I've Given Up Keeping Up with Technology

Alan Brookes · From: Brummy living in Southern California

I use a 15 yr. old computer, running Windows XP. I drive a 35 yr. old car. I still use reel-to-reel and minidisks. I have a big collection of LPs. All my instruments are old. My amplifiers are old. I still have effects units from the 50s and 60s.

But with all that old equipment I can still play the same music, the tape decks still work while electronic ones a fraction of their age gave up working years ago. I can take photographs with cameras built like bricks that will never wear out. The LPs still play the same music as if I had the CD versions of the same things.

Now I'm retired I have more time on my hands to enjoy myself, but fewer funds to do it with, and it's becoming more and more clear to me that you don't have to keep up with all the latest gadgets in order to lead a happy life. Winking

Barry Blackwood · Posted 11 Oct 2014 5:29 pm

Well said, Alan. I'm beginning to agree with you more and more in this age of disposable merchandise that was never built to last. Oh Well

Antolina · From: Dunkirk NY

Very well said Alan.
_________________
The only thing better than doing what you love is having someone that loves you enough to let you do it.

Sho~Bud 6139 3+3
Marrs 3+4

RC Antolina

Jr. Watts · From: Calico Rock Ar.

I agree with you. As I got older I found out I did not need nearly as much in the way of material things. I do however, find that my belief in the Almighty seems to matter more.
_________________
Sierra 12/10 gearless, Gibson Console Grand, Homemade dobro, Gretsch 5122, Peavey Session 400 limited, Peavey Classic VTX, Spectra 30-7.

Richard Lester · From: Constable, New York, USA

Alan, I surely do miss the older gadgets, instruments, cars, etc.. You're right, they were built to last. I own a 1958 fender bassman amp that is unbeatable for sound and wouldn't trade it for a dozen new walters or milkman amps, even tho they may be fine amps. I guess it's a matter of taste. Oh, that reminds me, things did taste a lot better years ago and I could actually hear when the lead player missed a note and if the singer was flat. Wish I had some of the old cars I used to drive, they were certainly more comfortable than these new ones. Oh Well

_________________
Zum D-10, GFI S10 keyless ultra, 2020 Flight Ready SD-10 Rittenberry, Quilter Steelaire, Telonics vol. pedal

Don R Brown · From: Rochester, New York, USA

Good luck finding film and processing for those pictures with the old camera!

But I CAN relate. You can imagine the flak I get from my kids and grandchildren about my cell phone. It does not have apps, it does not have the internet, it does not even take pictures. It is a dinosaur. But when it died a few months back, I went on line and bought an identical one for $12.00, swapped the card into the new one, and good to go!

Jason Putnam · From: Tennessee, USA

Well I have to admit, I do own the latest smartphone! But my 40 year old Sho-bud is probably the favorite thing I own.
_________________
1967 Emmons Bolt On, 1995 Mullen PRP 3x5,Nashville 112, JOYO Digital Delay, Goodrich Volume Pedal, Livesteel Strings

Dennis Saydak · From: Manitoba, Canada

Alan, you can always fake it like I do when it comes down to owning the latest gadgets. I don't have a cell phone and don't want one. However, when I go out in public I just hang my garage door opener on my belt and pretend it's a cell phone. Just joshing of course. Very Happy

_________________
Dennis
Just when you think you're getting ahead in the rat race, the rats get faster.

Gary Lee Gimble · From: Fredericksburg, VA.

On the flip side Alan, technological learning curves for new stuff, in my opinion, keeps your mind healthy. Pending of course, limited disposable income.
_________________
Assorted gear and a set of hands...
https://www.facebook.com/garythelee
https://www.youtube.com/user/ZumEmm

Alan Brookes · From: Brummy living in Southern California

Ironically, there are youngsters out there paying premium prices for old equipment, to try and get that old sound, while many of us have had that sound for years, because we never replaced our old stuff. Laughing

There was a thread on this forum a few months ago asking how to get the 50s sound. If you use the same guitars and amplifiers that you used in the 50s, and record them with the same microphones into the same tape recorder, you're going to get the same sound.'-)

Someone asked how I can get film for those old cameras. Well, in that instance I don't. I bought a Nikon Digital SLR when they first came out twelve years ago and I still use it. It'll probably last me out. It's only 8 gigapixels, but it has good optics, compared to new cameras with 12 gigapixels and more with poor optics which give worse results.

