I’ve come full circle as I still use tape now, a Studer A70! Making tape loops, warming up recordings – I love the tactileness of handling and manipulating tha tape.

I still have an old deck plus an early 80’s Walkman which looks totally rad. I grew up with the Aiwa and Panasonic ones, I kept losing or breaking them, still have the Panny. and many tapes.

I also liked Minidisc.

But I always look at the other side too ..how it made music much more available to people without funds. A good parallel for these dark times.

There is a certain point at which a compact cassette runs out of dynamic and frequency range – although when those cassettes were new and well-made, they actually did reasonably well. (The same could be said of something like MP3 – just substitute “high bitrate” for “clean.”)

If you really want to compensate for low-fidelity devices, to some extent you’re going to try to preserve the range of the recording. A squashed recording is going to sound even worse on the low-fidelity gizmo.

And anyway, yes, in turn we can go back to transistor radios that had a two decade headstart on the Walkman.

…and so on and so forth to the dawn of recording and jukeboxes, which did indeed have some hand in killing live music, or to the piano roll and music notation, which helped generate piracy.

…in another life, I lasted about 15 minutes as a star au rock, and spent, excuse me, wasted time with various rock denizens, including members of a band from Rockford IL who had recorded a popular lp in Japan, and whose manager also happened to manage the mess I labored in. Upon greeting the Huntz Hall like geetarist on his return from the mysterious East one day in 1979, I happened to notice a set of miniature headphones connected to a shiny little box..”Ricky”, I inquired, “wha the heck you got now”? “Walkman, we got em in Tokyo” was the explanation. Of course I was very jealous, and soon had my own lofi awful sounding appliance as well, all the better to listen to Weather Report on.

I am bringing this up to help illustrate one of those “hizztery b repeating” things..with the recent rightful backlash against blocked out, dynamics-less “music” being made and abetted by the advance of mp3’s, I would direct your attention to what was the beginning of the tragedy, the subject of Peter’s fine blog..the Sony Walkman. Engineers of the day, FINE engineers with good ears who spent weeks slaving over sonic details were appalled by the noise these devices were making, and by the true damage done to their mixes. YOU kiddies know how good a vinyl mix done properly sounds…but put that same beautiful mix on a cassette…whadda ya gots baby? And as the popularity of these awful trash compactors grew, and the Whirl got used to “the Walkman Sound”..engineers began to mix things so they sounded good on them, to the supreme insult and eq battering of real mixes..and that was the start of the end…which is still slip sliding away into digitally maxxed out mp3 land.

As a side note, it’s interesting that Ronald Reagan became preznint at the same time (1980), thus starting the slide of ‘merika into the shitter as well, but that’s another blog..

I like lofi as much as anyone here, maybe more..but I also like real mixes with real dynamics and real range too.

ok, back to playing with the great grandkids.