@PocketBrain The one I had wasn’t even pop-up. It just sat on a peg on the side of the turntable, and you would put it in the middle to play a single. The pop-up ones are more advanced.
I can see from my answer (CD) that I’m below the average age of the Meh public. As of the midnight voting crowd. Or I started buying my own music a few years later than everyone else in my age range.
@f00l Once in a Lifetime is my favorite music video. It reminds me of when I started to drive and would go to San Francisco and see bands at The Stone and the Old Waldorf. Before the show they’d often show videos, sometimes music videos and sometimes abstract video compositions. This was pre-MTV so the format was still exotic and experimental. It was pretty much guaranteed you’d see Once in a Lifetime. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
@RedOak
Was fortunate be be living in NYC when '77 and then More Songs About Buildings And Food and the next few albums came out.
For a few years, TH played everywhere round the area. Usually on a double bill with the B-52’s. I may have seen them 20-30 times in all during those years. I have no idea. I would talk people into coming toNYC to visit just yo go see them. Tix were cheap. I had a car. So we could get down to Asbury Park or wherever.
I always liked the rawness of the early small band a bit better, but hey, l’ll take anything they give.
When I was little, we had some 8-tracks and a portable player. We had some LPs and a portable record player. I even had a copy of the [original] Star Wars soundtrack on LP. However, my formative years were spent accumulating cassette tapes.
I just got my first turntable last year (I grew up in the cassette tape age…) and it’s been a life changer for listening to music. Sadly, it’s been having some issues lately (it sounds extremely fuzzy all the time, like there’s an electrical problem). Hm - any recommendations on what to try to fix it?
@luvche21 Are the records clean? Have you checked the needle for cleanliness? Is it a removable needle on the stylus? A bad needle can cause excessive wear on vinyl albums so you want to get it fixed as soon as possible if yours is bad.
Also, some players are susceptible to static buildup on the actual records. They used to sell things (and also wipes) that were to discharge and prevent static buildup. Might be worth checking.
@duodec I clean my records before playing, so that’s not an issue. I’ve also cleaned the needle (rather, dusted?). I’m 80% sure I can remove the needle, but I haven’t tried before. Any recommended place to shop for a replacement needle that’s pretty cheap?
So the records themselves can get static buildup? Interesting. I’ve tried a few different records and it’s been the same staticy sound on all of them, so I’m guessing all of my records wouldn’t have that buildup…
@luvche21
Go to a record store or a turntable place and ask - likely somewhat expensive. Or read up, possibly upgrade your turntable, and mail order good needles. It can make a huge diff.
@luvche21 I’d go with @f00l 's suggestion. We haven’t replaced a needle in my wife’s B&O turntable in 20 years so I have no idea who is reputable or what is available these days. You probably don’t want a cheap generic needle either. Get at least an OEM needle if its available for your turntable.
@luvche21needledoctor.com sells a lot of stuff, including a $15,000 cartridge if you’d like a chuckle. But they also have plenty of replacement styli for all sorts of mid- and lower-end cartridges. Worth a look.
@luvche21 not sure if it applies to you, but if you can see four colored wires going into the cartridge head, make sure they are all connected… I had one making a bad connection and it took a while to trace
I was raised on records and 8 tracks. I had the star wars album too. I think that actually might’ve been the first album my parents ever gave me. First one I remember.
Also I would like to point out that I listen to classical and opera and gregorian chant - some of which was recorded prior to 1947. So there is at least ONE person that listens to 70 year old music
@ivannabc
I am not as old as these. But I love my parents’ and grandparents’ music. And some music they barely knew of.
(This last one our older generations loved. They played it all the time, we kids had the lyrics memorized by the time we were 4.
So we tormented them by singing it, a capella and very badly: to them - as often as we could get away with - in public. While trying not to collapse with laughter before the song finished. They put up with our song massacre attempts with decent grace.
They would get us back by playing the real thing repeatedly once we got home. We would get them back by singing along and acting out the song story with a certain lack of respect.)
We would always demand the backstory of the “frightened arms” mentioned early in the song. Just how did those arms get so frightened? Did the “frightened arms” recover by the time everybody got to the “lilacs and laughter cottage”? I’d would be so sad if the arms were still frightened by the end of the song!
