I haven’t seen a turntable that had a 16 2/3 RPM setting for a few decades. Seeing it mentioned here, it set off a blinking question mark in the back of my head. I like vinyl records and spent a lot of time in record shops… But I have never witnessed a 16 RPM record. So I had to go and look it up.
Turns out that they were only made for a brief span of time in the 50s and 60s and were audiobooks, primarily. The most popular application was probably the Bible. Another sort of cool feature was that, being 1/2 of 33-1/3 RPM, you could buy a little step-down platter to put on the spindle of your 33 RPM turntable instead of having to buy a new component.
Thanks (and apologies, as needed) for the digession.
