Life In Stereo

My life is about to plunge headlong into the gaping maw of chaos. Well, actually, it's just my stereo, but to me it's pretty-much the same thing. Hard as it is for me to believe, that trusty old music machine of mine is in fact 13 years old. Only it's not quite so "trusty" any more ... some of the buttons on the front panel have begun doing strange things (the "next track" button switches the stereo from CD mode to radio mode, the graphic equalizer button changes CDs, the "play" button resets the graphic equalizer), it sometimes doesn't see that there's a CD loaded into a specific slot (or just skips over a slot or group of slots for no good reason), and the cassette playback deck went "boink" almost two years ago.

All is not lost, because I can work around those faults, at least for the time being: the remote control still works perfectly so I use it whenever I can, a strong blast of air makes the CD slots behave normally for awhile, and there's still the cassette recording deck that I can use when I have occasion to play (or record on) a tape. But if and when this thing finally bites the dust, it's gonna be a really sad day. This beaut has a 51-disc carousel CD changer, and a dual-cassette deck -- two features that are all but extinct on so-called "shelf" stereo systems anymore (the best I can find now is a 5-disc changer). If I went to a specialty retailer and assembled my own component system, I'd probably be able to find features like those, but I'm neither financially inclined to spend the money on a customized system with all the bells and whistles, nor am I such a finicky audiophile that I need a top-of-the-line sound system.

I'm still old-school in that I sometimes like to make mix CD's "the old-fashioned way", by recording them in real-time, track by track, from my stereo onto my stand-alone audio CD recorder. That's one reason I like my system so much -- I can load all the CDs I'm burning tracks from into the stereo at once, and just nudge the jog dial from one disc to the next as I go. Sure, it would be faster and easier to assemble the playlist in iTunes and hit the "burn disc" button, but it's so fast and easy that I almost think of it as cheating ... besides, such a mix CD would be made of 128Kbps MP3's instead of coming straight from original CD tracks. As for the remaining working cassette deck, I still make use of it, though admittedly not a lot. I do still have a couple dozen tapes that I listen to occasionally enough that I haven't felt the need to burn to CD; and I have yet to get a request to record a mix tape instead of a mix CD, but it's nice to know that, for now, I still have the ability to do so. And to top it all off (quite literally, in this case), not long after I'd gotten this stereo, I happened upon a matching turntable add-on for it, the same brand and dimensions and color and everything, making it a complete and total all-format (for its time) system!

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it's not just these conveniences that I'll miss if and when its proverbial number is up, but it's what this stereo represents in a broader sense. This is mostly what I've listened to music on for the last thirteen years ... in other words, for almost three-quarters of my music-loving life. Though I've embraced the iPod and now basically can't imagine life without it, I grew up with CDs, cassettes, and vinyl records, and now it seems that the big-name electronics manufacturers have all but forgotten those formats and now almost totally cater to the MP3 and iPod crowd. If you're not sure just how old(-school) your generation is becoming, all you have to do is check out the shelves of any electronics retailer, and it'll become pretty clear. Hey, I've still got a cassette Walkman, for cripe's sake! (It almost never gets used, and its belt clip is broken off, but I just can't bear to part with it.) Did I mention that my stereo doesn't even play CD-RWs or MP3-CDs? It reads CD-Rs just fine, though.

So, the question remains: what am I going to replace my existing system with when it finally kicks the bucket? I do have to admit, a 250- or 300-disc CD changer would be way bitchin' to have, but the way my listening habits have been changing slowly but surely (when playing a CD at home nowadays, I've gotten into the habit of just popping it into the computer and listening to it from iTunes), I just can't imagine getting my money's worth out of such a thing anymore. I went browsing around at Best Buy's online store the other day to get a feel for what's out there, and I guess I hadn't realized just how much the iPod has truly taken over -- the vast majority of the shelf systems out there are iPod-ready, complete with a dock that will not only pump your Pod's tunes through its own speakers, but even recharge its battery.

But I like to think of my iPod as being for strictly on-the-go music listening (Really, if you need to have songs in MP3 on your computer to put them onto your iPod, why not just play music from your computer when you're at home?), so I probably won't be looking for that particular feature. Sp far I've found a sweet-looking Sony 5-disc changer with a CD-recorder, which would potentially allow me to get rid of two machines at once, but then away go the cassette deck and turntable. Then again, there's a very cool-looking "retro" Victrola-style turntable housed in a desktop-sized woodgrain speaker cabinet, complete with a cassette deck on the side panel and a built-in CD player (or, for a bit more money, a CD recorder, for making those LP-to-CD or tape-to-CD conversions) as well. Maybe that's the ticket ... hey, if my stereo is my life, and I'm as old-school as I say I am, I might as well walk the talk, right?