The first record I bought for my beautiful new turntable is The Christmas Songs by Nat King Cole. I also want to buy a record by Billie Holiday because that woman was a genius.
Now a question for turntable pros: when I enter “Billie Holiday record” in the search box at Amazon, what I get is a list of things tagged as “vinyl.” Is that what I need? Back in the USSR, vinyl meant very thin blue records that were like sheets of paper. But I don’t think this turntable will play something like that.
I’m very ignorant about these things.
Clarissa's Blog 
Vinyl = records.
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Cool! Thank you. This helps.
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So does your turntable have three speeds, or only play at 33-1/3 r.p.m.?
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It has 33, 45 and 78. Whatever that means. How do I know which one works with my Nat King Cole record?
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33, 45 and 78 refer to the speed of rotation, in revolutions per minute. Usually the oldest records are 78’s the small ones with a big hole in the middle are 45’s, and the biggest ones are 33’s. It won’t hurt a record usually if you play it on an incorrect speed, but it will be obvious from the sound that you are doing so. It may not be an idea to change the speed while the needle is on the record.
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The one I have is big and thick. I don’t remember thick ones like these in the USSR.
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Assuming that the record you have is a standard 12″ diameter, 33-1/3 r.p.m. “LP”(“long-playing”) record with multiple songs on each side, it’s only “thick” by comparison to the very thin old records once sold in Eastern Europe. The record is “unbreakable,” but don’t drop it.
Set the speed for “33” and the record should play just fine. (If you want to hear Nat King Cole sound like Donald Duck, set the speed at “45.”)
In the VERY unlikely event that the record you bought is 10″ diameter and has only one song on the each side, someone sold you an ancient (from the early 1950s) 78 r.p.m. record. Those old records were almost twice as thick as LPs and break if dropped.
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45’s were basically released with one song on each side of the disc. They tend to be quite small, maybe 6 inches in diameter. 78’s are older and have a larger diameter than 45’s but not as large as the 33’s. 33’s were also called LP’s (long playing) and usually have multiple songs separated by a blank space (ring) that may be visible if you look at the disc in reflected light. That was to allow a person to set the needle to play a specific song. There’s music on both sides of each of these types of records. With 45s, the A side was the hit, although sometimes the B side was just as good or better in retrospect. Please note that records tend to collect dust and are easily scratched. They may also tend to warp if stored incorrectly. (At least the originals did that. The new-records may be better.)
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My record must definitely be a 33. It has several songs on both sides.
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Useless information that I’m going to state for the historical record:
Just to cover all bases, your record could be an “EP” (“extended play”) 45 r.p.m., 7-1/4″ diameter record with a big 1-1/2″ hole in the center.
Back in the 1950’s when a lot of teenagers owned a cheap record player that played only 45 r.p.m. records (so they couldn’t buy Elvis’ latest LP 33-1/3 r.p.m. album containing 12 songs), the recording studio would simultaneously release three 45 r.p.m. “EP” records, each containing four songs from the LP album.
If you ever obtain one of those EP records, it’ll be worth a fortune on eBay.
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You have great taste in music!
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Thank you! I’ll also get Louis Armstrong, Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. After which, my happiness will be complete. 🤗
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“Back in the USSR, vinyl meant very thin blue records that were like sheets of paper”
In the US those were sometimes called “flexi discs” and were included in magazines, sort of free samples of music that was bieng promoted.
The idea was just to play them a time or two and then buy the record if you liked it.
in Poland they were called pocztówki muzyczne (musical postcards) and were a cheap way of satisfying some of the large demand for western music. Some people collect them now (because people will collect anything).
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How interesting! I had no idea they were supposed to be the trial ones.
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To summarize. Almost all vinyl records come in one of three sizes.
12 inch, 10 inch and 7 inch.
Generally 12 and 10 inch records play at 33 1/3 rpm (revolutions per minute)
7 inch records play at 45 rpm.