I used to work with a guy who drove a 1954 Pontiac day in day out. Someone once asked how he could afford to run a vintage car on his wage. Easy. His dad gave it to him used as a teenager, and he's never owned another car. He's also never had a car loan or credit cards, and I don't think he knows what a cell 'phone is for. He's working for the same company that he went to as an apprentice in the 50s, is married to the same wife he married back then, is still living in the house he moved into with his new bride, and his mortgage was paid off decades ago. Winking

Roger Rettig · From: Naples, FL

Just pulling my 'old-fashioned' (actually only four years old) cell-phone out of my pocket will usually get a good laugh. It's a flip-top with texting disabled.

I fundamentally agree with you, Alan, but I'm still overwhelmed by what is possible with digital technology.

I do wish I still had a record-deck and the vinyl to go with it - sonically speaking CDs are deplorable by comparison and mp3s lack any sort of tonal quality. But then digital video lacks the colour-depth and saturation of good old Kodachrome Super 8; I'm told, though, that no-one cares anymore.
_________________
Roger Rettig: Emmons D10, B-bender Teles and Martins - and, at last, a Gibson Super 400!
----------------------------------

John Billings · From: Ohio, USA

"But when it died a few months back, I went on line and bought an identical one "

When I retired and was no longer on 24/7 call, I took my flip top cellphone out to the back yard, and shot it with my Redhawk 44 mag.. Very satisfying!

Darrell Criswell · From: Maryland, USA

I still miss my old 1987 MacInstosh SE computer, it had better software than the new ones. The new ones have some more capabilities than the old ones, but are harder to use; the design of the software is not as good.

CD's don't take up as much space as LP's and reel to reel tapes and are easier to copy but aren't any easier to use and don't sound any better if as good.

John De Maille · From: On a Mountain in Upstate Halcottsville, N.Y.

I'm still very old school, myself, and I kind of like it that way. I had the opportunity, back in the 90's, to do a session where they still used 2" tape machines with a mix down to 1"" tape. The sound as very warm and vibrant going into all the older equipment. I direct lined the steel right into the board with a touch of echo and reverb. My cuts sounded really smooth and rich. I've recorded into modern digital systems lately and I'm not at all happy with the outcome. Needless to say, I'm not an expert with recording, but, i don't get the feel with the newer digital systems. Everytime I've recorded with the modern stuff the take always sounds too sterile with no soul. Don't get me wrong, I like some of the newer stuff like flat screen TV's and CNC equipment and digital watches, but, I guess I'm just too set in my ways to embrace everything new. I've been using PV amps for a long time and lately I've been playing through a Stereo Steel rig, which, I like a lot. However, their sound isn't like the classic sounding amps. The best PV amp I used and liked a lot was an old PV Mace. It had tubes and transistors and I put a JBL E-130, 15" speaker in it. That amp sounded great with warmth, power and clarity. Unfortunately, I gave it to my son, who, won't give it back.
Anyway, I've said too much for my limited knowledge of modern electronics, but, I still have my vinyl with an LP turntable and IT still works good and I still use a flip phone and don't text with it.

John Billings · From: Ohio, USA

Got an experiment coming up! When my bud Neil Zaza gets back from his Asian Tour, (sold out in China and Japan, btw), we're going to take one of his digital stereo mixes, and run it through my Ampex tape machine, then back into the computer. I'm curious to hear the results! He just bought a Fisher 500C and speakers from me, so maybe he's coming around. He only uses tube amps,,,,,
http://www.neilzaza.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Zaza

And,,,, he's crazy enough to record with me!

