Picture this… It’s 1962, and your mom has decided it’s time for a new Sunday outfit. You get dressed in reasonably nice clothes to go shopping and head to the upscale department store in town. You walk in and begin looking around and see all kinds of new things. As you’re looking around you take note of the fact it feels upscale and part of what makes that ambiance is the nice, easy music playing overhead. You think for just a quick moment, “Where’s that coming from?” There’s no such thing as cable service or even Muzak. It’s not the radio because there aren’t any annoying commercials. Just music.

Well… it’s likely coming from a Seeburg 1000. This is a record playing device developed by the jukebox company, Seeburg. It is specially designed in every way to provide non-stop background music for stores, offices or anywhere else where music can add elegance to that ambiance.

The Seeburg 1000 is a machine designed to play special records created just for it. They are exceptionally long playing records spinning at half the speed of a long playing album which spins at 33-1/3rpm. Not only do these records spin very slowly, but the machine is designed to play both sides of the lp without having to flip it. A needle is placed in the usual location under the tonearm, but there’s another mounted on top to play the underside of the album. When the system is playing the other side of the lp, it spins in the opposite direction. When the full set of albums have completed, the device will raise all the records automatically and play them again – offering non-stop music, enabling a store owner or office manager a “hands off” approach to having atmospheric music without a fuss. Quite a skillful masterpiece of design for its time.

The red cartridge was specially designed by the Pickering company to hold two needles – one on the bottom and one on the top. This allowed the playback of both sides of the lp.

The Seeburg 1000 was in use from the late-50’s until the early 80’s. Special records were created for and by Seeburg. The owner of a machine would get a bi-monthly set of records with special numbers on them (from 1-25). The instructions would lead the machine’s owner to remove the current albums numbered, for example, 1, 4, 5, 11, 15, 16, 21, 24, 25. In the new packet would be albums numbered the same to replace those removed. The owner would packaged up the old albums and mail them back to Seeburg where they would then be destroyed. A special set would be sent at Christmas time. Luckily, not all records were destroyed, allowing users, 50 years later, to enjoy them again and again.

This device was set up in mono, so no special stereo amplifier would be needed.

I purchased my Seeburg 1000 in 2022 from a gentleman who finds and restores them. Albums are continually available on eBay for a reasonable price.

Here’s my Seeburg 1000 in action:

The Seeburg 1000 in action playing the underside of the record (one of the special Christmas albums created for Seeburg). Albums completed are dropped to the bottom. When all records have played, the system lifts them all back to the top to start all over again. Notice the plate on top of the stack of records? It’s a heavy plate the helps push the records down as needed, and also offers stability for playback.