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Off Centre: A Vinyl Junkie's Quest
Radio Sonic, CBC Radio, April 5, 2003
It ends up happening whenever I throw a party at my house. Inevitably, someone gets their grubby hands on my old collection of 45s. The stack of old Mitsou, Prince and Men Without Hats tunes always get people dancing.
But there’s one problem: I lost my 45 adapter. You know, the little piece of plastic that fits inside the record. So my friends will try to place the record in the middle of the turntable, but without the adapter, it’s always a little off-centre. People don’t notice for a while, but slowly, they realize that something’s not quite right. The pitch speeds up and slows down as the record follows its wonky orbit around turntable. This is what it sounds like:
Song: warped “Moonbeam” by Men Without Hats
There are a few different kinds of adapters-the little, yellow plastic ones that fit inside the record like the old Spin Magazine logo, and the thicker plastic ones that sit on top of your turntable, like the one I used to have. I decided that before my next bash, I’d better pick up a new one at the Radio Shack at the local mall. I didn’t realize, I was about twenty years too late.
Sarah: Hi, do you sell 45 adapters?
Clerk: 45 adapters? What kind of 45 adapters?
Sarah: You know, for records.
Clerk: You mean needles?
Sarah: Nooo….you know the old 7 inches right?
Clerk: Seven inches?
Sarah: You know the old records, 45 records, the smaller ones?
Clerk: Yeah.
Sarah: They were cut with bigger holes in middle. I have these old records but I don’t have the 45 adapter which means they slip across the turntable.
Clerk: Ohh! No we don’t have that.
Sarah: So you don’t get anyone coming in here asking for 45 adapters?
Clerk: No, you’re the first person in the year and a half I worked here.
Sarah: Really. Do you think I’m obsolete?
Clerk: Pretty much.
So there you have it, I’m 26 years old and already ridiculously out of date. I figured I’d give it another shot and headed down the street to another electronics shop, A&B Sound. After asking three different people, finally one of the employees told me they didn’t sell 45 adapters anymore. But they do have an employee named Stephen Weeds who has a tattoo of a one!
Stephen : I have two 45 adapters one on either side of my neck. I’ve had them for about six months now. It’s a little retro.
Sarah: What’s the motivation behind that?
Stephen: I’m a big lover of vinyl especially 45s, and I’m showing the love.
Sarah: When people see, do they know what is?
Stephen: About 4 out of 10 people know what is. They usually want to know the meaning behind it, not realizing it’s just a piece of plastic.
Well, at least there are still some people out there who understand what I’m on about. But I still wasn’t any closer to finding a real 45 adapter. So I figured I’d hit up my mom. She’s a big record collector and she has thousands of old 45s scattered all over her house, mostly cheesy 50s doo-wop records, so I figured she has to have a few 45 adapters.
While I was there, I figured I’d ask her why these records were made with these big holes in the first place. Why weren’t they made with small holes, like LPs, so they would fit on the turntable properly?
My mom told me it was because the 45 record was invented by the RCA company. They were meant to be played on a special RCA record player with a large spindle. You could stack a bunch of records on it and they would drop down and play automatically.
But if you didn’t have the special RCA record player and you wanted to play the new 45s on a turntable with a regular turntable, then you had a problem.
Sarah’s Mom: Naturally when we first started out, my sister and myself, we were collecting 78s but those broke and when we moved to 45s we had to buy those plastic adapters, which were the first to be invented. But the plastic adapters had problem--they came out very easily. If you put a stack of records on and put them on the spindle they would tend to fall out and then the record would fall all over the turntable and you might ruin the arms or the needle or both, so we discovered when moved near Chicago we discovered new metal type of adapter developed by Webster company of Chicago and they were very, very difficult to get in but worth it cause they didn’t come out and I think you will agree they were difficult to get in wouldn’t you?
Sarah: Yeah, I think I need to practice that…What about ones that sit on your turntable, cause I need one and I’m trying to find one. Do you have one I could have?
Sarah’s Mom: Umm. I don’t have an extra one. I need the one that I have.
Even my own mother wouldn’t even help me out. I realized I was going to have to be a little more creative. After all, a 45 adapter is really just a small, round piece of plastic, so there must be something else I could use to centre my records. I headed to Dressew, a fabric shop in downtown Vancouver and asked if they had any spool of thread or spindles or mysterious gadgets that would solve my problem. I walked out with two spools of thread that looked about the right size and headed home to try them on my turntable.
Amazingly, both of them worked perfectly, especially the roll of brown polyester thread that cost 49 cents! I just put it on the spindle of the record player and put the record on and it sounded great. But unfortunately, it didn’t look so good-it was like I had a spinning loom in my living room and not a turntable.
So took a deep breath and headed down to Bassix, a trendy techno record shop, and what do you know, they had one metal Technics 45 adapter left! At $8.99, it was a bit pricey compared to my spool of thread. But at least now, the party can get started. And listen-my records sound great.