Music over the last 40 years

1975: Put needle on record. Listen to your favorite song.

1985: Put cassette in stereo. Maybe fast forward or rewind a bit. Listen to your favorite song.

1995: Put CD in stereo. Read error. Maybe clean laser lens. Maybe clean disc. Maybe wait for anti-shock to re-buffer. Listen to your favorite song.

2005: Download mp3. Download player. Update player. Reboot computer. Update player again. Reboot computer again. Corrupted download. Download again. Find out bitrate is disgustingly low. Download a higher-bitrate version. Listen to your favorite song.

2019: Enter song in YouTube. Cast it via Wifi to your TV. Nothing happens. Restart TV. Restart browser. Go back to YouTube. Cast it to your TV again. Nothing. Hard-reboot everything. Restart router and Wifi. Restart browser. Restart YouTube. Enter song again. Nothing. Restart TV. Restart browser. Go back to YouTube. 20 minutes later you finally get YouTube to cast a video to your TV but there's a huge "error" message across the screen. Restart this, restart that. Eventually go to bed and dream about dragging your record player out of the garage.

I've never been without a turntable since 1975. And 20 years ago went back to tube driven receivers/amps.

2019: shout at your watch or truck a bit, immediately stream desired song. It's the London live version not the NYC bootleg, but you don't mind very much.

I have always been slow to adopt 'new' music technology. That seems kind of strange as along with my many other character flaws. I am a musician. I can't help but laugh when I see the wheel come full circle. Vinyl is once again the hot, happening deal. I think that band with the flower pot hats was right. We are devolving.

Jim

I'm insulted that you left out 8-track tapes! Were deprived as a child?

"She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah! She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah! sssssss GUH-JING sssssss "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeeaaaahhh!"

Either you have had terrible luck with your computer and your TV, or you're just being funny. I'll assume you don't go through that headache every time you want to listen to music in 2019.

It could easily be changed to...

muddymooose said:

1975: Put needle on record.

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Realize it sounds like chipmunks singing, turn speed from 78 to 45, hear horrible quality music, check needle and realize it's worn out and needs to be changed, no new needles in the house, drive to record store, punk working is high and doesn't know where needles are, get needle from other record store and go home, change needle, put needle on record, sounds horrible so you look and see scratches on record, drive back to record store to buy another copy, drive home, put new record on turntable, put new needle on record, listen to your favorite song.

Bat-mite said:

I'm insulted that you left out 8-track tapes! Were deprived as a child?

"She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah! She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah! sssssss GUH-JING sssssss "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeeaaaahhh!"

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Yup.. fast-forward (you can't rewind) and HOPE that you can find the song. That and the much larger form factor than cassettes (you ever seen an 8-track player in a car?) led to a quick and well deserved death.

I got a turntable for Christmas. I love it.
I also have Amazon music and Pandora so I can listen to pretty much whatever I want in my vehicles. It's crazy simple, can't find the song I want, I YouTube it. Still works great.

Yes..I have seen 8 tracks in vehicles, it was common. When my folks bought their current home 20 or so years ago, in the attic was a box full of the car units.

You could also get a turntable in your car.

cerving said:

you ever seen an 8-track player in a car?

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we did.. Drove all over New Hampshire & Vermont listening to groovy sounds on 8-track

A few gaps in the sequence: I had (still have, in fact) Sony MiniDisc recorder -- because magneto-optical is the future (c. 1995).

I may also, at one point, have owned a digital compact cassette recorder. (if I still have it, it is in storage next to my Ronco Record Vac).

Also, sometime around the turn of the century, it might have been: Download Shankly's compilation from The Pirate Bay. Run the batch converter to get from ogg-vorbis to AIFF. Try to figure out why the one track you wanted is unplayable unless you transcode it to WAV. End up running a patch cord from the speaker output to the audio input on your beige Mac G3 (with the AV personality card) and re-digitizing the track to get into a format that will burn to a CD so that you can play it in your car...)

Mushtang said:

Realize it sounds like chipmunks singing, turn speed from 78 to 45, hear horrible quality music, check needle and realize it's worn out and needs to be changed, no new needles in the house, drive to record store, punk working is high and doesn't know where needles are...

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For me it was more like -- get upsold on a cartridge with a diamond stylus, osmium-steel cantilever, cobalt magnet, and silicated copper coils -- and buy it just to give the hiss and pop suppressor in the pre-amp something to do <smile>.