My parents at first just thought we were cute and silly. And then I think Mom got a little upset that we made continual fun of one of her fav songs. Finally she admitted to us that the lyrics were dreamy and absurd and started to laugh with us. We let up a little then.
… decades later, my younger brother and I walked in Manhattan, with Dad (Mom was no longer alive), down Fifth Avenue I think, one Thanksgiving weekend with Dad around midnight on a cold cold night, singing that song and some others of those songs to him. By then, he loved it that we knew the words and would sing them; and we still sang badly, but with love.
@ivannabc As do I. And when in the car, I still almost exclusively listen to classical. Baroque, in particular. I also had Gregorian Chants. I thought I might have been the only one in the world that listened to that, lol.
@DVDBZN fyi, if you click on the bottom right of embedded YouTube videos, it’ll open it up in another page or the app, depending on if you’re on computer or phone (and then what your set preferences are)
@f00l I think they use url.parse() to determine whether or not a given ‘word’ is a URL, then from there a regex checks whether or not it looks like a YouTube URL. There doesn’t appear to be any inbuilt escape mechanism. The only thing I can possibly think might trick the parser is using some strategically placed otherwise pointless HTML escapes, like (let’s try this): www.google.com
LP’s. I had hundreds of them. I still do.
When 8-tracks came out, they were just for my vehicle, amazing that you could play music you picked out in your car!! WOW!
I also have over a hundred 10" shellac country-western records.
Vinyl. But our original stereo record player also handled the 78RPM records (probably shellac) my Mom and Dad had, which were fun when we were kids. Scratchy though, and sadly they did not survive storage after we moved out. A newer stereo system also had an 8-track player but mostly Mom and Dad songs; Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Andy Williams, not anything we liked.
And somewhere I still have my 45 single of “Walk Like a Tarkanian” by 911. It was big when I was there… I hope its not in hot storage…
@duodec
Your parents’ taste was similar to much of what I heard before we youth got our own turntables.
Thank you, Beatles and Stones and Who and Led Zep and Doors and Dylan and Beach Boys and Hendrix and Deep Purple and Creedence and Steppenwolf and Janis and Iron Butterfly and …
@compunaut Me too! I got the Chipmunks Christmas record (it was a red LP) in the early 60’s and played it… and played it… and played it… It strangely disappeared one day. No one could find it! lol…
@lseeber So right. Lived near Hartford so on Friday night somebody would get some beer (we were too young to buy legally) and drive up on a certain hill south of town and just turn on the car radio and listen to Cousin Brucie. Never got hassled by the cops, maybe they decided that if we were so dumb that we couldn’t figure out how to get girlfriends we weren’t really much of a menace to society either.
@Sarahsda Haha… yep… I was over toward Danbury in Bethel. Cops hassled us most of the time. Small town and nothing better for them to do. Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack … the 2 go to’s.
@OCBill3
It sorta kinda was. First we used reel to reel tape then cassette tapes came around and made it easier. Radio was how you bootlegged music back in the day. I remember waiting for a particular song to play just to record it.
Said 8-track, but really it was about half 8-track and half vinyl. All my parent’s cars had 8-track players and they recorded their vinyl albums to 8-track to bring them along in the car, but we did own several 8-track purchased recordings as well. They also mostly had us listen to the 8-tracks in the house because otherwise we would cause the vinyl records to skip when we bounced around the house.
Of course, by the time I was 6-7 we had modern cassette players in all the cars.
Also, I have a copy of Tattoo You on 8-track for some reason. Might have been in the quarter bin at a flea market; my 2nd car (well-used) came with an 8-track player.
I used a reel-to-reel tape recorder my dad gave me when I was 8. It lasted 35 years. Lafayette model RK-142, with the “Magic Eye.” Very cool, and probably led to my 27-year career in radio. Oh yeah, there were some 45’s too…
@MrNews spent many many hours goofing around with a SONY TC-353, including playing the tapes of us backward and at chipmunks speed. Then, to record music on the radio. Still have it in the basement. Wonder whether it still works?
