I remember when learning to play guitar by accompanying the guitar parts on records, I discovered many record players did not actually spin at 33 1/3 rpm as advertised. If they spun faster the notes would be higher pitched and I would have to tighten the strings on the guitar to match, and the opposite if they spun slower. This was a problem with tape players too.
To confuse it even more, there are some songs such as Ticket to Ride by The Beatles and Behind Blue Eyes by The Who that on the original albums even if one had a turntable spinning at exactly the right speed, those songs are like a quarter step or so (not even a half step, one fret apart on a guitar fingerboard) off standard tuning. I forget now which is which but if I recall correctly one of these songs is like a quarter step low and the other is a quarter step high (roughly), so in order to play along with these songs on guitar it is necessary to tune "by ear" to match their tuning. But the other songs on the album were in standard tuning, so I'd have to retune again to play the other songs!
And of course heat would warp records. And records would get scratched. I wore out some albums by playing them over and over again. Sometimes the needle of the turntable would get caught in a scratch and the record would play the same part over and over again until one lifted the needle up and placed it down in the next groove after the scratch that caught it. And tapes wore out too, and sometimes tape machines would eat the tapes! Yeah I know this thread is about record players, but I used tapes more to learn songs than record players after my first few years.
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"When you ride over sharps, you get flats!"--The Bicycling Guitarist, May 13, 2008