February 21, 2026
January 13, 2026

Acoustic Sounds is Cranking Out LPs in Salinas

“Chad Kassem, founder of Kansas vinyl record giant Acoustic Sounds, turned his hobby into a career–but his journey to success was anything but straightforward.” CBS Saturday Morning co-hosts Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson interviewed Kassem at his warehouse/manufacturing plant in October, 2025. Watch it on youtube by clicking here.

December 5, 2025

The Recorders that Defied the USSR

Many scholars have documented the ways that Soviet citizens used technologies like audio tape and videotape to copy and distribute western entertainment (see for example Gene Sosin, “Magnitizdat: Uncensored Songs of Dissent” in Rudolf L. Tokes, ed. Dissent in the USSR, chapter 8). A recent Reuters story documents Kazakhstan’s museum of Soviet-era tape recorders. They need a web site.

December 1, 2025

The Hart Mfg. Co. Recordgraph

Frederick Hart was an English engineer who immigrated to New York in 1884. He established a company in Poughkeepsie in the early 1900s to build steam-powered automobiles, but soon became a manufacturer of Hollerith punched-card equipment for a nearby company that, as it turns out, would be a predecessor to International Business Machines (IBM). Hart eventually became president of a new IBM munitions division in the 1940s, located in Poughkeepsie. His original company, which by 1944 was making military gun parts, was purchased by the American Type Founders Company, and later became part of Daystrom Corporation. Hart apparently formed a new firm, which manufactured something called the Recordgraph. How and why Hart got into that business is unclear.

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November 21, 2025

The sound recorder database is back.

When I first built this site, it was all hand coded. At some point I decided, foolishly, to try to create a database of every magnetic recorder ever made. It included a back end that I could use to upload and edit new records, and a front end for the public to use for searching. I never got past a few hundred records. Around 2006, when I ported the site to WordPress, I didn’t know how to make the back end/front end code work on the WordPress platform, so I ditched the database. This year, I decided to bring it back. Here it is. It’s just as ugly as I remember it and I’ve managed to break the site’s page layout. If you’re into scrolling, this is the page for you.

September 12, 2025

The Audio Recorder/Player Database

 
 

Recorder Manufacturers


September 6, 2025

Malcolm Riviera’s Final Track

Malcolm Riviera

I just discovered that Malcolm Riviera (pseud. of Gary C. Broyhill, b. Sept. 17, 1956) died in late July or early August, 2023. No formal obituary has been published online, but he was memorialized in the September 2, 2023 edition of the Trash Flow Radio show on WAIF FM, Cincinnati. The link takes you to a podcast version, and Malcolm is mentioned around 1:20:00. According to Trash Flow, he was a well known figure in the D.C. music scene, particularly in the 1980s, and was in a number of bands including Elevator, Grand mal, Sub Primal Cuts, The Velvet Monkeys, and Gumball. Known best as a musician and photographer, Malcolm was also a fan of 8-track tapes and their history. I never met him, but we corresponded by email over the years after he took over the web site 8 Track Heaven. In 1995, he collaborated with Abbey Levine and Chip Rowe to launch 8 Track Heaven, and it soon became nationally known as a resource for collectors. When Ms. Levine tragically died in 1997, Malcolm contributed to a tribute recording called Links Outta Here (issued only on CD, ironically) and then ran the site until he died. 8 Track Heaven was for many years the best and most comprehensive source for those interested in collecting 8 track tapes and keeping their 8 track players working. In keeping with the creepy and very “21st century” capacity of web sites to outlive their owners, but more poetically in keeping with the celebrated tendency of 8 track tapes to play in a continuous loop until they are finally eaten by the player or break at the splice, 8 Track Mind lingered until its domain registration expired in the early summer of 2024. Today, sadly, the domain is owned by the promoters of some Indonesian lottery site.

8 Track Heaven’s content is preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by searching for 8trackheaven.com. (image source)

August 17, 2024

For all the Vinyl Hype, This is Still the Era of Streaming

A great tool for visualizing the current state of the recorded music market is the RIAA’s U.S. Sales Database, which allows you to to filter and sort record sales data in numerous ways. Here’s a screen shot of overall sales since 1973. Although this only represents sales in the US, it still provides some perspective on the much-discussed rebirth of LP records and, lately, cassettes. The green-coded items are all some form of streaming, while LP record sales are in dark blue. It may be hard to see current LP sales in this screenshot, but they are at the tips of the bars representing the past few years. The big orange blob in the middle of the chart documents the rise and fall of the CD. Record sales chart

May 20, 2024

LP Sales are Still Going Up

LP sales chart 2023


According to Statistica, US sales of LP record albums increased about 14% in 2023 to about 49 million. The same site claims that 82,000 turntables were sold in the US in 2021. 2023 was the second year in a row during which LP records outsold CDs. But people still do not seem to be listening to their records. In one 2023 survey, 50% of LP buyers reported that they do not own a record player or turntable. The statistics suggest that buyers are not primarily attracted to the aural characteristics or physical form of the LP but rather something else, perhaps album art or merely the appeal of LP ownership and collecting.

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November 20, 2023

Bucks Burnett

Bucks Burnett, a Texas record collector, record store owner, and museum operator, died in October, 2023. Burnett was one of the early and vocal advocates of collecting music on 8-track tapes. In the early 1990s, 8-tracks were bottoming out in terms of popularity and value. Bucks was one of many who nostalgically latched onto them as collectibles. Yet Bucks became a sort of gadfly in the 8-track collecting community, preaching a message of commercialism to a group of fans who appreciated the format for other reasons. To those who hoped that used, thrift store 8-track tapes would always remain cheap and plentiful, Bucks proudly boasted that he had already sold a rare cartridge (the Sex Pistol’s God Save The Queen) for what seemed an unimaginably high price of $100 in 1992. At that time, Burnett stocked about 200 8-track tapes in a special section of his record store, and claimed that he sold about three per week.

 

KERA story on Bucks Burnett.

Facebook tribute page for Bucks Burnett.