Older 10 inch records played at 78 rpm (but this ended sometime in the 1950s IIRC). Old 78’s (as they are sometimes called) are very brittle and of varying sound quality.
The popular music market in the US from sometime in the 1950s until the early 80s was driven by 45 rpm records (called ‘singles’ cause they almost always had only one song per side0. These were played on radio (only rarely were other songs played).
Part of the purpose of singles was to get people to buy albums.
For performers themselves, record sales were almost never a major source of income, they made their money through live appearances.
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You should also check out Dinah Washington. Some purists didn’t like her hybrid style but they’re crazy and wrong. She effortlessly crossed between blues, jazz and pop (and every possible combination).
If you’re feeling more modern, you should really look into soul music, a hybrid of a little rhythm ‘n blues, pop and black gospel. At it’s best it has a cathartic power totally missing in almost any popular music since…
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So, Clarissa, is your brain totally overloaded by all this absolutely non-essential detail flood?
Here’s my wet-blanket recommendation, if you want to preserve all this beautiful music for Klara to listen to when she’s a young mother, or when she wants to pass that music along to your grandchildren:
YOU SHOULD BUY BOTH the vinyl (LP 33-1/3 r.p.m.) version of those records, AND the digital CD disc versions. The CD versions will probably be cheaper AND will contain more songs (sometimes two complete LP albums on on one disc because of the vastly longer recording time) AND –despite what certain deranged “vinyl nuts” will tell you — sound MUCH better (because they don’t contain unavoidable audio artifacts like the background “hsssssssssssss” from the needle moving mechanically in the the record grove, due to unavoidable damage that gets a bit worse EVERY time the record is played, plus the low-pitched rumble from the spin of the mechanical turntable adding its non-musical artifacts to your speakers. Even the “vinyl nut” purists will have to acknowledge that the vinyl recordings have had to be specifically adjusted in the recording studio to minimize built-in distortion from the vinyl recording process, and that the “dynamic process” (the actual range of sound from the lowest to the loudest produced by the orchestra has had to be dramatically compressed to fit within the limits of the obsolete vinyl recording method.
In other words, today’s digital CD discs sound infinitely better (more true to life, with non-musical artifacts filtered out) than yesterday’s outdated analogue vinyl records, AND they won’t deteriorate a fractional bit every single time that they’re played, AND you can preserve the perfect sound for all future generations to come, by periodically recording their digitally coded music into your computer’s hard drives and flash plug-in units. Unlike analogue audio (and analogue video like video tapes), digital recordings can be reproduced infinite times without any deterioration at all.
Since you have you new free toy, delight in it to your fullest pleasure. But recognize that it devours perishable goods — and that the only way to keep those beautiful sounds forever is to simultaneously purchase them in CD digital format, and then insure the survival of those songs beyond the physical survival of those CD discs by periodically re-recording them in new digital media devices (hard discs, flash drives. etc.), as you attain them.
OR you can simply do what a less obsessive-compulsive person than me might do —
recognize that all pleasure is fleeting, and enjoy the hell out of those beautiful vinyl records, until the thousandth needle drag through the shredded grooves finally makes the sound as inaudible as all the ancient whispers of yesterday than haunt the ghosthly memories of all of us of a certain age.
Okay, a bit off -topic. But to your credit. you allow you readers to head off in their own directions occasionally.Now, here late at night, at the end of this comment thread, it’s my turn.
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This is a beautiful speech. ☺ But the new turntable has a function where it converts the records to a digital format and preserves them on your computer. You should totally create advertisement for the company. 🙂
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If you’re buying vintage (used) vinyl records, you’ll probably want to avoid RCA records from the 1970s.
They used a weird super thin vinyl format called “dynaflex” (not as thin as flexi discs but thinner than any other vinyl records I’ve seen).
The sound was kind of crappy (thin and hissy) but some people like(d) them.
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