09 Oct The (Good?) Old Days – Part XI: Enjoying Music

Sure we always had headphones. But back in the ancient 1960s, those headphones had a wire that had a giant plug that had to be attached to a “stereo” or “hi-fi” system in your house. These were expensive groups of components that would generally include a tuner (to hear radio and serve as mission control), a cassette player of some kind, a record player and as the 80s came along, a CD player as well. I also remember the “reel to reel” tape player my father had. The idea that he could record something playing on the radio and play it back anytime was amazing before cassettes came along.

Collecting music was the process of buying records. Shlepping hundreds of the big black vinyl orbs to college (or to my weekend gig as a DJ) was not the funnest. As things moved to cassettes that was better, but the sound was not quite as good. Put aside 8-tracks, that can be a whole other column. Now, well, most of us just say wow. CDs changed things quite a bit. But no change was as dramatic as the MP3 players and the Apple iPod. The fact that you can download and organize tens of thousands of songs into a palm-sized device is nothing short of astounding to us oldsters. Kids heading to college now have a small speaker system to plug the iPod (or iPhone) into and that’s basically it! DJs bring a laptop and speakers and that’s basically it! Really incredible.

Related are the very dramatic changes in radio. First came AM, then in my era FM, but lots of commercials and their choice of music. Now, thanks to hundreds of channels on satellite radio, you can customize what type of music you want and do so generally with no commercials. Clearly: much better now!