Joe Queenan's Moving Targets column in The Wall Street Journal sure struck a chord. Wonder why?
Nothing gives some people more pleasure than ridiculing other people’s sad, antiquated technology. At a party two weeks ago, I gave an old friend a compact disc containing Mozart’s clarinet concerto.Keep reading HERE.
“Who listens to CDs anymore?” sneered one of the guests. I do. I own 3,000 of them. I listen to them in my car, my office, my house, everywhere. My friend, defending me, said that he often played CDs on his portable music system. So it wasn’t like I’d given him a handful of vintage cartridges for his breech-loading musket, not realizing that he’d already sold it on eBay.
Nonetheless, people were eyeing me with pity, as the latest incarnation of Rip Van Winkle. As if I had given my friend a dot-matrix printer. Or a Nehru jacket.
I know that the CD has had it as a viable technology. Other ways of listening to music have superseded it, just as vinyl was tossed on the junk heap a generation ago. But there is always a possibility that a purged technology can climb back out of the crypt. In recent years, vinyl has made a remarkable comeback, in part because LPs sound better than compact discs or streaming music, and in part because vinyl aficionados love to be annoying. I myself own 1,000 LPs. And yes, I am annoying.
Why is it OK to continue to use some objects that have been around forever but moronic to use others?
6 comments:
Don't listen to the technology snobs- everything doesn't have to thrown out because something "better" comes along.
anyone who's "lost" a digital download, for whatever reason, may have to buy another copy. i keep cd's on the shelf, and if the worst happens, i have a master copy, which has a much better sound quality than any compressed digital copy.
and, yes, i still have vinyl and a turntable, too...
Those of us who still listen to LPs and CDs have something the streamers will never have: cover art and liner notes.
They are either the same people who will say "Who listens to LPs anymore?", or those who will rave about their LP collection, and how the quality of the sound is so much better than anything else, and how anybody that listens to music on any other media (tape, cassettes, CDs, MP3s) should be flogged, and yada yada yada... Well, LPs are back (were they ever gone?) and once again making a place for themselves in the industry.
Ken, like you, I have thousands of albums; CDs and cassettes, and a very few vinyls that I can't listen to, because I sold my player and I haven't bought a USB compatible one yet. (Yes, I do need to buy one, my Rod Stewart anthology is on vinyl.) The only thing I can say is, when you meet these people; the posers, the "Audio-philes" on their soap-boxes, the clueless, tell them what my grandfather told me to tell people like that ... "F*** You". (Actually, he didn't, but you know...)
I will always love paper books more than my Kindle reader. I will always love my framed photographs of events rather than just skimming hundreds of photos on my iPad. And I will NEVER, EVER part with my fountain pens! The act of putting pen to paper is an act that I will employ until they pull one of my fountain pens from my cold dead hands. A truly crappy day in NYC will be the day the Fountain Pen Hospital closes. Then we will know the city is truly dying.
LONG LIVE PHYSICAL MEDIA!
I will only have my cds and vinyl taken from my cold dead hands. The digital Downloader will never understand.
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