Benjamin Ray's post this AM made me write!
From: Benjamin Ray
Let's hear it for the birthday of the CD, which turned 30 on Oct. 1. As a depressing side note, I turn 30 in July of 2013. The CD is the defining musical delivery system of my generation and the one I still prefer, though vinyl and mp3s both have their charms and drawbacks. I wonder if people older than myself feel that vinyl is their medium of choice and those younger prefer mp3s. Discuss?
I wrote back:
I turn 43 in just under two months.
I grew up on cassettes. I can remember 1980 as being when Casey Kasem's American Top 40 was on the radio on Sundays and I'd put my tape recorder up to the stereo speaker and record it to cassette. That same year, my friend JR (still my friend after all these years) and I would trade songs. We'd put the speaker of his tape recorder up to the speaker on mine (the concept of there being a microphone was lost on us as we were in 4th grade) and we'd exchange songs.
Eventually, I got into cassettes and dubbing every and any release that my friends or friends of friends had. I spent a lot of money buying 20 packs of Maxell UR 90 tapes and TDK D90 blank tapes. Due to budget constraints (as in I was not old enough to have a job and relied upon my parents for funds) I went with "Normal" bias instead of the "High" bias tapes.
1989 was huge for me. My friend in the dorm, Mark, went back home for the summer and let me use his stereo. He had a CD player and that was when I first really became aware of them. I listened to Van Halen's "OU812" repeatedly. Eventually, Mark retrieved his stereo and I began buying CDs. That same summer, I began playing with my guitarist friends Ken and James on a regular basis and taping our rehearsals. It helped grow my collection into one that was envied by my friends. It was huge. I began to track its growth in an Excel file, faithfully recording when I obtained a dub of a tape. I also got heavily into trading dubs of tapes from around the country. I'd dub a 10 pack of cassettes and send them to other states.
Eventually, I stopped buying cassettes and invested in a lot of 100 pack spindles of CD-Rs. I liked this because I could store 100 CDs on a spindle and it took up much less room than storing 100 CDs in hard cases. I worked my way up to 22 spindles of 100 CDs each. A friend that I traded CDs with, Kevin, eventually started creating "data CDs" which were albums in MP3 format. I'd get a data CD and rip each release on it (say there were 12) onto 12 separate CDs because (I thought) I wanted to be able to listen to it on my CD player, which didn't read his data CDs. I would use a free CD ripper to rip a CD to MP3 and then to record burn a CD with those songs.
The next step in my revolution was buying a 1 TB external HD. By accident, I discovered Windows Media Player would rip a CD when it was inserted. The days of carrying a shoebox of CDs to work ended. I now store 244 GB of music.
I am in the middle of multiple conversions. I'm converting my 1000 cassettes to MP3. I'm converting my 1000s of CDs to MP3. I'm converting my LP collection to MP3/CD. I have the converter for converting VHS and mini-VHS tapes to DVD. It is somewhat disheartening that I will do hours of work for these conversions, only to (someday) be faced with these collections in an obsolete media. I can remember when VHS tapes were expensive and now those VHS tapes are a fraction of what they were as DVD and now Blu-Ray have replaced them.
I don't have the magic answer for all this. New technology will come out and prices of what was expensive goes down. I bought a 1 TB external hard drive a couple of years ago for $150. Now, at Best Buy, I can get a 3 TB external hard drive for $150. And that's fine. It's a hamster wheel, I guess, as the industry and consumers strive to find the best way to do things.
So happy birthday CD as a format for bringing awesome (and not so awesome) bands to my ears!
Paul
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