Thursday, January 24, 2008

Feeling Old School

We live in an age we everything is digitally supported. Movies are stored on plastic disks, music can be bough online and put on you mp3 player with a flash based memory. Everything is tiny, everything is down behind the scene.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate my tiny 4gigs Zen V, my Blackberry Pearl that can do more 10x more than the first computer I ever laid my hands on.

The demise of HD DVD reminded me of the VHS-Beta battle of the early 80s (Sony finally got back to the world) and got me thinking about the good old k-set. I look at my mp3 player cranking tunes and all I see is a tiny piece of plastic with an lcd screen showing me the song info and I see no magic.

Now looking at a cassette player was something to be amazed of, you could see all the mechanisms need to produce the sound, the motors turning the spools making the magnetic tape travel in front of the reading heads. Once you were done with one side you had to take it out turn it around, put in back and press play unless of course you had auto-reverse and then you were good for 60 min of none-stop play. High-speed dubbing was great invention because otherwise you had to sit there for 30min per side.

My biggest wish as a kid was to own a reel-to-reel audio player and when I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time, I was stoked to see one when Uma Thurman's character is dancing around to Urge Overkill's version of Niel Diamond's Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon.

One day, I will acquire and install it in my living room. I will then proceed to pour myself an Amaretto Sour on the rocks, sit down comfortably in my preferred chair and enjoy my favorite tunes while looking at one spool unwind itself onto another.

Yup I am that old school. Yet I could care less about carburetors and will make sure I never own another carbed bike.

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