Post #252793 by Mai Tai on Thu, Sep 7, 2006 2:22 AM

On 2006-09-05 23:08, Coco Loco wrote:
5000 vinyl 45's (as in records). Odd or cool depending upon how you look at it.

ahem Those are MY records, Coco Loco. Keep yer meethooks off'em!

But seriously, I did inherit a boat load of 45 rpm vinyl records. They belonged to my best friend's uncle, who loved music from the 1950's and 1960's - American Graffiti was his favorite movie of all time. He grew up in the late '50's to the early '60's as well, and must have started collecting these 45's when he was in high school. After he passed away, his family was going to just throw the records away, or try to donate them to a library or something. My friend knew that I was restoring a 1950 Seeburg Jukebox, and also knew of my fondness for collecting, so he figured I'd put them to good use.

My friend and I loaded all of the records into my car nonstop, and it took us both about an hour until we were finally done. They filled up the entire trunk of a Honda Accord (which is a huge trunk!), as well as the entire back seat area from the floorboards to the top of the back seat!

After I unloaded them, I was wondering what I had gotten myself into. There were way to many records to count, but luckily they were split up into small boxes. I broke out the tape measure, and started measuring how many records there were. If you put them in one large stack from floor to ceiling, it would measure 168 inches, or 14 feet! I then measured how long a section of 100 records was, which came out to 8 inches. Dividing 168 inches by 8 inch sections of 100 records gives me 21 sections of 100 records, or approximately 2,100 records!

I didn't believe that this number could be correct - it didn't look like there were 2,100 records there! So I tried another calculation. If there were 100 records in 8 inches, then dividing 100 records by 8 inches should give me the number of records per inch, which is 12.5 records per inch. And 12.5 records per inch multiplied by 168 inches total equals 2,100 records! I'm still amazed!!!

I still haven't had time to go through all of these records. There's some cool old stuff like Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, etc., but there's also some more modern type crap mixed in there a little bit, like Lionel Ritchie. I guess that when I get the time I'll go through them all, and sell off any duplicates and ones that I don't want. But I don't know when I'll have time to go through them all!!!

Just listening to all of the songs will take forever - one song per side equals 4,200 songs, and if all the songs average about 2.5 minutes per song, that's 10,500 minutes of music, or 175 hours, or over 1 week of straight 24 hour around the clock listening time!!! Even if I listened to them for 8 hours a day every day, it would still take over 3 weeks to hear everything!!! At two hours a day every day, it's gonna take over 12 weeks!!!

Dr. Z, please check my math on this.