Ferrous Oxide Junky

Music on vinyl is very nice, but coming up through the 70s cassette tapes were the nuts. All this marketing puff about vinyl being a superior experience is beginning to bore me, I had a huge collection at one time but after moving a ton of plastic from one house to another it gets long. So I got rid, but the cassettes stayed. They were much more fun.

Don't get me wrong, pristine vinyl played on a transcription turntable through a decent valve amp will give you an analog experience that is unique, but from my experience, vinyl (especially vintage) is often scratched and crackly, the amps are hummy etc. so for the vast majority of us the overall effect is inferior to digital. Various sonic delivery systems have their own characteristic, be it Juke box, transistor radio, radiogram, top level Hi-Fi components, CD, iPod etc etc... it's the music which comes though that is the important part. It doesn't have, or need, to be perfect, life isn't.

"Home taping is killing music" - was an industry scare (at the dawn of radio and recorded music, the industry was in panic that they would never sell another sheet of published music not really seeing the big picture, since then music has become a giant industry. So no harm done there.

Back in the 70s my buddy was a record librarian in the catacombs of the BBC in Upper Regent Street. One of the perks of his job was that he could borrow up to five albums a day (as long as he returned them the next day) so we would feverishly record them (on high fidelity equipment of course) onto cassette, in this way we amassed an unrivalled collection of contemporary music in the pirate's den otherwise known as my bedroom.

Mix tapes were the thing too, (Hi Fidelity by Nick Hornby - read the book or watch the movie and you will get the gist). I still make them to this day, only now, using compilations of digital mp3 files I mix them down onto cassettes,  I am going backwards in time and technical development. I think I may have lost it. I still have a few hundred tapes corroding in storage, I just can't bring myself to bin them!

Photo shows one of many drawers full of cassettes that represent the ferrous years of my life.