When my memories become someone else's nostalgia
Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay
It's interesting watching a technology that felt new to me (even though it was quite old at the time I was using it) suddenly get renewed attention.
I still remember the first cassette album I owned. I'm sure it wasn't literally the first cassette tape I owned and I'm not sure whether I bought it with my allowance or if it was a present. I would name drop it but it turns out not all the artists from my youth listening to CCM became queer affirming. Some of them became pretty rancid!
The album meant a lot to me at the time. It's hard to think of that album without hearing the slightly imperfect warble of the tape speeding up and down just slightly as it played in my headphones.
Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay
Eventually, we got CDs. I only had two to start with. One was Moonlight Sonata. Legend has it that the 74 minute runtime of the redbook CD was chosen to allow Moonlight Sonata to fit on a single disc. As far as I know, this isn't true but it's a great story. The other was Rich Mullins's A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band. I still have that CD although I backed it up to FLAC when I backed up all my CDs over again.
Cassettes remained a part of my life for a little while. I used them to record songs of the radio. Particularly songs that would have been difficult for me to get albums of. Eventually, writable CDs became affordable enough to make my own mix CDs instead of mix tapes. Around that same time, I was getting into MP3 pretty heavily. The very first MP3 I ever heard was one I encoded myself. It took hours to encode that one song to 128Kbps and, when I played it on a 120Mhz Pentium Acer, I couldn't run any other software at the same time. It was so small, I carried that song on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Today, some pedant would tell me it was a 1.44MiB disk. I'd go pull one of my floppies from the protective case I store them in and offer them the use of my loupe to read the size on the label.
The last gasp of cassette tapes in my life was my four track recorder. Which only recorded two tracks at a time and required a special type of tape to really do its business.
Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay
A lot of ink has been spilled on why it is that people go for, say, vinyl long after it has passed its expiration date. The original releases of old music had better dynamic range (i.e. they haven't been compressed to hell and back) but tended not to have as much going on in the lower end. There may be something to that audiophile convention about analogue sound. Most professionally produced sound from the 80s onward was produced digitally at some point in the chain before it reached the listener.
To the extent that they may have a point, you'd have to listen to some really old recordings on some pretty old gear to know it for sure.
Why are folks reaching for the old stuff? I've heard it's because this stuff was the province of older siblings and cousins. Maybe there's some truth to that.
But maybe it's because there's 900 channels and nothing good on. I don't mean that literally in either direction. There are a lot more than 900 “channels” so to speak and plenty of the new stuff is really good. Maybe we have too many choices and too many distractions.
Image by blitzmaerker from Pixabay
I remember just listening to an album. I've always been me so I probably read a book or something while I was doing it but the activity was listening to the music.
Last year, I bought an inexpensive FLAC player. It can do more but, it's so convoluted to use, it's really best at playing an album or a playlist. Maybe it could hop on the internet for something other than syncing its clock. It says it does some streaming thing that makes my eyes glaze over whenever I think about figuring out what that means. It's a chore to get music onto it. Managing playlists for it requires either manually adding songs from the player one by one ... or reverse engineering their not-at-all-M3U file which still has the extension M3U.
It's not for everyone. It's barely for me. But it lets me listen to the music without too much messing with it. In fact, the more messing I have to do with it, the more tedious it is to deal with.
It's more inconvenient than popping a tape in and then turning it over when the side finishes. Unless, of course, you live in 2025 and you have to first find a tape player and then find or record a tape. And then you've got just one tape. Battery will need recharging on my little FLAC player before it runs out of music on the 256GB micro SD card I've half filled.
I still haven't just listened to an album in a while even with a good book.
I think I'll do that soon. I'll let you know how it goes.