Here come the holidays, and another wave of technology for the consumer. I just read that the hot item for the upcoming buying season is a plasma or LCD flat screen TV. How can something costing thousands of dollars be a flying-off-the-shelves item? But sure enough, I just visited one of Fort Collins’ warehouse stores, and upon clearing the front door I entered a canyon of these beasts stacked from floor to rafters. Shoppers were wheeling them out on those large flatbed carts to their vans and pickups.
As I approach the half-century mark, all of the technology waves that I’ve endured start to add up. I recently consolidated my music collection, which had become a rest home of recording technology, some better than others.
By the way, I’ve never understood diehard believers in vinyl LPs. Hey youngsters, in the old days, mom and pop kicked out the jams by placing a diamond needle on a spinning piece of plastic. But what a dreadful technology, with its crackles, pops and skips. Each time you played a record, you degraded its sound quality. Audiophiles sought refuge in reel-to-reel tapes, while the rest of us suffered through 8-tracks, which heartlessly chopped a classic tune into bits as the player ka-chunked from one track to the next. Cassettes were an improvement, but they came with hiss, and the players were failure-prone mechanical monstrosities.
My music collection possessed bits of all of these technologies. Thanks goodness for digital, a promising platform for capturing all of my music. Copying music from a vinyl record to a CD is time-consuming, but easy, if you have a PC and your old turntable still works. For me, it was worth it. So much great music on those old records, but to replace them with store-bought CDs would’ve cost a fortune.
I also learned that once I had taken digital snapshots of all of that music, I could send my old analog friends off to new homes, not to the landfill. The word “free” in a classified ad is a siren song for some people.
But looking back, I’m amazed at the investment I’ve made accommodating these waves of technology. Take The Beatles Abbey Road, one of my favorites. I first bought a vinyl version in the late 60s, and then repeated a decade later when the noise level became unbearable. A cassette version got me through the 80s until I bought a CD at my first opportunity. I’ll probably continue to buy Abbey Road as the media evolves again, perhaps next as an Audio Hi-Def Holographic Surround Sens-a-tone, or whatever.
I’m hoping some visionary entrepreneur will make it possible for me to simply purchase a license to listen to Abbey Road from now until the day I die, using whatever technology or media format happens to be in vogue.
That future is not so far away. Soon, we’ll stop purchasing media that we can hold in our hands. The recordings — movies, music, etc. — that we own will sit somewhere out on “the network,” and when we want to watch or listen, we will make our request, and the show or song will just appear for our enjoyment. We won’t load disks, tapes or cartridges. We won’t store our photographs on film, hard drives, CDs or DVDs. That precious picture will simply float in the Internet ether, ready for us to view anytime and anywhere we want.
But until then, She Came in through the Bathroom Window will be right here in its jewel case… you know, those nasty plastic contraptions that break way too easily.
