THE GOLDEN AGE OF TURNTABLES!

The Dutch Golden Age was between 1575 and 1675, so roughly the 1600's and not the 16th century as I wrote. Apologies for this stupid mistake..... 😕

@edgewear It was all about Tulips!

In 1636, according to an 1841 account by Scottish author Charles MacKay, the entirety of Dutch society went crazy over exotic tulips. As Mackay wrote in his wildly popular, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, as prices rose, people got swept up in a speculative fever, spending a year’s salary on rare bulbs in hopes of reselling them for a profit.

Mackay dubbed the phenomenon “The Tulipomania.”

“A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip-marts, like flies around a honey-pot,” wrote Mackay. “Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips.”

When the tulip bubble suddenly burst in 1637, Mackay claimed that it wreaked havoc on the Dutch economy.

Tulip price index from 1636-1637. The values of this index were compiled by Earl A. Thompson in Thompson, Earl (2007), "The Tulipmania: Fact or artifact?", Public Choice 130, 99–114 (2007).

Public Choice/CC BY-SA 3.0

“Many who, for a brief season, had emerged from the humbler walks of life, were cast back into their original obscurity,” wrote Mackay. “Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption.”

But according to historian Anne Goldgar, Mackay’s tales of huge fortunes lost and distraught people drowning themselves in canals are more fiction than fact. Goldgar, a professor of early modern history at King’s College London and author of Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, understands why Mackay’s myth-making has endured.

Tulipmania was the frenzy of the booming 17th century Dutch merchant economy. Not unlike the speculative financial ’products’ in our current global economy, that wreaked havoc in 2008.

Are you suggesting Turntables are today’s Tulips? 😂

BS, turntables have never been better. I can understand the nostalgia but I could care less. I want the best sound and modern turntables and cartridges have the old stuff beat by a mile. I know this will piss some people off. If all you can afford is older used stuff I would rather buy equivalently priced new stuff. There are some very fine relatively inexpensive tables out there. 

very interesting this. Doesn't it depend how you define it? Relative to time considering it in terms of the media that people bought it must have been the 70s' before CD came along. I think the late 70s' had the best technology relative to time as well when the likes of Sony, Kenwood, Pioneer et al really put their corporate boffins to making great turntables. The EMT motor is still used now, I think Koetsu may have started in the 70s'. A lot of people think that they have re-invented the wheel particularly cartridges - think again. Lets be honest a cheap Airpax motored 3 spring deck was considered the best turntable in the UK for over a decade. Of course right now we have access to the knowledge and wealth of info gleaned, and if lucky people with the skills to make turntables, but we can then argue that this is the greatest moment in time as we know more than ever before. LP is competing with CD's, streaming, on line media and gaming - god knows what else. Back then - the TV.