Author: DOuG pRATt

Jukebox Joy

It’s alive! After replacing the belts in my 18-year-old Sony CD 300-disc carousel I was frustrated by a skipping problem. I’d been using an otherwise idle Panasonic DVD player for CD’s, but I missed having the changer.

So, with my Trustee duties mostly completed, and having lots of free time in retirement, I took one more stab at fixing the skipping and succeeded, with a couple of Q-tips and some silicone lubricant. It’s working perfectly in every way, once again. Yay for me!

An old PS2-type computer keyboard is used to enter text for CD’s that don’t include CD Text and, alas, none of the CD’s I stuffed into the changer offer CD Text. As mentioned in the previous post, the forward-sounding Sony is different than the more reserved Panasonic, but I like the strong bass.

A revolver for Revolver

Geoff Emerick’s Facebook cover photo

Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick has died of a heart attack. When John Lennon described how he wanted his voice to sound in “Tomorrow Never Knows” — “Like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop” — Geoff, 19 years old, had an idea.

… perhaps there was one amplifier that might work, even though nobody had ever put a vocal through it. The studio’s Hammond organ was hooked up to a system called a Leslie — a large wooden box that contained an amp and two sets of revolving speakers, one that carried low bass frequencies and the other that carried high treble frequencies… In my mind I could almost hear what John’s voice might sound like if it were coming from a Leslie. It would take a little time to set up, but I thought it might just give him what he was after.

From Here, There and Everywhere, by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey

The effect can be heard at 1:27.