Alan Brookes · From: Brummy living in Southern California

Unfortunately, in a market economy, technological progress often gets sidelined. Several companies will come up with incompatable systems. One of them will eventually win out and the others will disappear, leaving the public with a lot of useless gadgets, and often people have recorded video and audio in what has become an obsolete medium and they have to pay to have their material converted. How many people gambled on BetaMax? It gave a superior picture to VHS at the time, but VHS won out. I've seen it happen throughout history. I used to take home movies using 9.5mm film. The quality was much better than Regular 8, and they eventually started to put it into cassettes, similar to Super-8, but Super-8 won out. How many people invested in the Osborne computer system? I used to use the CPM operating system on my computer. It was better thought out that MS.DOS because they anticipated the infinite expansion of RAM. But IBM got Bill Gates to design an operating system for them, and he stole the CPM system but decided that no computer would ever need more than 640k of RAM. Beyond that it was called Extended Memory. Windows is still stuck with that problem to this day, and they've had to work around it.
Reel-to-Reel was much better than Audio Cassettes, which were designed for dictating machines. When someone decided to develop Audio Cassettes as hi-fi equipment few people believed that that tiny tape running so slow could ever offer hi-fi quality, and the tape hiss was terrible, so they had to invent Dolby B, a consumer version of the professional Dolby A, to give anything like a good signal, even though DBX was a better system.
And how many people got stuck with 8-Track Cassettes?
Since they worked at twice the speed of the later audio cassettes and used twice the width of tape, you would expect better, but the mechanisms that had to move the heads up and down to change tracks soon fell out of alignment, and the tapes developed wow and flutter due to their design. Add to that the fact that you couldn't rewind them, which meant that you couldn't take a noise level test and return to the start, and if you recorded something too long, then with the tape being a continuous circle you would start recording over what you've just recorded without even knowing it.
Then Minidisks came in. A much better quality than audio cassettes, but they couldn't exceed 90 minutes and nowadays nobody stocks them. The MD140 Minidisks, which were originally designed for computer backup, were much better, and a lot of digital mini-studios were built and sold to use them, but the computer world soon grew out of the maximum 140 megabytes and stopped using them, and once that happened, since recording amateurs constituted only a tiny fraction of sales, they went out of use, leaving people with equipment that only runs on a specialist type of minidisk made by smaller companies at extravagant prices.
Then CDs came in. Since the same size CDs were used for hi-fi and computers they became immediately popular, even though CD stand-alone recorders require Music CDs. It gets even worse. The stand-alone recorders are usually not backward-compatable, and will only work on Music CDs made at the time the recorders were built. Now, after so many people have thrown out their LPs, which sounded better than CDs except for the surface noise. We're told that they have a limited life expectancy. But our LPs will still be around and playable centuries after to CDs have lost their surface layers. Now they're marketting DVDs the same way. People are throwing out their VHS tapes and buying the DVDs, but the DVDs also have a limited life.
Have you ever used a hard disk recorder, put in hours of work on your new recording, only to come up with DISK ERROR? Forget any idea of saving your work. You have to start again from scratch. At least with tape, if it broke you could tape it back together, and it would still work. Even that scare tactic of magnetism, which they say will erase your tapes, rarely does. I have tapes from jam sessions in the 50s and 60s which still play as well as they did back then. About the only way you're going to lose your tape recording is if the brakes on your rewind wheel are defective and it stretches the tape, or you neglectfully change direction at full speed, and then it's your own fault. High class machines won't let you do that, by the way.
Progess? Yes, but it's two steps forwards and one step backwards all the time, and it's the consumers who keep up with the latest technology who have to pay for the errors of the designers and the vagarities of a fickle market. Rolling Eyes

Darrell Criswell · From: Maryland, USA

I still miss my old 1987 MacInstosh SE computer, it had better software than the new ones. The new ones have some more capabilities than the old ones, but are harder to use; the design of the software is not as good.

CD's don't take up as much space as LP's and reel to reel tapes and are easier to copy but aren't any easier to use and don't sound any better if as good.

Eric Philippsen · From: Central Florida USA

Tough to get an LP into a car's CD player.

Roger Rettig · From: Naples, FL

An interesting time-line there, Alan.

My first experience of in-car stereo was hearing an Elvis album being played on an 8-track deck in a Rolls-Royce as we travelled through London (Peter Sarstedt's record producer's car, by the way). I was amazed by the sound and the very next day went to buy a system for my car.

