AS THE TURNTABLE TURNS

Turntables have made a big comeback. Music companies are releasing new and old albums on vinyl again, so it’s time to find your old record player, dust it off, and give it a spin. Well, unless your player is one of these weird ones that disappeared into gadget history.

MISTER DISC (1983)

Manufacturer Audio-Technica oddly boasted that this portable record player was “no bigger than a man’s shoe.” It also looked like a man’s shoe, with the slab containing a battery compartment, a headphone jack for its included foldable headphones, and a tiny tone arm that could play both LPs and 45s (which had pretty much disappeared by the early 1980s). While Mr. Disc was touted as portable, it couldn’t actually play music on the go—the user had to keep it on a flat, even surface, and it wouldn’t work if it was moved. Also marketed as the Sound Burger in Japan, Mister Disc was an awkward piece of technology, but what really killed its chances of success was that it hit stores right around the same time as the much more portable, cassette-playing Sony Walkman.

THE SOUNDWAGON (1976)

It looks like a toy car—a Volkswagen Bus that fits in your hand—but it’s actually “the world’s smallest portable vinyl record player.” Users simply turned it on, placed it on a record, and the little thing would race around an LP, using a stylus on its underside to play the music through its tiny embedded speaker. (Talk about a car stereo.) The Soundwagon was primarily sold by manufacturer Stokyo as a toy to kids in Japan. Real music fans stayed away because the Soundwagon tended to ruin vinyl records.

LASER TURNTABLE 9 (2015)

What if somebody took the technology that made compact discs possible, and applied it to vinyl records, an older and more primitive form of music storage and playback? A company called ELP Japan did just that. Instead of a stylus on the end of a tone arm, the Laser Turntable uses a precise laser to read a record’s groove. Cost: $15,000.

GABRIEL (2013)

For the hardcore audiophile, there aren’t just “records.” There are stereo records, mono records, 45s, 78s, and other, even more obscure types of vinyl. DaVinciAudio aimed to please audiophiles with its Gabriel player. The device is equipped with four separate tone arms, which can be equipped with different styluses and cartridges. Base cost: $79,000.

Lesser-known names for Area 51: Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Groom Lake, and Watertown.