My father managed a vending machine company when I was young, which included jukeboxes. I would get vinyl 45’s when they were pulled from the inventory. I must have had 300-400 of them. My ex-wife worked for a record distributor, we had over 1000 vinyl albums. So, vinyl. (I still have an old Gerrard turntable)
@olperfesser hah! Fond memories, sorta. I think my first turntable was a crappy Garrad like the following. Couldn’t wait to replace it with a nicer Technics and Sure V15 cartridge.
Given the tremendous number of people who said Vinyl, I can’t tell if it’s because meh is primarily the “hipster” folk or because meh is just filled with the wizened members of another time…
For me, it was a combination of records, cassettes, radio, 8-tracks, and CDs. We had a very eclectic set of music playing devices. The mid-late 80s was kind of weird in the media department, anyway.
I never “got into music” as many people have. Music is important to me and I definitely have strong likes and dislikes, but I can’t talk about performers and there are few performers whose whole catalogue I enjoy. Evidently I have decent taste as my guests and audiophile friends compliment me on my party mp3 playlist, which contains some uncommon fare. Anyway, the earliest music I recall enjoying was my dad’s LP collection of 50’s rock, Gene Autry, Nat King Cole, Burl Ives and some classical stuff. I blew out every set of speakers my dad ever had with Also Sprach Zarathustra, that piece had to be played big. The first album I ever bought with my own money was from a TV ad, it had a lot of songs in the vein of The Night Chicago Died. In my teens I won a local rock radio contest for 50 records, I went down to the station and they opened their library and said “go for it”. I told the DJs I didn’t own any and really didn’t know what was good and asked them to pick for me, and they had a good old time picking me out a foundation library. I think I ended up with about 70 records, many of them still considered classics. I still have most of them.
I used to carry around a giant-ass CD book with me on my way to and from high school, back around the turn of the 21st century. I lusted after the iPod when it came out, but my first MP3 player was one of those hybrid MP3/CD players, so I would burn all my er… “legally acquired” MP3s to CDs and switch those out until I got my first iPod
I also have a turntable, a tube amp, and a small vinyl collection, for when I want to do serious listening.
My first album was More of the Monkees. I was only five so if I wanted to hear it I had to beg my dad to play it on his Hi-Fi. Then I got in to the Partridge Family. At some point I got my own self-contained record player. I owned Aja by Steely Dan when I was nine. But what changed everything was when someone gave me The Beatles’ red album for my tenth birthday.
It was all vinyl until I started to drive. Then I’d transfer my albums to cassette to listen to in the car. Started out with TDK SA-90s then switched to Maxell XLII-S. I had one of those cassette holders that looked like a briefcase. But I still bought everything on vinyl. Which turned out to be smart. I still have all the vinyl. Including the very battered More of the Monkees.
I had a few “inherited” 8-tracks from my older brother & sisters (Queen, Boston, etc.) but for me, growing up in the 80’s, I was all about the cassette mainly for the portability. I can’t tell you how many 60,90, & 120 minute cassette tapes I acquired over the years from '80 to '86. I’d almost always purchase new LP’s by my favorite artists (KISS, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax were a few of my favorites) then x-fer over to cassette.
I went off to school after graduating, and was just fascinated by this new invention…the compact disc. We had a local distributor (Team Electronics) who was selling this new magical device as a component that would work with my existing stereo, for the uber-low price of $600! Needless to say, a college student working for $1.75/Hr + tips, could not come up with that kind of scratch, so I started a payment plan with the manager of the store and paid anywhere from $5 to $10 per paycheck. About a year later, I was getting close to being able to actually purchase my compact disc player, when the store went out of business…and all the money I had given them was GONE. I had even bought a couple CD’s just dreaming about how great they were going to sound…Jimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced” and the 4th Led Zeppelin record being my “crown jewels”…and to have that happen, it was nothing short of devastation!!
With the help of my great parents, combined with the ever downward spiraling of costs of the players, I was able to purchase a player a couple years later (pretty sure they were down to around $250) and I was in heaven!
I was a vinyl guy and pretty much skipped 8-track and only listened to cassettes that I had recorded myself (not so much mixed tapes, but entire recorded albums) to listen into my car.
I remember when CDs came out, I actually started buying discs nearly a year before I owned a CD player. I wanted to make sure when I finally bought a CD player, I had enough of a collection that I was going to burn myself out on one or two CDs that were all I could afford at the time I purchased the player.