These were early days ('68/9-ish) but the guy in the car-stereo shop (one of only two in all of London then!) advised me to go with cassette rather than 8-track. Yes, he said, the sound is theoretically better at 3.5" per second (over the cassette's 1.75") but you'll never hear the difference in a moving car. Even then, more importantly, he predicted that the writing was on the wall for 8-track and I took his advice.

As far as amateur film technology was concerned I was more than happy with Kodachrome 8mm but the new way was video - it added sound and there was the facility to re-use the tapes over and over (once Kodak film was exposed, that was it). The quality, though, was awful!

As you know, Alan, I'm a bus enthusiast - much of my filming was record photography of London buses. I was dismayed at the dreadful 'flare' on video tape when I tried to film a red bus! Totally unacceptable, and I stuck doggedly to my expensive but superior Kodachrome.

I compiled a two-volume, four-hour film of London trolleybus footage in 1992 (for On-Line Video - still available, by the way, and now on DVD) and we were lucky enough to have footage donated by many of the best and most knowledgable photographers in the genre. I was grateful for all material submitted, but the real excitement would be when someone's efforts had originally been shot on 16mm!!! That stuff was borderline-professional quality - very scarce amongst amateurs and fiendishly expensive but what a difference!
_________________
Roger Rettig: Emmons D10, B-bender Teles and Martins - and, at last, a Gibson Super 400!
----------------------------------

Charlie McDonald · From: out of the blue

I remember riding in Bruce Curry's car listening to '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' on vinyl through the tunnel-mounted record changer in his Plymouth. I don't recall how it sounded, but it was cool.
_________________
Those that say don't know; those that know don't say.--Buddy Emmons

Roger Rettig · From: Naples, FL

They've been discussed on the Forum before, Charlie, and you're right - very cool!

I had one (a Phillips) that was just a deck and used the car's radio for its amplifier. I had mine fitted to my Jaguar MK9 and thought I was a real Jack-the-lad as I'd choose which 45 rpm single I'd play next! You had to remove the centre of the disc and I lost count of the records I had to replace because I'd left them lying around to be fried when the sun came out!

No Rolling Stones for me (I couldn't stand them) but plenty of Beach Boys and Marvin Gaye records...
_________________
Roger Rettig: Emmons D10, B-bender Teles and Martins - and, at last, a Gibson Super 400!
----------------------------------

David Hartley · Posted 13 Oct 2014 9:12 am Hi

But we are steel players, we always want something new?
But I sometimes wish I still owned my Fender Twin with 15" JBL like I had many years ago.
I wonder where it is now?

Alan Brookes · From: Brummy living in Southern California

I agree with Roger's comments about Kodachrome and 16mm film. I've always been interested in stereoscopic (3D) photography, and watched as Kodak film went from Kodachrome I through Kodachrome 64. In fact I got stuck with some Kodachrome exposed film that I can't get processed, as Kodak has given up working with it.
During the late 60s and 70s I was filming in 3D using a Bolex H16 16mm camera with a stereo attachment, but a 100' of 16mm film runs through your camera in just over 3 mins. without sound. To get sound you needed a separate reel-to-reel tape recorder and a Synchrodeck to synchronise the two. What with having to take along a generator to power the tape recorder outdoors, or an expensive portable tape recorder with a rechargeable battery (I used a Uher 4000), the whole process was very expensive. My dad had a photography business at the time, and the idea that the day would come when you could shoot off as much video and photos as you liked in a tiny device at very little cost would have seemed like a fantasy to him.
I have to confess that a couple of years ago I bought a Fujifilm W3 Stereoscopic Digital Camera. It takes widescreen 3D stills and video with 4-channel surround sound, uses standard SanDisk HD memory cards, and you can slip it into your pocket and take it anywhere.

Lane Gray · From: Topeka, KS

chas smith R.I.P. · From: Encino, CA, USA

I have the old stuff and I have the new stuff. My oldest amp, a Gibson, is from the 30s and I prefer the old guitars. Behind me is the Wall-of-Vinyl. In my shop, I regularly use tools and equipment that go back to WWII. However, I still want to participate and what that means is, keeping up with technology, whether I like it or not.

Forum Index > Computers	Goto page 1, 2 Next	Next oldest topic :: Next newest topic