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13-Year-Old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week
BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and the shuffle feature. The Walkman, however, offers two headphone sockets, making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
The sound of, say, Metallica's Garage Inc on tape is way better than on mp3. Cassettes are beautiful. They are durable, unlike CD/DVDs, and I have 25 year old cassettes that still work. They are hardware, tangible mechanical form of music. And there's just something about it that no CD/DVD/MP3s can match. And then there's the cover art sitting on an actual cover. Man I miss those days.
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I had a friend with an 8 track player in his Gremlin in High School. In 1994. It was not a chick magnet.
It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.
Pull your pants up and wear a belt! You damn kids
Either he writes well or I was an idiot when I was 13.
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you could probably also faintly here "Speak to Me" on track 1 at the same time
That was just 'the lunatic in your head' that you were hearing.
When I was a teenager, 8 years ago (2001-2002), instead of putting a CD deck in my car, I wanted to put my dad's old 8 track deck into my car. That way it would have been ironic, hip, and would have limited me to playing only his old 60s-80s 8 track tapes. Also, I had no money for a CD deck. Almost got it done, but lazy kicked in, and the 8 track deck needed to be repaired a bit, so I abandoned it.
I went around trying to find somewhere which might have one for real cheap, like a pawn shop or similar. This was a pretty interesting thing to go around asking.
I went into this kind of music pawn shop, which had heaps of old things, including old record players, however it was more focused on that sort of indie niche. I walked in and asked the person running the store if they have an 8 track player, especially for a car. There was this old druggie raver looking guy standing behind him looking at records. When I asked about the 8 track player, he turned around and said "Hey man, that was funny, I thought I heard you asking for an 8 track player", at which point I looked at him and said "I am", he looked back with a freaked out yet blank face and said "Whoah". He then proceeded to stare at me after that last thought. All I can think was that I caused him to have some sort of an acid flash back, which he experienced for the next 30 seconds.
Either way, I still got a pile of 8 track tapes and no 8 track player. Probably for the best, I now have a good car, with a good deck, and I like things which aren't shit, now. Though the old bomb (1981 Ford Falcon XD) was awesome for jumping over train tracks, going 200kph, drifting around dirt corners, shredding my tyres and similar.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I find it disturbing that, according to the article at least, this particular kid had problems working out for himself that a cassette tape is two-sided and what half of the controls on the Walkman do.
As a kid, I can remember taking some bits of machinery apart to clean or service them, and just to see how they worked. (For example, my parents were in the clothes-making/tailoring trade and I frequently messed about with old sewing machines to fix them or clean them.) I also got into electronics at a fairly young age and knew some basics about car mechanics.
It seems a shame that kids these days don't get the chance to (or are just not interested in) take things apart just to see how they work - from my perspective, I developed an "engineering brain" from a really early age that has served me well throughout my career.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.