There’s been some neurology research on the different ways the brain responds to whether incoming sound is analog or digital. People unconsciously know this as they describe the technical accuracy of CDs or how moved they are by analog music. No wonder live performances are so popular and vinyl seems to be coming back into favor.
@cranky1950 Well, most new vinyl, yes. That said, I don’t think it really matters whether the master was digital or analog, as long as it’s mastered for the limitations of the vinyl format.
At least, I feel that way for new music. I’m extremely wary of buying reissues of older albums on vinyl, however. I’d rather track down a vintage LP with the original vinyl mastering than some hack job remaster that was only pressed to vinyl to sell to the kids who don’t know any better.
TL;DR - New vinyl of new music good. Old vinyl of old music good. New vinyl of old music, not so much.
@RedOak I think you’re conflating two kinds of compression. Audio compression, in terms of MP3s and M4As is removing frequencies outside of average human hearing. In a double-blind test, most people can’t determine the difference between a well-encoded high-bitrate (192kbps and up) MP3 and a lossless file.
Then there’s Dynamic Range Compression, which is a mastering technique that adjusts the dynamic range of audio so that the quiet parts and the loud parts don’t have as much range between them. This makes the song sound louder and punchier, but also kind of flat. That’s what’s really hurting modern music, and why so many shitty modern remasters of old music sound so shitty.
(Addendum: I collect concert bootlegs, and typically keep them in lossless FLAC format, not because of the extra fidelity, but because it’s better for archival and CD-burning purposes. Any bootleg that goes into my regular listening gets converted to a v0 MP3, and I can’t tell the difference, even on good headphones.)
First three albums I ever owned (on cassette):
Used one of these too…
@Mehrocco_Mole
She Comes In Colors
@Mehrocco_Mole
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/youre-old-school-1
@Mehrocco_Mole I never had one that was so primitive, but the turn table I used came with a normal round item that did the equivalent task.
@kazriko The classic pop-up 45RPM hub. Mine had that, too. Heck, my USB turntable might have one; I just never looked.
@kazriko Primitive? God I feel old right now.
@PocketBrain The one I had wasn’t even pop-up. It just sat on a peg on the side of the turntable, and you would put it in the middle to play a single. The pop-up ones are more advanced.
I can see from my answer (CD) that I’m below the average age of the Meh public. As of the midnight voting crowd. Or I started buying my own music a few years later than everyone else in my age range.
/image barry manilow II
my first album
@Yoda_Daenerys
You suffered a sea change into something rich and strange along the way?
@Yoda_Daenerys I have Copacabana and Mandy on my playlist as of now
/image her name was Lola
@f00l yea, that phase didn’t last long, next stop
/youtube ELO Evil Woman
@f00l Once in a Lifetime is my favorite music video. It reminds me of when I started to drive and would go to San Francisco and see bands at The Stone and the Old Waldorf. Before the show they’d often show videos, sometimes music videos and sometimes abstract video compositions. This was pre-MTV so the format was still exotic and experimental. It was pretty much guaranteed you’d see Once in a Lifetime. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
@f00l artists don’t come much more talented than David Byrne. Through his entire music career.
@RedOak
Was fortunate be be living in NYC when '77 and then More Songs About Buildings And Food and the next few albums came out.
For a few years, TH played everywhere round the area. Usually on a double bill with the B-52’s. I may have seen them 20-30 times in all during those years. I have no idea. I would talk people into coming toNYC to visit just yo go see them. Tix were cheap. I had a car. So we could get down to Asbury Park or wherever.
I always liked the rawness of the early small band a bit better, but hey, l’ll take anything they give.
/youtube take me to the river
edit: you’d have to watch the video for two minutes and two seconds before you knew the song, so I’ll just say it.
The Ravyns - Raised on the Radio
When I was little, we had some 8-tracks and a portable player. We had some LPs and a portable record player. I even had a copy of the [original] Star Wars soundtrack on LP. However, my formative years were spent accumulating cassette tapes.
I just got my first turntable last year (I grew up in the cassette tape age…) and it’s been a life changer for listening to music. Sadly, it’s been having some issues lately (it sounds extremely fuzzy all the time, like there’s an electrical problem). Hm - any recommendations on what to try to fix it?
