Vinyl is my ex - Part 3. Yes, there were others

Vinyl. I still miss her. The more I think of her and my love of music, the more I miss her. It's not as if I have nothing to do with recorded music. It's not as if I want my collection of music to dwindle and stop expanding. It's not as if I can hear new songs from artists I wasn't aware of and not feel like I need to add to my collection. Yes, I am still seeing recorded music and it's a relationship that I value and one that I just have to nurture. I don't have the ability to walk away from her. No matter how much my enjoyment of recorded music goes on, no matter how much songs move me, Vinyl was the best thing for listening to any of the songs that moved me - and there were many. There are many. There will be many more. There have been others in my love affair with music, there are others, but I guess we just grew apart. I know that sounds cliche, and more than a little lame - but I'm man enough to admit that I was wrong. Cut me some slack there people - in all his coolness, even Fonzie couldn't admit it when he was wrong...well, he could admit it, but he sure couldn't say it.

8 track tapes never held any appeal for me. They couldn't have. Cover art reduced to packaging that demanded it be thrown away, and reduced to a decal on bulky plastic box that was the equivalent of a VCR tape. I didn't spend much time listening to any music in this format, I wouldn't even talk to her, no matter what she had in the way of my favorite artists. My sisters both had 8 track players though, and I always thought they sounded really crappy.

Cassette tapes were another story. The fidelity wasn't as good as Vinyl, she had far less appeal in her liner notes and cover art - which was bad even in my younger days. Liner notes and cover art are things I want to look at and read - and take it all in. It's a bit like the information on medicines as one gets older - a bunch of information that I need to read, crammed into a bunch of fine print that is all but impossible to read without taking off my glasses, putting them back on and trying to manually focus by holding the information in my hand and moving it closer to, or further away from my eyes, walking to various places to find better lighting - It just shouldn't be that difficult to read information that is important. Cassette's virtue was that she allowed me to copy music to take it with me in the car, or get a copy of songs I needed to learn for any of the various bands I played in. A bit like a football player being given a playbook - only much cooler. Yes, I saw Cassettes while I was in a relationship with Vinyl. Vinyl could handle it though, and our relationship never suffered for it - in fact, it brought us closer together. Not the case when I met Compact Disc, temptress that she was.

When Compact Disc first started showing up, she seemed to have everything that a beautiful new girl on campus had going for her. All eyes were on her, that's for sure. It didn't matter how long anyone had been together with Vinyl - most people were drawn to Compact Disc and were more than willing to wine and dine her. My own resistance to her was futile. Looking back on when I first started cheating on Vinyl with Compact Disc, it was an odd mixture of doing something I suspected I shouldn't be doing, yet I wanted to do it. She wasn't coming home with me unless I spent some of my hard earned cash on a component she could play on. When I asked her what was in it for me, there was a touch of arrogance in her reply:

Compact Disc: What's in it for you?? Un-paralleled clarity and sound quality, if you think you can handle that, and you should, if you're half the man of musical taste that you say you are, the ability to control your playback of music via remote control, and you can play the songs in any order you choose to - not just the order that they're on the record in...
Me: Why would I want to do that??
Compact Disc: I can't answer that - but you will from time to time, and that's the kind of feature that will come in handy when you're still going out with Cassette Tape, tramp that she is, I'll let you program the songs that you're going to put on her, so you don't have to get up off your lazy ass to lift the arm from your precious Vinyl, nor lay a hand on Cassette's buttons - you can just record what you need her to have. When you say things like that, it makes me not even want to come over - maybe you need to decide if you actually want to see me, and if you're not going to appreciate the clarity and sound quality that a real music lover should, maybe you're just not all that interested in me and what I can do for your music appreciation.
Me: OK, OK...I'll do it. I'll pop for the expensive player, stop and get some stuff to listen to on my way home - any suggestions?
Compact Disc: I'm not about to tell you what music is important enough to you to enjoy enhanced sound quality and my other good points - figure it out if you're interested.

And so the affair began. I bought a Sony compact disc player and I was immediately impressed with a feature called marking, which enabled you to pick a starting point in a song - and anywhere in the song mind you, and an ending point and keep playing it back. For those of you who might not see the appeal in a feature like this, if there was a part of a tune that had a break or a cool lick that I was trying to cop in learning the tune, this feature made it very easy to repeat it to facilitate learning it. While this wasn't a feature I used all that often, it was cool nonetheless. I guess that wasn't a feature that had much mass appeal, because I don't think you can still get that capability on Compact Disc players today.

I'm ashamed to say it now, but little things like this made cheating on Vinyl easy. I didn't even feel guilty about it. I started caving in to the whole snob appeal/keeping up with the Joneses trip of having things on Compact Disc and being proud of it and wanting others to know.

I remember a friend talking about how thrilled he was to listen to Beatles music on Compact Disc. I was too - but really, how can Beatles songs sound anything but good? Easy, they can't. How can any music that I like not sound good? It can't, unless I'm not in the mood for it and I want to hear something else. Maybe I'm on my way home from a loud rock gig and my ears are fried and I don't want to hear anything - and this has happened a lot, but it's temporary. Why? Because music is like food - I'm always going to eat again, and I'm always going to listen to music again. Always.

Of course the Beatles sounded good on Compact Disc. For the most part, so did other music that I like. And so my affair with Compact Disc continued. My collection grew. And this was the start of an affair that is still going on today - albeit nowhere near as frequently as my affair with MP3 formatted music. Before you call me a slime ball, it's complicated people. I can explain - and I'll do a bit more explaining in my next post. And yes, I know I was a fool to let her go.