Sebastian Abbott - Looking at things to listen to

Timing in music, comedy and writing is of the essence, so it is ironic that I should appear to be posting this in such a timely fashion after the announcement that a team has managed to reconstruct the sound from the wax disc that recorded Alexander Graham Bell's voice from 1885. All of a sudden, I have a relevant segué to present my old news in a new, refreshed light.

Over the Easter holidays, oh so long ago now, but at least this year still, we managed to park the children with the Großeltern for a happy few hours and to drive to the wholly unremarkable Black Forest town of St. Georgen near Villingen.

The town is, sorry to say, not much to look at. But it was the centre of two key industries as they rose and fell in waves; clock making, and record players. I'm not that much of a watch connoisseur, but I have always enjoyed audio and hifi, so when I saw the signs for the Deutsches Phonographisches Museum in St. Georgen, it was always going to be a place to visit.

The famous Dual logo (from Wikipedia)

Perhaps the most famous brand to come out of the St. Georgen is Dual, with their wonderfully stark logo and great record players. The name stems from their technique of combining a clock-maker's spring (from which the company sprang) with an electric motor, creating their signature dual motor system (I suppose we would call it a hybrid these days). Dual and its related competitor, Perpetuum Ebner, were the hight of hifi for several decades, but neither survived the switch to CDs. Dual tried a spot of badge-engineering via Rotel - but that's rarely a forward thinking strategy and, after a rather demeaning round of sales to ever less relevant groups, they folded.

A couple of ex-employees got together and put together a German phonographic museum in the St. Georgen town hall. It's a pleasant, light space on two floors, full of a record players from the very beginnings in the USA and France (Edison and Pathé), via the dominance of the German and Dutch manufacturers and through to the demise of Dual. Whilst the collection is ordered chronologically, we still felt that there was a lack of a "story" behind the industry. What helped its massive expansion, how it withered on the branch here in Germany and - for me, notably - how it continues to this day. There was no mention of current high-end record player production from the likes of Linn or Pro-Ject, and there was only a passing mention of new music formats (with no sign of an iPod at all).

The strangest thing for me from the collection was the sound. The main hall, with reception, is also the location of a small stage where a video of how records and music developed. This then booms across the whole collection, which I found rather distracting. Secondly, there was also a random selection of old LPs and singles with some rickety looking turntables - but no instructions as to whether playing them was permitted or not. We had the possibility of paying 1 Euro to watch a 1980s high-end turntable play and to spin around in its gyroscopic gimbal, but by that stage I didn't feel like I really wanted to.

What I wanted was something like an audio room, where we could hear how the old horn record players sounded, how a 1970's Dual turntable with the amplifiers of the day sounded, and how a modern system might sound. After all, that's what they were built for.

I fully understand the difficulties surrounding that - how to organise and to protect such systems from the grasping public - but perhaps the old chestnut of a bank of good quality headphones would be a start. (Update: I see from their website that they're holding a record playing evening on 11th May 2013. I'm not sure I can go, but it's exactly what I'd love to see - and to hear!)

I'd love to go back again in a few years, to see how and if they develop the collection. In the meantime, here are a few more smartphone photos for you to peruse whilst I try not to buy myself a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon...