K-Tel Presents

Long before Now that's what i call music and Telstar there was K-tel.
A company making money out of releasing and advertising compilation hits albums of the day, and very popular they were to.

The problem was that packing 10 tracks on each side of a vinyl LP reduced sound quality.
Mass production and grooves that were so close together meant that a high pitch vocal could wobble the needle so much it jumped onto track two if you didn't have a brand new stylus or there was a slight warp.
And as most of the people who bought these albums thought that balancing a penny on the arm to weight it down would rectify the problem the chances are the needles hadn't been replaced in years anyway.
Some of the oldest K-tel albums i own are visibly marked were the stylus has dug into the groove of the record so deep you can actually see the plastic burring.

K-Tel also had some brilliantly tacky accessory products that were also on the edge of quality control

Do you remember or did you own a record selector ?

This clever little invention held 24 Vinyl albums, one flick forward of the first album and all the other albums would slowly flick in turn like the pages of a book, clever eh ?

However i also seem to remember that once over half of the albums were leaning to the front the bloody thing it was so top heavy that the whole stack fell over in a heap...

Happy days !, bring back Disco Rocket (LOL)