My first experience with the gramophone was a total failure. It must have been around 1960, when I was seven or eight years of age. My father had given me a second-hand radio set with an integrated record player, and I happily went to a second-hand dealer and bought one of those seven-inch discs for just a Mark – a single with Harry Belafonte singing his ‘Banana Boat Song’ of 1957. The battle of the speeds, which had been waged in a country unknown to me at the time, now reached me, and I became one of its casualties. I owned a record player and I owned a disc, but the two did not go together as my record player had only one speed – 78 rpm – for which no records were still made. Instead, the characteristic Belafonte sonority was transformed into a flickering castrato each time I put the disc onto the turntable. To an artist like Paul Hindemith, this might have been a stimulus for experimenting with sounds formerly unknown and unheard of. To me, it was a frustrating experience which led me to neglect the gramophone altogether for some years. Instead, I looked at the back of the radio case through the little ventilation holes to search for Heinzelmännchen (munchkins) making music inside the box.

Later, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I wanted to buy my first classical record. We still had no proper record player: in fact, the old one had been disposed of by then. But I was eager to get a recording of Schubert’s beautiful and haunting Piano Trio Op. 100, even before I had a record player to play it on. I had grown to love the Trio’s slow movement because it was practised by older pupils at my school during a week in a holiday camp devoted to music-making. But the local shop did not have a record in stock; the sales assistant looked it up in a catalogue – it must have been the Bielefelder – and informed me that there were two recordings for 25 DM and 21 DM respectively.