@luvche21 Are the records clean? Have you checked the needle for cleanliness? Is it a removable needle on the stylus? A bad needle can cause excessive wear on vinyl albums so you want to get it fixed as soon as possible if yours is bad.
Also, some players are susceptible to static buildup on the actual records. They used to sell things (and also wipes) that were to discharge and prevent static buildup. Might be worth checking.
@duodec I clean my records before playing, so that’s not an issue. I’ve also cleaned the needle (rather, dusted?). I’m 80% sure I can remove the needle, but I haven’t tried before. Any recommended place to shop for a replacement needle that’s pretty cheap?
So the records themselves can get static buildup? Interesting. I’ve tried a few different records and it’s been the same staticy sound on all of them, so I’m guessing all of my records wouldn’t have that buildup…
Thanks!
@luvche21
Go to a record store or a turntable place and ask - likely somewhat expensive. Or read up, possibly upgrade your turntable, and mail order good needles. It can make a huge diff.
@luvche21 I’d go with @f00l 's suggestion. We haven’t replaced a needle in my wife’s B&O turntable in 20 years so I have no idea who is reputable or what is available these days. You probably don’t want a cheap generic needle either. Get at least an OEM needle if its available for your turntable.
@luvche21 needledoctor.com sells a lot of stuff, including a $15,000 cartridge if you’d like a chuckle. But they also have plenty of replacement styli for all sorts of mid- and lower-end cartridges. Worth a look.
@luvche21 not sure if it applies to you, but if you can see four colored wires going into the cartridge head, make sure they are all connected… I had one making a bad connection and it took a while to trace
@hoosier I’ll try that out when I get home and see if it is something that will help. Thanks for the idea!!
bought my first recordings in high school, but was at live concerts (classical) from age 5.
I was raised on records and 8 tracks. I had the star wars album too. I think that actually might’ve been the first album my parents ever gave me. First one I remember.
Where I come from, it’s the older the violin
the sweeter the music 
Also I would like to point out that I listen to classical and opera and gregorian chant - some of which was recorded prior to 1947. So there is at least ONE person that listens to 70 year old music
@ivannabc
I am not as old as these. But I love my parents’ and grandparents’ music. And some music they barely knew of.
(This last one our older generations loved. They played it all the time, we kids had the lyrics memorized by the time we were 4.
So we tormented them by singing it, a capella and very badly: to them - as often as we could get away with - in public. While trying not to collapse with laughter before the song finished. They put up with our song massacre attempts with decent grace.
They would get us back by playing the real thing repeatedly once we got home. We would get them back by singing along and acting out the song story with a certain lack of respect.)
@ivannabc It’s hard to find 70 year old music too! Especially recordings that have been transferred well into a more versatile medium to listen to!
@f00l
I’m going to borrow that second one because I…uh…heard it somewhere before. Can I get a link?
@DVDBZN
We were reduced to hysterics by the line:
“In my frightened arms”
We would always demand the backstory of the “frightened arms” mentioned early in the song. Just how did those arms get so frightened? Did the “frightened arms” recover by the time everybody got to the “lilacs and laughter cottage”? I’d would be so sad if the arms were still frightened by the end of the song!
My parents at first just thought we were cute and silly. And then I think Mom got a little upset that we made continual fun of one of her fav songs. Finally she admitted to us that the lyrics were dreamy and absurd and started to laugh with us. We let up a little then.
… decades later, my younger brother and I walked in Manhattan, with Dad (Mom was no longer alive), down Fifth Avenue I think, one Thanksgiving weekend with Dad around midnight on a cold cold night, singing that song and some others of those songs to him. By then, he loved it that we knew the words and would sing them; and we still sang badly, but with love.
@DVDBZN
Re link you mean the Edith Piaf song right? Gimme a sec.
Edith Piaf - Non, Je ne regrette rien
I don’t know how to post text as a comment instead of an embed.
https ://m. youtube. com/watch?v=Q3Kvu6Kgp88
Remove all the spaces.
@ivannabc As do I. And when in the car, I still almost exclusively listen to classical. Baroque, in particular. I also had Gregorian Chants. I thought I might have been the only one in the world that listened to that, lol.
