Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Vinyl has passionate adherents mainly, they claim, because of sound quality. But for typical teenagers – and I feel I came pretty close to the norm – slovenly treatment meant they could be rendered useless in a very short time.
Careless dropping of the stylus, spillages, and stacking on top of one another without the protection of the cover were the chief culprits. I’m sure I was guilty of all three.
But their size made the covers grand to look at. Who could forget Cream’s Disraeli Gears, for example?
Then came cassette convenience. It may have been difficult to fit a turntable into a car, so popping a cassette into the slot was a relative breeze. Except when it had a tangling tantrum.
If the magnetic tape wound itself into a frenzy of spaghetti and the mechanical player didn’t eat it, you could try to wind the tape back on to the internal spool by sticking a pencil or biro through one of the holes and turning, turning, turning… (I feel a Byrds song coming on.)
The pen-in-the-hole fix was a grand usurper of time and success was never 100% guaranteed. In fact I remember seeing many tangled tape ribbons scattered along the roadsides in their heyday, clearly ejected from moving vehicles by frustrated motorists.
To our rescue came the CD. It wouldn’t tangle but it could suffer similar damage to vinyl and so was often softened by heating and moulded into a functional, clam-shell ashtray.
I have also seen them attached to a wall as a sort of holograph-type cladding. Both of these are of course very tasteful.
All our CDs (many hundreds) are still on display in our home in a designated CD shelf in front of which visitors will often bend to examine sideways titles. Alas, the CDs are seldom played because we have since paid for Spotify which, as you would expect, has its own issues.
A major one is that certain artists – ones like Neil Young to name but one example – boycotted the platform. (Stop press: my up-to-date research has uncovered that, after two years, the boycott is over and his music is now available.)
When I first used it I was horrified to hear ads but the addition of an extra payment swiftly eliminated those.
Another issue– and I don’t know how common this is – involves little moments of audio drop-out. Because I’m a modern consumer, I Googled possible ways to deal with this. I found instructions for how to fix the issue but couldn’t understand them, so now I tend to just hum along through the drop-outs.
Now that I have measured out my life in music mediums, I’d like to ask what the next one is going to be. And how much will it cost? I hope it won’t need a password because my brain is already full.
And while I await an answer I’m happy to measure out the time in coffee spoons. I’ll have a double-shot latte please.
