Oh, boy readers: we've hit Memorial Day weekend yard sale pay dirt here at MM! In a recent trip to the lovey Germantown/Schnitzelburg neighborhood we discovered an offer we couldn't refuse in somebody's front lawn: an entire stereo dream-system that made all our analog dreams come true in one fell swoop! A cherry JVC set up (complete with really nice after-market speakers) that includes a CD player, a record player (pictured above) and a double tape deck! Although the tape deck needs some repair, everything else is in perfect order and ready for action! Oh boy!
Perhaps I should explain my enthusiasm to the modern, digitally-inclined music listener: I've been pretty disenchanted with the current-generation listening equipment landscape for some time now. Despite a well-publicized love of The Old Ways, I jumped (enthusiastically) into the digital pool along with everyone else: computers, MP3s, CD burners, iTunes--the whole she-bang. My conclusion (after a series of digital heartbreaks)? I miss magnetic tape!
The beautiful complication of making mixed tapes has been romanticized (ad nauseum) in the last decade or so, sure, but you know what? There is a good reason for that: burning a CD is so impersonal, so thoughtless, so...easy. You don't have to stress over thoughtful little variables like transition time between songs and the A side/B side issue. It seems like cheating to have your entire library of songs laid out in front of you in neat little lists, you can drag and drop your way to a perfectly timed mix, with no worries about too many or too few songs--your computer will tell you if there's enough room, eliminating the embarrassment of cutting off a song before it's over (or worse: that awful dragging silence on the end of a side when you left too much blank tape after the last song, your bad planning irrefutably exposed). Not that I think anything worth doing should be complicated/difficult, quite the opposite, actually: analog just works so reliably; digital stuff is too easily controlled by Apple and DRM and other mysterious, legally nebulous abstractions that just get in the way of being creative with your own things. LPs never tell you you can't record songs from them--it's a grooved plastic disc with exactly zero hidden BS to screw with your desire to make a soundtrack for your roadtrip.
I've been thinking about regressing back to the early 90's, equipment wise, for quite a while (the real clincher came last year when my computer crashed and iTunes informed me that I could not recover any of the songs that I had already legally purchased from them...). There is no ethereal, fleeting quality to analog--there is no data to be lost or corrupted, no finicky little lasers, no rebooting, no delicate touch screen technology. My stereo has needles, levers, dials, buttons and switches--it makes reassuringly cantankerous noises that let you know it's working.
I found all my old records in storage, and I realized I had a single of Eat It by Weird Al Yankovic--I had actually forgotten that I owned it! I listened to my records all day yesterday and it was great! Soon I'll get the tape deck up and running and then the real fantasy comes to life: mixed tapes! My end-game plan is to add one more piece of past-present equipment to my arsenal: a portable tape player, so I can take it camping and listen to music while sitting around a fire and looking up at the stars...can you imagine? I've done this many times with a CD player...but never the same one twice. My point being that CD players are so sensitive to moisture that one overnight trip, even a rain-free one, is usually enough to kill them dead. I've gone through more CD players than I'd care to count this way, always with the same result no matter what precautions I take--condensation always finds a way. But those old tape players we all threw away a decade ago? they still worked just fine, even after being dropped down stairs, dragged through mud, kicked around and generally disrespected.
We can have it all, my friends, we just have to go back to the eighties to get it...who's with me?
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