@DVDBZN fyi, if you click on the bottom right of embedded YouTube videos, it’ll open it up in another page or the app, depending on if you’re on computer or phone (and then what your set preferences are)
@RiotDemon
Test
Ok a semi-colon flunked
The quote “>” flunked.
How does one enter a string as a comment here?
So that if I wanted to post the URL as text rather than an embed, I could do that?
@PlacidPrnguin? Do you know how to do this?
@f00l I think they use url.parse() to determine whether or not a given ‘word’ is a URL, then from there a regex checks whether or not it looks like a YouTube URL. There doesn’t appear to be any inbuilt escape mechanism. The only thing I can possibly think might trick the parser is using some strategically placed otherwise pointless HTML escapes, like (let’s try this): www.google.com
(Edit: haha, nope, good work parser.)
@f00l I’m not sure. Most forums I see, everyone just puts spaces like you did.
https ://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3Kvu6Kgp88
One space after the https
ttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3Kvu6Kgp88
Remove the H
Not sure if that’s useful.
@RiotDemon
That will have to do.
It’s so nice to know that I’m not the only old fart here.
What, no 78’s?
Ya know, 76 is almost 77!
@f00l I have probably a couple feet thick of 78’s, inherited from my dad who was an early hifi fanatic. Those beasts are heavy.
Still have one of his original McIntosh mono tube amps but he got rid of his original Acoustic Research speakers before they could visit our house.
LP’s. I had hundreds of them. I still do.
When 8-tracks came out, they were just for my vehicle, amazing that you could play music you picked out in your car!! WOW!
I also have over a hundred 10" shellac country-western records.
Vinyl. But our original stereo record player also handled the 78RPM records (probably shellac) my Mom and Dad had, which were fun when we were kids. Scratchy though, and sadly they did not survive storage after we moved out. A newer stereo system also had an 8-track player but mostly Mom and Dad songs; Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Andy Williams, not anything we liked.
And somewhere I still have my 45 single of “Walk Like a Tarkanian” by 911. It was big when I was there… I hope its not in hot storage…
@duodec
Your parents’ taste was similar to much of what I heard before we youth got our own turntables.
Thank you, Beatles and Stones and Who and Led Zep and Doors and Dylan and Beach Boys and Hendrix and Deep Purple and Creedence and Steppenwolf and Janis and Iron Butterfly and …
/giphy "doors of perception"
/image fisher price turntable
I still have a lot of 45s in a little brown carrying case because we all carried them to each others’ houses to party.
Looks like 30-40% of us are old dogs or approaching.
Not sure it was my first vinyl but it was the first one worn out… and subsequently the first Master Disc I bought…
@RedOak this one is in my quite selective “classic albums” playlist
@RedOak Christmas with The Chipmunks was the first album I wore out. Not sure how my jazz-loving parents could stand it
@compunaut Me too! I got the Chipmunks Christmas record (it was a red LP) in the early 60’s and played it… and played it… and played it… It strangely disappeared one day. No one could find it! lol…
@daveinwarsh @compunaut “Alvin, Alvin!”
@RedOak
@daveinwarsh
@compunaut
“Alvin, Alvin!”
“Want a plane that loops the loop”
“I still want my hula hoop!”
/youtube chipmunks Christmas
Not just radio. AM radio. WABC New York.
@Sarahsda Me too… And Cousin Brucie got his career resurrected on satellite radio. I listen to him on Saturdays. Blast from the past.
@lseeber So right. Lived near Hartford so on Friday night somebody would get some beer (we were too young to buy legally) and drive up on a certain hill south of town and just turn on the car radio and listen to Cousin Brucie. Never got hassled by the cops, maybe they decided that if we were so dumb that we couldn’t figure out how to get girlfriends we weren’t really much of a menace to society either.
@Sarahsda Haha… yep… I was over toward Danbury in Bethel. Cops hassled us most of the time. Small town and nothing better for them to do. Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack … the 2 go to’s.
Wtf? Radio is not a recording format!
@OCBill3
It sorta kinda was. First we used reel to reel tape then cassette tapes came around and made it easier. Radio was how you bootlegged music back in the day. I remember waiting for a particular song to play just to record it.
