The Reluctant Dinosaur

One of my fondest memories from youth is of lying on the rug in front of our old console stereo, listening to records. Our stereo was as long as a sofa, dark wood, modern Danish. It had a fabulously mellow, deep, multi-layered sound -- you could hear each and every instrument so clearly, you felt as if you were in the room while they were recording. The voices, too, resonated with incredibly life-like tone. There were no levers or gauges, or whatever they're called, to balance the sound -- there was no need for them; the sound was automatically and perfectly balanced. True, you sometimes heard a tick-tick-tick as the needle passed over a scratch in the disc, or that crinkly noise when you forgot to clean the disc or needle, but those were only small annoyances. Like someone softly coughing in the theater.

The tonal warmth you get from vinyl discs, of course, was a large factor in my listening pleasure; but the discs have to be played on the right machine. I play my vinyls now on a TEAC shelf system, and they sound shallower and defnitely tinnier they did on our old console. I'm no techno-geek, mind you; in fact, my ignorance in that area is astounding, but I am a musician with over four decades of live performances behind me, so I know true-to-life stereo sound when I hear it. And I ain't hearing it like I used to hear it. When I put on a CD, I hear it even less.

At the moment, I do not own an MP3 or iPod. I suppose owning one sometime down the line is inevitable (or will they, too, soon be obsolete?). However, I'm putting it off for as long as possible, just as I put off using a computer until we were required to do so at work (late '90s), and just as I put off using a cell phone till only a few short years ago (mine is still of the most basic kind). I am indeed a slow-moving and extremely reluctant dinosaur.

Well, this dinosaur has been ordering books and other things online for fifteen years now, joined Facebook in 2009, Twitter a year later, and started blogging just last autumn. So I guess I'll join the music-from-an-Altoid-tin crowd eventually. Meanwhile, I have my vinyls, my TEAC, complete with turntable, my big CD/radio/double-cassette-deck boombox (can ya believe it?), and, yes, my portable CD Walkman.

I also have an Underwood-Olivetti Lettera 22 manual typewriter. And I'll never give that up!