Puzzle Description:

Just after I finished transferring all my vinyl records to cassette tapes (yeah, I knew better than to trust 8-tracks) Compact Discs came along. After converting my cassette collection to CDs I hear about something called MP3. Now that I have all my old music stored on the computer, my 19 year old son tells me vinyl records are the future of music.

#1: Norma Dee (norm0908) on Jul 29, 2013

20/20 hindsight, huh? The things we wish we had kept if we had only known.:)

Well one good thing is that I don't have to decide what songs to listen to. With all that re-recording the quality is so bad I can't tell my Frank Zappa from my Frank Sinatra.

Now, that's bad.

Yeah, I was going to say something about the generation loss you must be dealing with... first copy is usually fine, depending on your hearing, but copies of copies of copies usually sound pretty awful.

Now, that said, your son is somewhat mistaken. They are not the future of music; higher and higher quality of digital is the future, but the real audiophiles are never going to let vinyl die; it's the last bastion of analog audio.

The usual complaints about digital audio are kind of ridiculous with the modern music people are making; everything is recorded digitally now anyway, so you're not actually losing the warmth in your digital copy anymore. The argument makes a lot more sense when you're talking about converting your 70s collection over. The current trend of digitally remastering old recordings is great for the masses but really frustrating for the people who miss the warmth of an analog recording.

Wombat is right,the future is in high quality digital and engineers are making great progress daily,however as someone who has had the pleasure of hearing vinyl records spinning on a high quality turntable and a tube amplifier,I have to say that I prefer the sound of analogue. There is a resurgence in vinyl records right now and a lot of it is do too teenagers and young adults discovering analogue and buying records. I think analogue will hang on for a long time still,but ultimately digital will win out. Nice puzzle Dave.:)

Yeah, Alex likes messin' with me (his sense of humor is nearly as warped as mine). Truth is, I sure like the convienence of digital formats (I have yet to scratch, smudge or warp any of my mp3s) and instead of actually converting A to D, I just buy digital downloads of my favorite oldies. Since I've been called just about everything EXCEPT an audiophile, I'm mighty content with "square wave" music even when compared to analog.

Thanks Al & Wom.

hey.... frisbees ahoy

We used to use them for BB gun targets when I was a kid - Boy, did that make my mom mad.

Remember when people would heat them and fold up the sides to make snack bowls?

SNACK BOWLS! I tried making them into soup bowls and it never quite worked out.

Yeah. The soup kept leaking out of that hole in the bottom.

45s are the WORST!

Right you are. I remember when I became the proud owner of a Dave Brubeck album on green 45's which I had high hopes of becoming a lucrative collector's item, but walked into the living room to find my toddler son using them to "sandpaper" the wall. :)

Well that's just silly. Your son should have known that Brubeck's music is smooooth . .

Oy, to the puns *and* the treatment of vinyl records.

See #16342 for some Brubeck. :)

My dad lamented a couple of years ago that his record collection would probably be worth a lot of money now if my youngest brother hadn't used them to surf down the stairs when he was small.

I thought 45's were better than sliced bread when they first came out. easy to carry ...kept a thingie in my pocket in case no one had a spindle.

Had forgotten about the thingy.

I actually put a thingy in the puzzle (it's the square in the lower right area). You guys probably had round 45 adapters, but we were so poor growing up we could only afford a square one AND I had to share it with my sister.

Now, that's poor. Just a square thingy and you had to share it with your SISTER?

pretty poor

Agree, #6. You can't beat the teeny size and indestructability of mp3, but also playing vinyl through a McIntosh system with Bose speakers is chocolate for the ears!

McIntosh system with Bose speakers? Ferrari engine in a school bus :P

Goto next topic

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