Said 8-track, but really it was about half 8-track and half vinyl. All my parent’s cars had 8-track players and they recorded their vinyl albums to 8-track to bring them along in the car, but we did own several 8-track purchased recordings as well. They also mostly had us listen to the 8-tracks in the house because otherwise we would cause the vinyl records to skip when we bounced around the house.
Of course, by the time I was 6-7 we had modern cassette players in all the cars.
I own Pac Man Fever on vinyl! 33 1/3 RPM.
Also, I have a copy of Tattoo You on 8-track for some reason. Might have been in the quarter bin at a flea market; my 2nd car (well-used) came with an 8-track player.
I used a reel-to-reel tape recorder my dad gave me when I was 8. It lasted 35 years. Lafayette model RK-142, with the “Magic Eye.” Very cool, and probably led to my 27-year career in radio. Oh yeah, there were some 45’s too…
@MrNews spent many many hours goofing around with a SONY TC-353, including playing the tapes of us backward and at chipmunks speed. Then, to record music on the radio. Still have it in the basement. Wonder whether it still works?
My father managed a vending machine company when I was young, which included jukeboxes. I would get vinyl 45’s when they were pulled from the inventory. I must have had 300-400 of them. My ex-wife worked for a record distributor, we had over 1000 vinyl albums. So, vinyl. (I still have an old Gerrard turntable)
@olperfesser hah! Fond memories, sorta. I think my first turntable was a crappy Garrad like the following. Couldn’t wait to replace it with a nicer Technics and Sure V15 cartridge.
Generally, cassettes, but records were still popular and I bought them until CDs killed them off.
Given the tremendous number of people who said Vinyl, I can’t tell if it’s because meh is primarily the “hipster” folk or because meh is just filled with the wizened members of another time…
@123abc988 number two, we are all just number two
@123abc988 Ditto… number 2.
For me, it was a combination of records, cassettes, radio, 8-tracks, and CDs. We had a very eclectic set of music playing devices. The mid-late 80s was kind of weird in the media department, anyway.
I never “got into music” as many people have. Music is important to me and I definitely have strong likes and dislikes, but I can’t talk about performers and there are few performers whose whole catalogue I enjoy. Evidently I have decent taste as my guests and audiophile friends compliment me on my party mp3 playlist, which contains some uncommon fare. Anyway, the earliest music I recall enjoying was my dad’s LP collection of 50’s rock, Gene Autry, Nat King Cole, Burl Ives and some classical stuff. I blew out every set of speakers my dad ever had with Also Sprach Zarathustra, that piece had to be played big. The first album I ever bought with my own money was from a TV ad, it had a lot of songs in the vein of The Night Chicago Died. In my teens I won a local rock radio contest for 50 records, I went down to the station and they opened their library and said “go for it”. I told the DJs I didn’t own any and really didn’t know what was good and asked them to pick for me, and they had a good old time picking me out a foundation library. I think I ended up with about 70 records, many of them still considered classics. I still have most of them.
33rpm, some 78rpm and 45’s. And skips & scratches. And a portable record player!
Me, too. All of the above.
I used to carry around a giant-ass CD book with me on my way to and from high school, back around the turn of the 21st century. I lusted after the iPod when it came out, but my first MP3 player was one of those hybrid MP3/CD players, so I would burn all my er… “legally acquired” MP3s to CDs and switch those out until I got my first iPod
I also have a turntable, a tube amp, and a small vinyl collection, for when I want to do serious listening.
My first album was More of the Monkees. I was only five so if I wanted to hear it I had to beg my dad to play it on his Hi-Fi. Then I got in to the Partridge Family. At some point I got my own self-contained record player. I owned Aja by Steely Dan when I was nine. But what changed everything was when someone gave me The Beatles’ red album for my tenth birthday.
It was all vinyl until I started to drive. Then I’d transfer my albums to cassette to listen to in the car. Started out with TDK SA-90s then switched to Maxell XLII-S. I had one of those cassette holders that looked like a briefcase. But I still bought everything on vinyl. Which turned out to be smart. I still have all the vinyl. Including the very battered More of the Monkees.
@SSteve The album to cassette technology curve rings very familiar. 'Cause the only way to beautiful sound was vinyl, right?
And cassettes were for convenience and/or preserving the vinyl when wanting to reply endlessly, not for music fidelity.