I have had some version of this

https://www.elpj.com/ltfeaturesandspecs/lt-master/

on my Christmas list every year since 1997. So far, nobody has loved me enough to buy it for me.

cerving said:

Yup.. fast-forward (you can't rewind) and HOPE that you can find the song. That and the much larger form factor than cassettes (you ever seen an 8-track player in a car?) led to a quick and well deserved death.

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Quick death? How old are you? 8-tracks had a 12-15 year run, from the mid 60's until the late 70's. Ford made 8-track players available in the 1965 Mustang and Thunderbird. And cassettes weren't a competing format; they were a successor, just as CDs succeeded them.

A little trivia: 1988's Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits is generally considered to be the last album to be released on 8-track.

Just curious, does any old timers here remember 4-track tapes? They had a very short life in the 60's until 8-tracks succeeded them.

My folks had a rell-to-reel four-track recorder. It had three speeds, and I discovered that I could do covers of Dave Seville and the Chipmunks by recording my vocals at two different speeds.

Bat-mite said:

My folks had a rell-to-reel four-track recorder. It had three speeds, and I discovered that I could do covers of Dave Seville and the Chipmunks by recording my vocals at two different speeds.

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You are talking about a device which allows you to meld different recording channels (tracks) into one inter-mixed recording. I'm talking about formats which describes the number of tracks, or programs, on a tape. 4 tracks equal to two programs because of stereo. The photo below demonstrates the 4-track of which I speak:

If you are the least bit interested in recording formats, this is an extremely interesting page on the subject:

History of Audio Formats

There's nothing like the oldies. From 1956, ancient Krell music:

Speaking of oldies, this is the good stuff.




And, if you are a King's X fan, you have to admit that Doug and company did some heavy lifting from this song.

muddymooose said:

... Hard-reboot everything. Restart router and Wifi. Restart browser. Restart YouTube. Enter song again. Nothing. Restart TV...

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Man-oh-man, I'm laughing so hard - I got tears in my eyes! What I can't figure out is -how you are able to see inside my house?!?

Sometimes casting just works at my house - but most times - not so much.

sooooo - just to check how accurate this is today. One click to open the new tab, type "House of t" chrome autofills "House of the Rising Sun". Hit enter. The video is at the top of the page. Click Play then click "Cast" and guess what happens...

I'll be back on TRF in about 3 hours, I'm streaming oldies right now.

Mushtang said:

Either you have had terrible luck with your computer and your TV, or you're just being funny. I'll assume you don't go through that headache every time you want to listen to music in 2019.

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Yeah I was just being facetious. Mostly. Casting YouTube from my phone to my TV is pretty slick most of the time, but there's that 25-30% of the time where it just doesn't want to work. What makes me laugh in frustration is the fact that we keep getting cool new features, but they often seem to be more problematic than the older, simpler features. You'd think if we could get a phone to tell a router to tell a TV to play a video we'd have also nailed it down in regards to simplicity and reliability, but no.

scsager said:

Man-oh-man, I'm laughing so hard - I got tears in my eyes! What I can't figure out is -how you are able to see inside my house?!?

Sometimes casting just works at my house - but most times - not so much.

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Glad I'm not the only one!

Bat-mite said:

I'm insulted that you left out 8-track tapes! Were deprived as a child?

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I was born in 1976, so I grew up on vinyl in the early 80s and then cassettes in the late 80s. Totally missed out on the 8-track fun.

A curious thing to me....

I've found that the VAST majority of music that really catches my attention in the last couple of years are things that I've happened upon in some way or another on YouTube. Some of it is brand new, and some of it is stuff that's been out for a few years but I'd missed, and some of it is rare oldies that never made it to any commercial release back in the time. Most of the time it's live performances that aren't released any other way. Sometimes there are recordings that I used to have on vinyl or cassette that were never released digitally (or that I've not been able to find), but someone/somewhere uploaded their own copy as a YouTube video. I end up burning the audio into an Mp3 and adding it to my collection that way.

More curious is that a lot (perhaps most) of the time this is a common occurrence: I'll find a raw live video performance of an artist I'd never heard of. Sometimes the production value is pretty high, but sometimes it's very raw. I'll be intrigued and search for more from the artist, and will often find other similar, really great songs...again usually raw live performances. Then I'll decide to check out their actual commercial/studio releases. And..........when I do I find myself thoroughly unimpressed. So, even though I'd like to actually support the artist by purchasing their commercial releases, I find that I really don't like any of them, and sometimes I REALLY don't like them.

Then there's NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts (or Live From Here). Again, which I access via YouTube. Some absolutely outstanding performances there that I often vastly prefer over the studio/commercial versions from the same artists.

