My first Crosley was a gift from a girlfriend at the time while my P Mount was boxed up and in storage. She had a Technics rack mount (Obviously, this was in the 1990s) with a 6 CD carousel and no TT and there wasn't room for my stereo when we took up residence together. It took me ten years to realize how bad of a match we were when this very situation should have prompted me to force a breakup. Anyway . . .
Restoration Hardware at the mall was the only place that sold this turntable. No one sold turntables then. Online retail hadn't even really begun. This was like, maybe 1997. There was no Urban Outfitters yet as far as I know. I sure didn't know of any places like Audiogon, Audio Karma, or others. I believe Restoration Hardware even said in their sales literature that they commissioned the turntable.
Before that Crosley was carried by Restoration Hardware, I don't think people even knew what a record was, or that anyone even made a record player anymore much less a turntable. Stereo stores didn't have them. They had been absent from departments stores for almost ten years by then. Record stores had quit selling records probably by the late 1980s. I know that I got bumped to the CD club when the BMG record club pulled up stakes in 1988 and even when I was a freshman in college, I was treated as a kind of weirdo relic by most of my friends for having records, even if those who were seniors at the time had pretty much exclusively LP's only three years before. That's how quickly the market turned its back on vinyl in those days. CD's were expensive. Most people had cassettes.
By 1997, records and record players were long dead and gone. Forgotten except maybe by DJ's.
And then there was that Crosley being sold at Restoration Hardware. That was the pulse in the neck of what otherwise was a vinyl corpse. Restoration Hardware also sold frames for LP covers. That, to me, was the only sign in retail or anywhere that LP's weren't totally and completely forgotten except for the occasional comments when people would be squinting at a CD cover about how they missed the big artwork and the liner notes. No one missed vinyl itself, it seemed--only the big artwork.
My girlfriend bought me that Crosley for about $150. That was a big expense for us at the time. Rent was $350 for our two bedroom apartment. Some months, we were lucky to earn enough to pay the rent. The thought of spending $150 on a stand alone record player like the Crosley seemed like an extravagance and I was also sort of annoyed because I knew I had a perfectly good and better P Mount in a box in the basement. But I accepted the gift graciously and we set the unit up.
It was disappointing to me but my girlfriend was thrilled. I was glad to dig my old records out and give them a spin. Soon we had a party and the record player was a big feature of the party even though we had a CD player. It was tough to find a place to set it up where it wouldn't skip if people danced on our hardwood floors, but I found a solution by putting the record player on a cushion.
Friends came over and they thought the record player was so cool. The first question was where they could get one and where they could get records. Back then, the only answer was Restoration Hardware. I didn't even know where they could get records from. I had all mine still. "Garage Sales and Goodwill," I said.
I don't know if anyone bought a record player or records after that because of the Crosley I had. I, personally, never liked how it sounded, but others did. Not everyone is as critical as I am, I guess. I also never liked how the wall wart didn't stow in the case. That seemed like a real design oversight. Neverminding the low sound quality which the single tone control barely altered; it wasn't loud enough, really, certainly not for a party, but barely loud enough to listen to unless you were sitting right next to it and there was no line out for other means of amplification which I would have tried. I realize that such a complaint is something like Woody Allen complaining about the bad food being served in portions that are too small.
Years later, after my relationship with that girlfriend fizzled, dragged and then finally got mercifully yanked out of the end groove, and I was living on my own in a $900/mo single, which was considered cheap by the local market, I still had the Crosley. I was single again and had happily set up my old system, got online and discovered online vinyl retail and I bought my first LP in many, many years. Instead of my girlfriend and a tinny Crosley, in the evening after work I had what I wanted: my P Mount deck, a Pickering TL-3S and Norah Jones singing "Come Away with Me." It seemed like heaven.
When I met my wife, I still had that Crosley and the original box it came in. I wish I could say that I gave it to a friend or that my ex girlfriend still had it and spins a tune to the memory of us once in a while, but I sold it at a garage sale I held before moving in with the woman who is now my wife. The Crosley went for $10.
I never valued the Crosley very much, but it was seemingly simultaneously the last gasp of the old record era and the first breath of the new era. The sales of the Crosley gained momentum, slowly at first, but then rapidly. I knew that they were popular when they began to show up at discount stores. That original design that I had was all the was available for years and suddenly, as if Spring had sprung, that mud brown color gave way to pinks, blues, yellows, and all kinds of colors and new krokus-like shapes.
Records began to appear in greater number on auction sites and entire online stores began to appear. Suddenly records and turntables were everywhere. New styling to old products appeared and those plain Jane audiophile tables began to get updated appearances. Records themselves, now called "vinyls," as if to carry the second spring metaphor now come in rainbows of vivid gem tone colors instead of the old antiquated Model T black.
For me, it all started with that Crosley. That's what the Crosley was and still is. That's my experience of vinyl.
I think that a lot of us forget that young people don't have a lot of money. The fact that the price of the Crosley in those nearly twenty years has actually crept down rather than gone up shows that money is still a problem for young people as it was for me and my girlfriend at the time. I didn't really appreciate the Crosley, but it's cheap and it works well enough. They bring people happiness, especially now when there is no otherwise physical medium to connect to with music. They are clearly about nostalgia for kids these days who shouldn't be nostalgic about a technology they never knew. So it's more than that.
But in the meantime, the selling of nostalgia has given way to new life and moving forward for this once totally dead vinyl LP business. It also makes sense for the music industry because you can't endlessly reproduce your single vinyl copy of some track and give it away to thousands of people for free. So vinyl protects profits needed to continue to make music and musicians.
I never liked my Crosley except for the fact that I do think, in my memory at least, that it brought vinyl back from the dead for the consumer. And the consumer is what we all need to create and maintain demand. I hope the person who bought my $10 Crosley has bought records by now and played them and had a good time. They might think I'm crazy for spending well more than double the original purchase price of that Crosley on a single cartridge--an AT OC9ML/II. But as long as we are both enjoying vinyl, I really don't care. I'm glad they are here.
