[78-L] turntable question

[Michael Biel]

L78rpm at aol.com wrote:
> A friend writes of of a turntable on which there was a tone arm that  would 
> move to the centre of the record and then "slowly move to the edge before  
> playing".   He says that it wasn't a changer.  What would this  have been?
>  
> pc

To answer the second question, this was in the LP era, somewhere in the 
1980s.  The idea was to be able to have the turntable go to a specific 
track like a CD player could.  The tone-arm had a light and sensor which 
would first quickly scan the record from the center to the outside and 
note in its memory where the bands were from the increased reflection of 
the light in the spaces between the bands.  It could then locate any of 
them, play them in any order, or skip over one you didn't like.  It was 
a particularly stupid idea!!!  The Rabco straight-line arm might have 
had this feature, but I do remember a radial-arm player that also did 
this. 

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com