Where will you get your music?

Technology and Music

In 1988, as I was preparing to move to North Carolina, I sold my large Sony reel to reel tape recorder.  For years I had longed to have a reel to reel, a sign of a true audiophile, only to realize it was a pain in the ass. I spent hours taping albums to reel to reel only to never have occation to play them.  But it looked damn good in my rack!

At the time I had hundreds of vinyl long play records.  As a fourteen year old, I worked at Bill Post's APCO station for $1.25/hour.  Over the next three years I would spend every dime on records.  It started in 1968 at Clark's Discount in Shawnee, Oklahoma I bought my first real, non-cut out*, album, Bob Dylan's "John Wesley Harding."  I would go on to own his entire catalog, both in vinyl and CD.

While living in North Carolina, in 1990, vinyl records of new releases were becoming hard to fine.  I was a stick in the mud, resisting the switch over to the compact disc.  Once the decision was made, I drove to Spartanburg, South Carolina to a new discount electronics chain, Leshmires, to buy an Onkyo compact disc player.  My first compact disc was Bob Dylan's "O Mercy."  Then began the long process of replicating my entire vinyl collection into CD’s.

I eventually decommissioned my $400 Hardin Karmon turntable.  An expensive piece of audio equipment when bought in 1984.

Over the next twenty seven years, I would acquire over fifteen hundred compact discs.  During my music travels in the mid-nineties, I would be able to have over one hundred autographed.

Recently, our last two compact disc players gave out.  You can't buy a single disc player these days.  You can go on EBay and shop vintage stereo audio equipment, which I did to replace my AM-FM tuner.  I am still old fashioned running a total component system, with a Carver amp, NAD preamp and Phase Technology speaker system.  But AM-FM tuners are no long made.

I have one of the best Texas Songwriter and Americana collections and no way to play them.  Not to mention, it's become a pain to sort, play and refile CD's.  How lazy we've become.

Now we see the reemergence of the LP vinyl.  I do own a PROJECT turntable.  A wonderful piece of German engineering.  Since I got married, having all my audio equipment in the living room has been forbidden.  So it sits in the garage.

So on to the next technology.  I set up a Pandora account.  Once I had set up all my "stations" for all the artists in my collection, I bought blue tooth relays for the stereos in the house.  I now get a random selection of my collection without running to the stereo very sixty minutes.

So what's next?  In my life time I have gone from AM radio and 45 records to LP vinyl and FM radio to a brief period of cassettes and the romance of 8 track tapes to compact disc’s and now to total digital.  How will we get our music in the future?  Somehow, I suspect Apple will play a role.

*cut-outs records were album that either didn't sell or had flaws and they'd cut a notch out of the cardboard sleeve and discount.  The first album I bought off a cut-out rack was "Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful" which I still have to this day.