The record player from the engine bay of an 80’s Datsun car [video]

The laugh box! We had one of those and my father in law used to abuse it to make all sorts of creepy laughs for Halloween.

I want one again, now that you mention it. I had almost forgotten about those things.

>So, instead of a victrola, the must have used a motor-ola?

>(That's the actual origin of the company name.)

You've just blown my mind.

But still seems to integrated circuit digital tech too? What a strange transitional period in technology!

Those are pretty impressive feats of engineering, given how hard it is to operate a record player in a relatively stable environment. Just having a room with wooden floors would be enough to upset the needle when walking around if your record player was placed un-carefully (or was not properly decoupled from the environment). To do this in a car with three potential axis of acceleration is pretty amazing. I would love to see more about how they managed to get away with this without the records skipping. Also interesting: a 45 RPM single would give you 3:30 playing time or so, replacing records every few minutes must have taken quite a bit of attention away from the road.

Audio CDs are easy to pitch shift with hardware that supports variable playback rates. That doesn't require any resampling effort. On PC hardware you're rigidly locked into a few supported sample rates and can't smoothly pitch shift without some effort.

CDs are also digital audio - are you talking about a difference between changing pitch on a hardware CD player and DJ software?

There is no particular difficulty in getting the effect you're hearing from the analog device digitally -- it just requires an implementation other than the most simplistic possible, and most things don't bother because changing the speed is a weird effect to begin with.