But I recall the TDI vs Maxwell thing to be fighting words. Pure Maxwell for me, eventually leading to metal grade tapes in the quest for 20-20kHz…
(apologies for the Maxell typo/phone autocorrect/senility. Did it twice so it might be the latter.)
@RedOak
Always blame both autocorrect and senility. Very important.
It’s double converage for your ass, plus it’s bad karma for them if others others blame you.
Plus, ya know, dem facts. Facts is good.
/giphy facts
@f00l
W i s d o m - - - ^
I had a few “inherited” 8-tracks from my older brother & sisters (Queen, Boston, etc.) but for me, growing up in the 80’s, I was all about the cassette mainly for the portability. I can’t tell you how many 60,90, & 120 minute cassette tapes I acquired over the years from '80 to '86. I’d almost always purchase new LP’s by my favorite artists (KISS, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax were a few of my favorites) then x-fer over to cassette.
I went off to school after graduating, and was just fascinated by this new invention…the compact disc. We had a local distributor (Team Electronics) who was selling this new magical device as a component that would work with my existing stereo, for the uber-low price of $600! Needless to say, a college student working for $1.75/Hr + tips, could not come up with that kind of scratch, so I started a payment plan with the manager of the store and paid anywhere from $5 to $10 per paycheck. About a year later, I was getting close to being able to actually purchase my compact disc player, when the store went out of business…and all the money I had given them was GONE. I had even bought a couple CD’s just dreaming about how great they were going to sound…Jimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced” and the 4th Led Zeppelin record being my “crown jewels”…and to have that happen, it was nothing short of devastation!!
With the help of my great parents, combined with the ever downward spiraling of costs of the players, I was able to purchase a player a couple years later (pretty sure they were down to around $250) and I was in heaven!
@tohar1 lesson learned here… Put money in a jar, when saving up, instead of giving it to the store.
I was a vinyl guy and pretty much skipped 8-track and only listened to cassettes that I had recorded myself (not so much mixed tapes, but entire recorded albums) to listen into my car.
I remember when CDs came out, I actually started buying discs nearly a year before I owned a CD player. I wanted to make sure when I finally bought a CD player, I had enough of a collection that I was going to burn myself out on one or two CDs that were all I could afford at the time I purchased the player.
AM radio.
There’s been some neurology research on the different ways the brain responds to whether incoming sound is analog or digital. People unconsciously know this as they describe the technical accuracy of CDs or how moved they are by analog music. No wonder live performances are so popular and vinyl seems to be coming back into favor.
@spiralroad
Did not know, but seems reasonable.
/image “doors of perception”
Uh most vinyl is pressed from digital masters.
@cranky1950 Well, most new vinyl, yes. That said, I don’t think it really matters whether the master was digital or analog, as long as it’s mastered for the limitations of the vinyl format.
At least, I feel that way for new music. I’m extremely wary of buying reissues of older albums on vinyl, however. I’d rather track down a vintage LP with the original vinyl mastering than some hack job remaster that was only pressed to vinyl to sell to the kids who don’t know any better.
TL;DR - New vinyl of new music good. Old vinyl of old music good. New vinyl of old music, not so much.
@sanspoint ^---- That.
Because, lets face it, modern ears (the iPod and later generations) have been trained to compressed music due to early storage limits, right?
What sounds “natural” now is different from what sounded natural in the vinyl era.
@RedOak I think you’re conflating two kinds of compression. Audio compression, in terms of MP3s and M4As is removing frequencies outside of average human hearing. In a double-blind test, most people can’t determine the difference between a well-encoded high-bitrate (192kbps and up) MP3 and a lossless file.
Then there’s Dynamic Range Compression, which is a mastering technique that adjusts the dynamic range of audio so that the quiet parts and the loud parts don’t have as much range between them. This makes the song sound louder and punchier, but also kind of flat. That’s what’s really hurting modern music, and why so many shitty modern remasters of old music sound so shitty.
(Addendum: I collect concert bootlegs, and typically keep them in lossless FLAC format, not because of the extra fidelity, but because it’s better for archival and CD-burning purposes. Any bootleg that goes into my regular listening gets converted to a v0 MP3, and I can’t tell the difference, even on good headphones.)
@sanspoint OK. Sound things are less musical.