It’s probably people with serious nostalgia glasses on, vinyl seriously struggled with classical music for example something like 2 in 5 records used to get returned because of poor sound quality and don’t I think it did that well with Jazz either.
My old man was a serious nut when he got his first hi-fi with a CD player, the man sat me down and it was an hour or two of him shouting excitedly but hearing this or that instrument that you would not pick up from the vinyl record.
With cassette tapes, my lasting memory of getting a walkman as a present was using it for a day and than abandoning it because I quickly realized how I would burn through what little pocket money I would get just buying batteries. That 2019 nobel prize the inventors of the lithium-ion batteries got is truly well deserved.
You thought audio cassettes were inconvenient? Try loading cassette only games on a C64 or ZX Spectrum.
We’d have multiple games on one tape, and it would take 5 minutes to load a single game. Regularly there’d be a read error, and you would have to try again.
Multi-load games were the worst. Games would use fast-loaders, but it was still an ordeal at times. Luckily our parents got us a disk drive for the C64 after a few months.
That said, it were still interesting and fun times. We’d create our own mixes of songs on cassette, and share them with friends. It was also fun hacking cassette games with our neighbourhood friends and creating copies on our cassette decks.
The tech may have been different, but the social aspects remain the same, really.
I remember them too - and how obsessed I grew with mine, though I had the VIC-20 and Commodore 16, but never got the 64 before the IBM compatible clones started being released.
I remember DESPERATELY wanting an Amiga 500 when they were released, but never ended-up with one: first device I’d seen with what looked like actual photo-realistic images possible, which seems just funny now: photo-quality 320x240 res images
One year, our school had a chocolate drive where all the students were given a crate-sized box of these bags of chocolates to sell to raise money for the school or whatever: chocolate peanuts, chocolate sultanas, all those kinda things.
My this stage, I’d already begun sneaking back home to the empty house once everyone had left, to settle in for a day of ‘programming’ in BASIC and I remember just being so enthralled by the idea I could write instructions I could save, then have this machine follow them - even given how stupidly-simple it was - plugged into a TV set for f-sake
Didn’t take long before I was busted though, then got suspended for eating all the chocolates (my thinking being I was gunna be reamed for not showing up for school each day anyway, so WTF - may as well go all out), yeah.
Loved computers ever since: a generation x love affair that’s probably shared by the majority of us, after we’d been there for the Atari, then Nintendo and Sega came consoles - watching PCs leapfrog the previous years technology was unavoidable.
Movies like Wargames with Mathew Broderick only helped encourage that ongoing fascination with tech
Four guys with four instruments is not the same as a full on orchestra. The limitations of the dynamic range of vinyl is a well known and documented problem.
Just google around on the history of the development of the CD and am sure an article or two will mention this.
Even Peanuts is returning to the format (so a kid getting a cassette player for Christmas, in 2021, may become an actual thing).
For the audiophile, these will go nicely with the brand new vinyl disks (which have also made a comeback).
It doesn’t matter if the tech. was even all that great, the moment it gets old enough to hit your nostalgia buttons is when you are no longer able to think before splurging on something (case in point, the people buying their childhood Nintendo games again, and again, and again, and again ect…).
No, double deckers did have FFWD and recording was as easy as putting the source tape in Deck A, the blank one in Deck B, rewinding both tapes to the counter 000 and pressing Record+Play to record all songs on a side. No need to repeat it for each song.
Physical devices also had the advantage of instant correction - just move sliders/ turn knobs with your hand and get results while listening to the piece. Audio files make you launch an editor, make corrections, save them, open corrected file in a player and then play it. That’s a lot of work. Not to mention things such as brand name and design which often made others envy you your stereo.
With the arrival of CD players and Audio CD you could hear audio quality changed but some people fumed at it saying vinyls were much better. They still do and vinyls are having a kind of comeback.
The MP3 revolution allowed storing more audio than ever on something as small as a MicroSD card but I prefer .FLAC files, in particular for ringtones. All mobile devices support .FLAC files so they are not a problem.
Streamable audio is the new kid on the block, but it needs a device, too, to play it.
So tech, too, has pros and cons and devices are gonna stay a while with us.
Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
31
8-tracks went out of style just a bit before I was born, but I did have this little toy robot when I was a kid that used 8-track tapes to run you through quizzes. It was the coolest thing.
and creating copies on our cassette decks.
