Retro

For Christmas, I bought the Spousal Unit a turntable. We're listening now. Seawind. Wow. 

It turns out that we've got a big pile of LPs in the Garage O Plenty and now we are going back in time and recalling all the music of our youth. There's Eric B and Rakim. There's Herbie Hancock Megamix with DST. There's Evelyn Champaign King. We need a Diskwasher and some D3 to clean up the grooves. Meh, isopropyl will do for now.

I've got it running through the phono preamp into my Setton, which is an audiophile integrated amp from the same era. It's quite a trip to hear clicks, pops and watch the labels spinning around. I didn't realize we had so many 12 inch singles.

Let's see here. 
Queen - The Game, a 12 inch 45 rpm single from Art of Noise, an original played only once REM Murmur. Wynton Marsalis' first album 'Think of One'. The original Yellow Magic Orchestra, Malcolm McLaren, Switch - OMG those dudes were ugly. Donna Summer's The Wanderer. Grace Jones - Warm Leatherette, Hiroshima and The Bus Boys - Minimum Wage Rock & Roll. Commodores. 

Half of the trip is seeing the $7.99 price tag on Tom Tom Club from Music Plus. And you can clearly see the quality and thickness of the vinyl is superior for Bobby McFerrin on Blue Note, you can read the lyrics for Walking on the Chinese Wall by Phillip Bailey. Here's the old Stop The Violence sticker on my Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet Limited Edition Rapp Control DJ 3 Album Set.

Hmm, what's this. Jenifa (Taught Me) single. Who knew that De La Soul ever put pictures of people other than themselves on record covers? Here's the Star Wars original soundtrack. There's Whoopi Goldberg's Original Broadway Show Recording. 

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It occurs to me that we pay way too much for hyperrealism. See all this stuff transduced through my stellar electronics but crappy speakers, well I can tell that the old stuff is relatively lo-fi. It's nothing close to the Dolby Surround 3D of Avatar style, but then again neither are my memories. These poppy, crackly, barely stereo recordings are better than my ability to recall any of it, much less transduce my own memories through my crappy vocal chords. It's enough for me to stick a few bits in front of your eyes, say Bobby McFerrin + Robin Williams improvising 'Beverly Hill Blues', and if you ever heard it once, you'd recall it. But playing it on the old turntables brings back all the details even though they are far fewer details than anybody really needs.

These are our cathedrals. They are the digital details of our age. Ornament and filagree. Terabytes of Double Dolby. We don't need all this bandwidth to carry emotion.