving audiophile from that era break out in hives. Maybe I’ll pick one up this Christmas and let those vintage grooves finally hear what coal in their stocking feels like.