Seeburg (Not Seabird)

I talked to you about Muzak a bit earlier, spurred on by Lee's posting of a Muzak Christmas LP that I needed. Lee also posted a Seeburg Christmas record, something else I needed, even though I didn't know it existed prior to his posting it. What I did know existed was this series of Seeburg Background Music records, which I've had for years but never listened to. Why not, you ask? Well, in addition to my having more records than I could listen to in a lifetime, these records have a hole in the middle that is too big for a standard record player, and they spin at half the speed of a standard LP. That big hole you see in the scan above is 2" versus the 1.5" hole in the standard 45. And if that weren't enough, the music is supposed to be played back at 16-2/3 RPM, half the normal LP speed of 33-1/3. This frustrated me for years until I finally decided to do something about it this year. I had my machinist father make an adaptor for the spindle on my record player so it would fit, and I figured out how to slow the recording down once I got it into my PC. All that work, and it turns out I wasn't missing much. I only recorded one out of the 24 records in the series, and at that point I had had enough. Turns out that only one out of every five tracks is Christmas, and the versions are sub-par even for background music. Well, maybe it's just the poor fidelity of the record that's ruining it for me. I don't know. If you want to give it a listen, here're six tracks from The Seeburg Music Library-Matching Christmas Library (CH 10 A/B). I suppose it's amazing that these things have survived. They were supposed to be returned to Seeburg after the season, but somehow these never got sent back. I guess Seeburg didn't want these things saved for posterity.