In defence of the shellac 78 — and the people who still play them.
A visit to a small club in the Midlands where members meet once a month to listen to pre-war 78 rpm records on the equipment they were originally meant for. Polite, considered, and slightly indignant.
The club meets on the second Tuesday of every month, in the upstairs room of a working men's institute that has, by the standards of the East Midlands, been there a long time. The room holds about thirty people. The membership is, depending on the month, between eighteen and twenty-six. The age range, at the meeting I attended, was somewhere between fifty-eight and ninety-one. The youngest member, who told me his age unprompted, looked at the ceiling for a moment before he said it, as if he had not quite expected to be asked.
The format of the evening is straightforward. Members bring records. The records are 78 rpm shellac discs, predominantly British and American, predominantly from the 1920s and 1930s, with the occasional excursion either side. They are played on a single gramophone — a horn-loaded acoustic machine, dated to roughly 1925, which lives in a wooden cabinet at one end of the room and is brought out for each meeting. There is no amplifier. There are no speakers. The needle drops, the horn flares, and the music — such of it as survives — fills the room.
What it sounds like
If you have never heard a shellac 78 played on a contemporaneous acoustic machine, I am not going to try to describe it convincingly. The frequency range is narrow. The surface noise is present, at all times, as a kind of fine atmospheric hiss. The dynamic range, by modern standards, is severely compressed. The wow and flutter — produced by a clockwork motor whose speed varies marginally with the tension of the spring — would, in any other context, be considered unacceptable.
It is, even so, an experience of music. The voices — and most of the records played at the club are vocal records — sound present in a way that has not, in my listening, been improved on by any combination of microphone, electronics, and loudspeaker that I have encountered. There is a peculiar intimacy to the format that has, I think, very little to do with nostalgia and a great deal to do with the directness of the signal chain. Three steps from the air at the recording session to the air in the room.
The voices sound present in a way that has not, in my listening, been improved on by any combination of microphone, electronics, and loudspeaker that I have encountered.
Why the club exists
The members are, by their own account, not collectors in the obsessive sense. Several of them have collections of several hundred records. One has a collection of nearly nine thousand, almost all of them played at the club at one time or another. But the records are, for the members, instruments of listening rather than objects of accumulation. They are played. They are passed around. They are talked about. And they are, when they are unplayable — as a small proportion of every collection eventually becomes — disposed of with a kind of professional resignation.
The club's reason for existing, several members told me, is the same reason most clubs of this kind exist. The format does not survive without the practice. A shellac 78 played once a year, in private, on equipment that is half-restored and half-improvised, will not, by itself, keep the format alive. A club that meets monthly, that maintains a working gramophone, that has a small library of replacement needles in a drawer — this is closer to what the format requires to remain a living thing.
The slightly indignant bit
The members are, on the whole, polite and welcoming. They are also — and this part I think is worth saying clearly — slightly indignant. The format is, in 2026, almost entirely absent from the mainstream conversation about recorded music. The reissues of pre-war material that exist tend to be transferred from the original metal masters, which is a defensible engineering choice but produces a sound that is markedly different from what the records sounded like at the time. The acoustic machines on which the records were meant to be heard are, in most cases, sitting in the corners of antiques shops being sold as decorative objects.
What has been lost, the members feel — and what they describe with patient, repeated emphasis — is the practice of listening to these records as they were heard. Not as historical curiosities. Not as restoration projects. As records, played at home, by people who liked the music. This was a normal evening activity for tens of millions of people for several decades. It is now a niche pursuit maintained, in most parts of the country, by clubs of fewer than thirty members.
What I left thinking
I left the meeting in March with two records I had bought from one of the members, both of them in poor cosmetic condition but, when played, intact. I have a small acoustic gramophone of my own, of similar vintage to the club's machine, which has been mostly idle in our office for the past two years. I have, since the meeting, been playing it again. The records do not sound, in any way that a modern listener would describe as objective, "good." They sound, however, like records that were meant to be played. That, after a fortnight of evening listening, has begun to seem to me a more interesting standard than the one I am used to applying.
The club meets again next month. I have been told I am welcome to bring a record. I have been told, less officially, that the youngest current member would be glad to have someone younger to talk to.