HI-FI DECONSTRUCTED

Rod Easdown reminds us about some of the most remarkable devices ever invented to help play music, and reveals why most of them met a bitter end…

Rod Easdown reminds us about some of the most remarkable devices in audio history… and why they all met a very bitter end!

This is a test. How closely did you examine the cover of the very first edition of Australian Hi-Fi magazine, reproduced on page 45 of the January 2019 edition, the one marking 50 years of continuous publication? That original cover photograph from 1969 showed an Elac Miracord 50H turntable. Did you notice how tall the spindle was?

Question: Why is the spindle of a 1969 Elac Miracord 50H so tall?

Give up? This was one of those shining, musthave innovations of technology that comes and then goes, bright like a shooting star that races across the firmament grandly before disappearing forever without trace. It was called a stacking spindle. An ingenious thing, but every time I think about stacking spindles I shudder.

Stacking spindles let their users pile half a dozen or so records above the platter so they could get continuous music for as long as the stack lasted. In the days prior to electronic music files and Spotify this meant a host could get through at least the main course of a dinner party without having to rise and change the record. They were so popular they became a common fitment on turntables, portable record players and especially that ultimate expression of entertainment extravagance, the radiogram. If your record player didn’t have a stacking spindle, well socially you rated somewhere south of Maynard G. Krebs.

A stacking spindle had a little vertical tab sticking out, and a notch, and it was geared to the fully automatic tonearm. The tab guided the lowest record in the stack, the one closest to the platter, into the notch which held it up there, and that record supported all the others above it where they hung precariously until you fired up the system. Then the tonearm would lift, and as it did the tab would move to push the lowest record out of the notch so it dropped down to the platter. The tonearm would move across to it, lower and play. Please note that there was nothing subtle about the drop down the spindle, it was gravity at its most unapologetic, more a plummet than a drop. The entire turntable assembly would jiggle as vinyl met mat.

Meanwhile the records still up there on the spindle’s top would all move down a space as the bottom one slid into the notch, cueing it to play next.

By having the tab and the notch, the stacking spindle let one record fall onto the platter at a time, preventing the vinyl equivalent of an avalanche. As the tonearm reached the end of the first record, lifted and returned home, the tab would again push the next record out of the notch so it would drop down and the remaining records would again all move down a spot.

When all the records had played you simply lifted them all off, turned the stack over and slid them back onto the spindle to play the second side of each. Search ‘stacking spindle’ on YouTube for a demonstration, but note that these appear far more elegant than the process ever actually was, and they don’t properly capture the sounds, blood curdling to anyone who cares about records.

For the most part stacking spindles were reliable, although there was the odd misfire where a record got stuck up there and the stylus lowered onto the spinning rubber mat covering the platter. It was amazing what styli could tolerate back then, not to mention speakers.

If the record’s centre hole was a bit enlarged it could hang at an alarming angle while waiting to play, and by the time you reached the final record in the stack there were so many records on the platter that the tonearm played a long way off horizontal.

But stacking spindles were so popular that recordings on multiple discs were often tailored to them. Like the recording of Sir Laurence Olivier reading Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose which I once bought at a garage sale on three 78 rpm discs. The first disc was part one on the A-side, part six on the B, the second part two and part five, the third part three and part four. Exactly how you’d want them for playing on a stacking spindle. (Bloke Warning: Even on 78s The Snow Goose will get you sloppily emotional.) There were equivalent inventions for stacking and flipping cassettes later on in the 1970s. Akai’s invert-o-matic would eject the cassette into a sleeve, move it back to a frame that spun it through 180 degrees and re-insert it into the playing mechanism [ www.tinyurl. com/AHF-auto-reverse-2]. Other bright ideas for flipping cassettes came from Philips, Aiwa and Nakamichi among others [ www.tinyurl. com/AHF-auto-reverse]. There was an after-market Heath Robinson type device for top loaders with auto eject that would drive multiple cassettes through a loop to flip them, letting gravity then drop them back into the player.

All these wonderfully inventive ideas died when some bright spark invented autoreverse. Rod Easdown