Music Centre Nostalgia

When we were kids, our family didn’t have a stereo, our Dad had a Music Centre. Yes I think it had initial caps in our minds. We always used its full title. And it was always 'his' rather than 'ours'. We weren't allowed to touch it, merely admire it from a safe distance. It was made by Hitachi, a make he remained faithful to ever since as he did with Schreiber for furniture, a brand that has developed retro cachet now. Somehow he came to the realisation and belief that this was the apex of quality and he’s never faltered from this faith. Nothing else will do. 

Anyway the Music Centre had a turntable, radio and single cassette deck. Much was made of the stylus that we believed was a diamond. If so, it was the only diamond in our house. The Music Centre had a smoked-glass-effect lid. There were lots of dials and switches whereby you could alter what came out of the speakers and increase the treble or bass, plus the displays were backlit, adding more drama. It looked very grand, very hi-tech so we approached it with awe, as if it were a spacecraft that had landed in the front room or at the very least the control panel of an aeroplane or the dashboard of a car. And the switches! Five knobs representing FM frequencies and an array of black push-in buttons for radio, turntable, cassette, mono, stereo etc. When you taped something from a record, you could see the sound levels rise and fall by watching a white needle (one for each speaker) waver back and forth. It was Dad's custom to tape records and sit perched by these tiny levers so that he could alter how the record sounded - evidently thought he knew better than the orchestra conductor. It was the height of sophistication and class, especially for us as we only had a black-and-white TV and had no idea that the Waltons were redheads or what colour the uniforms in Star Trek were. To us, (until 1981), they were all shades of grey.

Our family has always been a little technologically backward and I only got my first mobile phone Christmas 2010 and still don’t really know how to use it. We’re not quite Luddites but we’re getting there. Or rather not getting there. Still prefer video to DVD and analogue to digital. Dad still has the Music Centre although somewhere along the line, we stopped using its full title and for a while it became just the stereo but the cassette deck no longer works and, as it got older, the right-hand speaker grew temperamental and would sometimes cut out. This could be got round in a couple of ways. If you held the stereo button down firmly for a bit and then let go, it would sometimes bring the speaker back or if you ran your fingers across all the buttons in the direction of the speaker, that might work. It was obviously some loose connection. Now the turntable and radio still work ok but Dad hardly ever uses it, preferring DVDs and CDs although at one stage, he rigged the sound from the TV to come out of the Music Centre's speakers.

I still have a great deal of affection for it as the romance of vinyl and the gate-fold sleeve will never be lost on me.

Update:

In 2020 in the middle of Covid, my Dad died and we're having a lot of trouble letting go of his pride and joy.