Crosley CR49-TW Suitcase Style Turntable

Rating:
Summary: On 78s, Blows Away My High-End Stereo!
Review: As you would guess from its price and its source, this nifty portable player gives mediocre (but pretty satisfactory) performance on LPs, and does a little better on 45s, but it is simply amazing on 78s (manufactured from the late 1890s to the mid-1950s, petering out just at the dawn of rock-n-roll). I have no idea how this can be, but it is flat out true that my ancient 78s sounded better, richer, fuller, and far more enjoyable, on this sub-$100 player (at Rite-Aid, no less), than on my high-end stereo equipment. True, the very weakest link in my real system is the Thorens 180 turntable I use for 78s, but that alone can't account for the remarkably low surface noise and sheer listening pleasure to be had from these shellac geezers as played on the Crosley portable tonight (I just bought it, while my wife was looking for floss and nail polish). There's also something palpably magical about sitting in front of this tan beauty that seems to make the music better -- maybe these old records were intended to be played on these machines, and they only sound right this way. I do remember listening to my very first 45s (with the big hole in the middle) on something very like this player, when I was about 4 years old, staying with my cousins at the Jersey Shore in the 1950s - I was hooked on music from that moment. Probably because the overall fidelity is on the low side, the ear seems to adjust immediately, and "fill in the gaps" in the sound in a much more pleasing way than when listening to laughably more expensive and more sensitive equipment. I tried 78s from a variety of eras - from a 1907 one-sided Victor recording of a long-dead quartet singing "God Be With You Till We Meet Again," to a late-40s pressing of Bull Moose Jackson's "Bow-Legged Woman" on the King label (pretty rare, but I could see and hear that the needle was not doing any damage to the grooves - in contrast to what the original 1950s portables, with ten-pound tracking force, did to records (turned them into grey powder after the second or third play)). Every 78 I played on the Crosley just sounded more musical than on my Conrad Johnson/Pass Labs/Quad megasystem. Go figure. And even the fussy Mikey (Michael Fremer of Stereophile fame) would not be too displeased at the decent build quality and floating plinth and arm - a tiny nod to high end 'table developments of the past 25 years. Highly recommended!