There ARE some artists that have commercial (usually digital download) releases of the music that I first discovered on video (like Postmodern Jukebox, Brass Against, Vulfpeck/Fearless Flyers, etc.), but again, YouTube was the gateway to discovery for me.

It should be noted that I don't use/"do" Spotify, Pandora, or any other streaming/cloud type music service. And I'm "of a certain age" where I've lived through all the vinyl/cassette/8-track/CD/mini-disc/Mp3/etc. eras over the years (I used to have a vinyl collection that numbered in the thousands). But for what it's worth, my main access to recorded music these days is via YouTube.

s6

Not long ago an old high school buddy reminded me of the time when we were driving somewhere, fiddling endlessly with an old Pioneer Supertuner cassette stereo, and a look came over my (already) glazed eyes, and I looked at him and said, "Someday, music will be on little computer chips (this was like 1977, keep in mind) and you'll just plug them into your car, and you'll have all your music right there..."

He probably thought I was nuts.

Today I have a little, tiny white Samsung chip that has over 400 full CD's representing six decades worth of music, all in high-quality, lossless compression FLAC digital files, plugged into my car stereo. It's so small it's hard to handle if you have big fingers and I never remove it for fear of losing it. I just leave my stereo on 'Shuffle' and I rarely hear the same song twice for months - no commercials, no static, no scratches or clicks - just all of my favorite music ripped in high quality from Red Book mastered CDs.


As a trained audio recording engineer I could go on and on about why CD digitally recorded and played music is technically superior in every possible way that one can quantify the relative quality of recorded music (other than rare hi-res digital formats taken directly from source material), but all I can say is this: While most of the music of today is truly awful, we have never been so lucky to have the listening options that we do today; today's accessibility to high quality/quantity music reproduction is nothing short of stunning. (I'm talking source material, not streaming, of course).

I'm going to take him a copy of my chip this summer

Raindog said:

Quick death? How old are you? 8-tracks had a 12-15 year run, from the mid 60's until the late 70's. Ford made 8-track players available in the 1965 Mustang and Thunderbird. And cassettes weren't a competing format; they were a successor, just as CDs succeeded them.

A little trivia: 1988's Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits is generally considered to be the last album to be released on 8-track.

Just curious, does any old timers here remember 4-track tapes? They had a very short life in the 60's until 8-tracks succeeded them.

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8-tracks (invented by Bill Lear of Lear Jet fame) were far superior to the Phillips Cassette in every way, sound-wise, but they were big and road vibration weakened the transport mechanism (ergo the matchbook shim). Cassettes were, literally, disposable music, as they started to shed the microscopic flakes of oxides that produced the highest frequencies. That's why they sounded dull after a while.

it's sad that the music industry sacrificed sound quality for ease of transport and cost savings, but I think we'll come full circle again, and high fidelity music reproduction will make a comeback. We just have to wait for Rap and Metal to die, first...

I still have a Sharp vertical play turntable:



Plays both sides without removing the vinyl by using a stylus for each side and reversing the motor. Last used it about a decade ago. Also had track search that used opto reflection of the gap to find the gap, rewind a bit, mute until the quiet bit, then unmute. Clever. Never had troubles of it not booting...

OverTheTop said:

I still have a Sharp vertical play turntable:

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That's got to be quite a collector's item by now!

Someone actually made a programmable turntable once that would play different tracks in different orders on different LPs. You would stack them up, and it would lower (or raise) the LP and optically find the appropriate track by scanning the surface for the inter-track lead-in. It cost some huge amount of money and probably broke easily. Kinda like the massive Pratt & Whitney R-4360 piston engine just before turboprops came out

Curtis Enlow said:

it's sad that the music industry sacrificed sound quality for ease of transport and cost savings, but I think we'll come full circle again, and high fidelity music reproduction will make a comeback. We just have to wait for Rap and Metal to die, first...

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The main reason for the matchbook trick was because too much of a too heavy cartridge hung out of your stereo with nothing to support it. Its why you got the "wrabbles" every time that you hit a big bump or hole. And don't be so quick to dismiss rap and metal. I hate most rap but it has influenced music in a few positive ways. As for metal, its been around since 1970, almost 50 years, and gotten many a young man through life and in to adulthood. There are many metal songs that have become mainstream or popularize. For example:

Oh, I don't mind Sabbath, and I still upset my neighbors with concert-level playbacks of 'Montrose' from time to time, but...Post-Grunge Industrial Speed Swedish Death Metal...? And Rap today: Most of the 'artists' have no idea what the song is going to actually sound like after they lay down a VOX track and leave the studio, because the Producer 'writes' the song and performs it on programmable keys, synths and sequencers, and then puts his name on it, all to save the Label from having to pay band members and full song writing royalties(!). Instead of sending A&R people out to find talent, they simply bring in rooms of people and do marketing tests: "What sounds better to you? This beat? Or this one? This style of lyric? Or this one?" (Exactly like an optician does). Then they create a 'formula' and write songs according to their findings, reducing music to the most primal emotional pieces. 'New Country' does the exact same thing and this is a prime example of modern music production formula:



My training was in studio music recording, but after I learned how rotten-to-the-core the music business is today I opted to specialize in audio for video & film. I love music; music is my life, and don't get me wrong, there are some amazing artists out there today, but there's a reason that most pop music today is awful.

Bat-mite said:

I'm insulted that you left out 8-track tapes! Were deprived as a child?

"She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah! She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah! sssssss GUH-JING sssssss "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeeaaaahhh!"

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I remember my buddies bought the 1st Boston album on 8-track. They also bought Kansas , Point of Know Return, etc. We all listened to them so much they got worn out and they had to buy a second copy.
Me, that's why I never bought into 8-tracks. Around '78 I bought a bunch of home stereo equipment from Radio Shack, high end cassette recorder and lots of Maxell blank tapes. (The cassettes you bought with pre-recorded music were poor recordings compared what you could do yourself. The tape material was cheap.)
Copied a bunch of my albums.
Everyone had Craig or other nice units in the car with 6x9s.
Me, bought a Pioneer super tuner, grafted to a 40 watt amp from Radio Shack.
6x9s? Nope, took the back side panels out of my Honda Civic, made plywood panels to mount 10" woofers, tweeters in the back, again from "The Shack"
Best sound you ever heard for 1978.

Curtis Enlow said:

As a trained audio recording engineer I could go on and on about why CD digitally recorded and played music is technically superior in every possible way that one can quantify the relative quality of recorded music

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What are your thoughts on CD music only recording between 20 hz and 20,000 hz in order to save space on the disc, due to the human ear not being able to hear outside this range? I've heard people say part of the reason that vinyl sounds better is music outside that range that we can still feel even though we cannot hear them, and it gives the sound the impression of being fuller. I'm not sure if I believe that or not but it seems reasonable.

Mushtang said:

What are your thoughts on CD music only recording between 20 hz and 20,000 hz in order to save space on the disc, due to the human ear not being able to hear outside this range? I've heard people say part of the reason that vinyl sounds better is music outside that range that we can still feel even though we cannot hear them, and it gives the sound the impression of being fuller. I'm not sure if I believe that or not but it seems reasonable.

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As someone who owns approximately 500-800 records (used to be a rave dj and also collect some classic vinyl), I can definitely say that vinyl is not "better" in any objective sense. What it is is that it's sound reproduction is not as accurate as a CD, so it imparts some distortion that is considered pleasing to the ear. Most people favor vinyl records as a combination between the tactile sense and also nostalgia. You also have to include that vinyl as a physical medium degrades very quickly with multiple playbacks.


As for the hearing range, blind tests have shown that people cannot hear the difference between a square wave and a sine wave above 20k (maybe 22khz for people who have super hearing). Anything beyond this is more marketing than anything else. Below 20hz is really more into "feeling" than "hearing" as the frequency is so low.

djs said:

As someone who owns approximately 500-800 records (used to be a rave dj and also collect some classic vinyl), I can definitely say that vinyl is not "better" in any objective sense.

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I had a little over 2200 albums that took up two walls in my living room. I had lugged them from the US to the UK and then to the Philippines (military.) When CDs became mainstream (around 1985) I sold them to a DJ in Manila with the proviso that I could pull 100 out of the collection. I almost cried when he took them away but I had so much more space. Much of what I had sold had been recorded to reel tape or cassette and it gave me a reason to start buying CDs. Now, I've just finished doing it again. I ripped all my music to a Plex server and have it backed up (along with all my movies) onto a drobo unit with 48tb worth of hard drives, raided for dual-disc redundancy. It would take three simultaneous hard drive failures to kill it. Not saying that it can't happen but the chances are really slim. I need to keep a copy off-site in case of fire. Otherwise, I think that I'll be passing on my media to my granddaughter, if the format doesn't become unreadable by then.

BTW, does everyone remember their first foray into a new format? My first CD was Dire Strait's Brothers In Arms. It was a totally digital product (not analog to digital conversion) and it totally blew me away. I purchased Madonna's Like A Virgin for my then-wife and, again, what a clear sound! I think that was the motivation to move away from vinyl. That and convenience.