Every journey has it's beginning...

... and the beginning may be considered straight out of the textbook. On one of my recent visits  I stumbled upon my 90s hifi in my parents cellar. It was in pretty bad shape - missing button to open the disc drive, broken speaker connection, dusty as hell. I wondered why my parents never threw it away. Nevertheless, what caught my attention was the record player on top of the setup. Some of my friends are into vinyl but I never paid much attention to it as I was happy with my humble CD collection. This time I was curious and I decided to test if it was still running. The model is a Samsung/Noblex SCM-6500.

 The only information I found on this model was from websites in spanish so unfortunately I can't give you more information on this specific model. Teenager me must have been pretty happy with this setup. Cassette decks, cd-player, equializer along with some big speakers. I can't remember ever making use of the record player on top. But before I could try this one out I had to fix the broken speaker connection. As you can see in the pic below there was no way to fix the speaker cable in place for the leaft speakers. I used some tinfoil and tape get the speakers to work. Nothing to last for ages but this would suffice for a first test.

   

Fortunately my parents have quite a vinyl collection so I had my testing material ready. Unfortunately my parents record collection consists of 90% Neil Diamond records. Among the other 10% I found an old Creedence Clearwater revival compilation album from the 70's which was probably the only album I could listen to without getting annoyed. The whole player has a very plastic look and feeling. The tonearm is entirely made out of plastic, has no counterweight and even the needle looks like one of those things you find as a gimmick in cereal boxes or kinder surprise. The platter is made out of plastic too with some rubbery patches. There is no I/O button, no tonearm lift - everything is manual. Moving the tonearm to the middle set the platter in motion. So everything was working and ready for a first run. 

It's a pretty special feeling to manually place the tonearm on the record - very different from tapping with your fingers on your smartphone to start a song or pushing a button. And it was the first time since several years I consciously listened to an entire album. I'm pretty much a victim of my own habits here. My CD collection I exclusively used in my car as I can not stand my local radio stations and even then I caught myself skipping songs to the one I like and changing the CD afterwards. With streaming It actually got worse. I found myself creating playlist after playlist, categorizing all songs I like and redo this ever other week. I actually stopped listening to music - I had my masterpieces playlist and I never listened to anything else despite of me having about 5000 songs in my library. This continued up to the point where I could not even play my favourite songs from the beginning to the end. But this time it was different. You can't skip a song this easily on a vinyl and there's no screen telling you which song is which. You have to look at the back of the outer sleeve, find the song you want to skip to, count the grooves on the record and place the needle there. Long story short - I enjoyed music for the first time in years. And I enjoyed a record I would otherwise not have listened to. I got hooked - and this was the beginning of a wonderful journey which should cost me a small fortune.

Up next - Review of my very first record
Between the Buried and Me - Coma Ecliptic