Music Formats

As a teenager I was obsessed with records. I am sure most of my pocket money went on buying albums, usually at the local Our Price store.

Once I was old enough to be allowed to go to London on my own I discovered a fantastic little store inside Kensington Market where I would spend hours just flicking through their vinyl trying to pick a couple of LPs to take home. I would wander round the whole market looking at shoes and coats, candles, scarves, models of dragons and wigs in neon colours, and I would often grab a jacket potato as well. But the majority of the time I was in that record shop.

I would also spend a couple of hours a week putting collections of songs on to cassette tapes.

Record sleeves even got books dedicated to them

Then at the end of my teens the Compact Disc began its rise to ubiquity. In a record shop rack they just don't flip in the same satisfying way, a rack would only stack them two or three deep because of that. The case art work was tiny compared to the twelve inch square glorious design you got with an LP. Album art designers (Storm Thorgerson, Roger Dean, Derek Riggs to name just three) would never have achieved such fame as CD artists.  The disc claimed to be unbreakable so there was never the same sense of care of and reverence as there was with a vinyl disc which could be ruined with a single scratch. As long as I still had a working turntable I was reluctant to replace my vinyl albums with CD versions.

CDs were easier to tape from though and I still have boxes of my compilations, and copies on tape for playing in the car.

At University I wrote a dissertation on competing music formats, describing the rise of CDs and going on to debate the relative merits of DAT (digital audio tape) and DCC (digital compact cassette)  - a debate similar to the VHS and Beta wars of a few years earlier, based as much on the access the patent owners had to recordings they could sell their formats with as the technical benefits of either.

At the end of the 90s I bought a MiniDisc machine and spent many a happy hour recording digital compilations from my CDs.

Unfortunately it was not a format that lasted and before long the MP3 took over. A music format with no physical substance at all. Artwork has to be viewed on a computer, there can be no reverence or fear of damage to something that has no form. Consequently record stores are fast disappearing or becoming game stores. My small collection of LPs, though, has become more valuable to me and I am increasingly reluctant to risk damaging them.

The march of progress moves steadily onward but those little  moments of pleasure that are gone forever are memories I cherish.

How is progress changing your world? Are you at the forefront of technological advances or do you cling to the old ways?

Technology

When I was a kid I felt quite technologically advanced as my parents both worked in the computer industry when it was still fairly new. Now though I feel a bit left behind. My telephone has many times more processing power than the room sized computers my dad used to install, complete with air cooling, cranes and tapes. It has functions that I am sure those early computer pioneers could never have dreamed of.
I understand that kids today take computers and technology for granted and learn to use everything as easily as they learned to walk. I feel somewhat baffled. I appreciate that something like a personal assistant on the phone is an incredibly complex piece of software but I can't really workout what I would use it for, or what it can do that I can't.
I also think there is an extent to which heavy reliance on technology reduces the scope of a person. If I ask this personal assistant to do everything what is there for me to do? Like taking photographs. I used to have a lovely 35mm SLR camera that I would carefully clean and adjust all the settings to make sure I captured beautiful pictures. Now I drag my phone out of my pocket and take a quick pic that I can then fiddle with using automatic filters all included in the phone.
I have also read that Google are launching glasses with a HUD (heads up display) integrated into them, so you can find maps, take photos, even buy things online just by tipping your head.
There is a film called eXistenz in which players of a game are physically connected into it, reality becomes very confused with the in game world. I wonder if that is our future.