Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Tape?
I had a horrible epiphany (not to be confused with an apostrophe) the other day whilst driving up the interstate with my family in the car. We were listening to the very last mix tape that I ever made for my wife and discussing music. The eldest daughter piped up from the back seat with a song suggestion and I responded that the particular tune wasn't available at this time because it was on a different tape. "Tape?" she said, in the most quizzical tone possible.
Alas, is it possible? Could it be that she will grow up in a world that has no memory of the array of media format choices that were once available?
There was a Saturday Night Live sketch from way back in the day about the "Scotch Boutique". The humor of that sketch exploited the absurdity that one might carry only the "sticky kind"of tape in an age when audio cassettes were rapidly becoming the standard playback format for commercial audio recordings. Although audiophiles would argue their poor performance in reproducing analog recordings, cassette tapes were much more durable, versatile and portable than their vinyl counterparts. Their disco-era success was further catapulted by the introduction of the Walkman in 1979 and tapes eventually took the lead in sales over LPs for most of the next decade.
Who knew that just a few short years later, Phillips and Sony would revolutionize all that by perfecting a method of storing digital data on an optical disc? Thanks to them, my daughters will likely know nothing of the glorious splendor of the "tape". They will never feel the titillation of exchanging "mix-tapes" as little musical collages of expression with their boyfriends. They will never know the agony of looking into the cassette deck window and seeing the bunched up mangled folds of a tape gone bad. They will have no concept of the anticipation of waiting for your favorite song to come on the "radio" so you can tape it and listen to it over and over until the sound is distorted nearly beyond recognition. They will probably have only vague memories of what it means to "tape something off the TV". They will only know the "sticky kind".
By the way, as a complete tangent to my thought, does anyone know how the creators of the CD settled on the industry standard 12 cm diameter? (Hint: the decision has historical roots dating to the beginning of the 19th century.)
Links to this post
Alas, is it possible? Could it be that she will grow up in a world that has no memory of the array of media format choices that were once available?
There was a Saturday Night Live sketch from way back in the day about the "Scotch Boutique". The humor of that sketch exploited the absurdity that one might carry only the "sticky kind"of tape in an age when audio cassettes were rapidly becoming the standard playback format for commercial audio recordings. Although audiophiles would argue their poor performance in reproducing analog recordings, cassette tapes were much more durable, versatile and portable than their vinyl counterparts. Their disco-era success was further catapulted by the introduction of the Walkman in 1979 and tapes eventually took the lead in sales over LPs for most of the next decade.
Who knew that just a few short years later, Phillips and Sony would revolutionize all that by perfecting a method of storing digital data on an optical disc? Thanks to them, my daughters will likely know nothing of the glorious splendor of the "tape". They will never feel the titillation of exchanging "mix-tapes" as little musical collages of expression with their boyfriends. They will never know the agony of looking into the cassette deck window and seeing the bunched up mangled folds of a tape gone bad. They will have no concept of the anticipation of waiting for your favorite song to come on the "radio" so you can tape it and listen to it over and over until the sound is distorted nearly beyond recognition. They will probably have only vague memories of what it means to "tape something off the TV". They will only know the "sticky kind".
By the way, as a complete tangent to my thought, does anyone know how the creators of the CD settled on the industry standard 12 cm diameter? (Hint: the decision has historical roots dating to the beginning of the 19th century.)
Links to this post
Comments:
Beethoven's 9th Symphony just fits on a 74 minute CD. Not that you can find many 74 minute CD's anymore ...
And, yes, your daughters WILL LIKELY be able to share "mix-tapes." They will simply be called "playlists".
Still baffled on the pants. Although the voice sounds amazingly like my paternal grandfathers voice.
- Ted>
And, yes, your daughters WILL LIKELY be able to share "mix-tapes." They will simply be called "playlists".
Still baffled on the pants. Although the voice sounds amazingly like my paternal grandfathers voice.
- Ted>
Ted -
Excellent sleuthing once again. However, since this answer is the product of a simple wiki query which yields a reference to this article - revealing that the longest known performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’) was conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1951 during the Bayreuther Festspiele and lasted 74 minutes - I didn't deem this challenge worthy of awarding a donut.
Do you think it would help to know what brand the pants were?>
Excellent sleuthing once again. However, since this answer is the product of a simple wiki query which yields a reference to this article - revealing that the longest known performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’) was conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1951 during the Bayreuther Festspiele and lasted 74 minutes - I didn't deem this challenge worthy of awarding a donut.
Do you think it would help to know what brand the pants were?>
Actually, that was not the product of a web search; at least not this AM. That was simply brain fodder that I had already embedded into my somewhat tiny gray-matter.
And that's the scary part, I think.
- Ted>
Post a Comment
And that's the scary part, I think.
- Ted>
Links to this post:
|
| 
|
|  |
