What speed do you listen to audiobooks and podcasts at? 1x? 2x? Half-a-mile-an-hour?

Our first family record player was the size and color of an adolescent brown bear. It sat on four legs in a wood veneer skin. Train tracks were shaved into one long side, from Luxembourg on the left to Helvetia on the right, with regular stops marked by red or green plastic tabs. A dial moved the train through the stations. Behind a pull-down door, one half was turntable, the other was records. Big Wagner and Verdi ones and little ABBA and Rod Stewart ones. If I had to guess (it's long gone, reduced to splinters by burglars in 1978) it was a German-made Grundig radiogram. The turntable offered four speeds. 45 for Money Money Money, 33 for The Ride of the Valkyrie, and 78 for pretty much anything recorded before 1948, but what in God’s name was 16 for?

Sixteen-and-two-thirds RPM shouldn’t have found a place on a mass-produced hi-fi in the 1970s. It turned slowly, meaning the needle didn't cover much ground and sound quality was awful. The faster a record turns, the more inches of vibrations it passes through, and the more information it can hoover up and turn into sound. At best, a needle travels on a 16 RPM at around half-a-mile per hour. But a 16 RPM record could play for ages.

In September 1955, Chrysler announced the Hiway Hi-Fi, an in-car record player. Changing records while driving was a bad idea so the longer they played the better. Only one label, Columbia Special Products, made records for it. Their grooves were packed in to give a 7” record a running time of an hour. Poor suspension and rough roads meant the player needed a lead-heavy stylus else it would skim across the surface, but the pressure quickly ground records down. Eight-track cassettes ran for 80 minutes without jumping so the in-car turntable died. Eight-track lost out to compact cassettes, which gave way to compact discs, and now Bluetooth. But 16 was the stopgap that first let us take our choice of sounds on the road.

Sixteen was perfect for audiobooks. We're more tolerant of muffled speech than muted symphonies. An early 1950s recording of the Bible was probably 16's high sales mark, and it got some traction with the visually impaired. The evangelist Jimmy Swaggert sold sermons on 16 RPM. If podcasts had been a thing in the Fifties, they’d have shipped on 16 RPM records. But the spoken word wasn't a big enough market and boxes of 33 RPM long playing records and then cassettes did the job well enough to keep 16 from reaching critical mass.

Sixteen was an audio format with bad audio quality and it was doomed. But new business ideas often get off the ground using whatever technology is already at hand. The first burglar alarm put a pressure pad under the doormat, which triggered a Rube-Goldberg machine to dial the police and start playing a record that read out the homeowner’s address and said someone was breaking in. The first voicemail answered the phone, played an outgoing message on a record player, swapped in a blank 78 disc to take the incoming message, and stamped the time of the call on a strip of paper. Pretty clunky stuff.

Podcasts, audiobooks, and Dancing Queen on the school run needed 3G and other flavors of mobile bandwidth to work on demand, but 16 RPM broke the ground.

We also had a Peugeot 404 Family Estate with three rows of seats. If we had ever needed a story on the move, the audiobook-reading brown bear could have jumped in the back.

#audio #streaming #podcasts #audiobooks #rpm