| Yes, and no. I'm an early adopter of technology that I see as viable for my lifestyle, so I'm no old fogy wishing for an idealistic past. I started with vinyl when singles cost US .79 cents, LP's 1.99, because other than the radio, music was only available that way unless you had the money to buy expensive reel-to-reel tapes and the exorbitantly priced tape recorder/player. Vinyl was fragile and a bit of a hassle to deal with if one wanted to keep them in near pristine condition, but the process of removing the LP from the protective sleeves and without touching the groove sides, flip it over between my open palms and place it on the turntable then lowering the tonearm into the entry groove was an exquisite tactile experience to be sure, like a smooth dance move. And the album artwork and bonus gate-fold sleeves with additional information about the record and band made the minor hassles worth the efforts. When cassettes were introduced I didn't like the loss of audio quality, but due to their size and robustness as a storage medium they truly made music "portable" like in no other time in history, and with the advent of consumer affordable in-car cassette players in the mid 70's the sales exploded and they became ubiquitous. Despite the drawback of having tiny nearly unreadable "album" artwork, they were so much easier to manage and store, plus opening the polystyrene cases and slotting them into the player had it's own subtle tactile appeal. But one had to de-Gauss the playback head occasionally, and regularly clean the head and capstans on the player with isopropyl alcohol as early tape formulations shed the iron oxide coating, degrading the tape and playback experience, muddy, muffled highs anyone? The CD changed everything yet again with slightly larger "album" artwork and a case that initially took awhile to figure out how to open until one got the hang of it, and with proper handling the poly-carbonate CD disc's were much more damage resistant than vinyl. Again, the process of opening the CD case, extracting the disc with two fingers on the edges and placing it into the tray and later on, slot, also made for an enjoyable haptic ritual of sorts. The Mini Disc was a failure from the start, media was expensive, players were expensive and the benefits were not worth the effort to pursue. I still have a sealed copy of Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust that I bought in 1987 and I never played because the player prices never dropped to a level I found acceptable. Digitally available music ruined it for me, and aside from the total loss of "album" artwork and such, the mp3 CODEC delivered garbage sound quality on a well thought out sound system. Thankfully, I quickly discovered .flac so the audio quality issue was resolved, but finding the music in my extensive multi genera library was/is a hassle. I've never found a music manager that I like, and of course, digital music has zero tactile feeling unless you count mouse clicking and keystrokes, which I don't. So I hope I live long enough to see the next big change in media and hopefully I'll like it better than the what I see in the clunky present. |