Back when I was in junior high, I had an all-in-one Norelco stereo system. These systems were popular back in the late 1960s – early 70s. Each stereo cabinet would house a record player for playing vinyl records (either 45s or LPs, which spun at 33 1/3 rpms), an AM-FM radio, and a cassette player. Pop quiz: How many grooves does the average LP have? Answer at the end of part II. Because components were housed in one small cabinet, these stereo systems were easy to move around and locate on the top of a dresser. Here are some of the records I used to play on this old Norelco system (records still in my LP collection today):
Savoy Brown — Looking In
Bloomfield, Kooper & Stiles — Super Session
Grand Funk Railroad — Survival
The Who — Magic Bus
Big Brother & the Holding Company — Cheap Thrills
John Mayall — Blues from Laurel Canyon
Vanilla Fudge — Self Titled LP
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (which I stole from my father’s collection)
Pretty eclectic eh? Back during my junior high days I didn’t take good care of my LP collection. I’d leave them laying around the room out of their dust sleeves and cover jackets. If the sun hit them, they’d warp like a Pringles potato chip. I’d bring them to a friend’s house and if that friend had a record player where you could stack albums on a spindle, we would stack away. There would be this eerie sliding noise as the top album slid across the one below during a drop from the stack. Because of my poor LP care, my junior high albums contained many pops, ticks, skips, and other scratch noises. We kids of the late 1960s and early 70s simply accepted that poor sound fidelity was the price one paid for having and not caring for vinyl records.
Well, once I entered high school, I gained considerable LP care skills. I entered the realm of being an audiophile. Today, when I play that sound in my head—two albums sliding across each other during a stack drop—it’s like nails on a blackboard. What happened? In the rest of this post I’d like to talk about how I gained my vinyl record “care and feeding skills” and why I feel that they are important. In part II, I’d like to end by commenting on how a loss of such skills could play a role in the loss of care skills on a societal level. Lets get started.
When I entered high school I met a friend who’s still a dear friend of mine even today. Lets call him John (not his real name). John was (and still is) an audiophile. Loosely speaking, an audiophile is a person who takes pleasure in listening to recorded music with a high degree of fidelity (thus the term HiFi or High Fidelity). Yes, WiFi is a play on the old High Fidelity era. When I first spied John’s stereo system, I was in awe. First, no all-in-one stereo system. For the best audio fidelity, audiophiles knew that individual components were a must. John’s system consisted of a record player (which audiophiles called a turntable because there was no stacking mechanism), an AM-FM tuner, a stereo amplifier, a reel-to-reel tape deck, and an external Dolby noise reduction unit that was used for reel-to-reel recordings and playback. When John fired up all of his stereo equipment—all neatly housed in a stereo cabinet that John built (he did carpentry jobs to fund his hobby)—it looked like the control panel for a recording studio, which, in many ways, it was.
John’s stereo system had an undeniable presence to it. You could viscerally feel the heat, which is why John’s cabinet contained cooling vents and a fan. But presence was only part of it. When he fired up the first track from the Doobie Brothers album Toulouse Street (Listen to the Music), it was stunning. The sound quality just blew me away like Maxell’s “chair guy.” Here’s what really caught my attention: absolutely no scratch noises. More on this in a moment. Not a pop, skip, or click to be heard, which was unheard of. It was simply pristine. I found myself saying, “I want pristine sound.” I was hooked. It was clear that John took great pride in having a high fidelity audio system. Heck, he even built his own stereo speaker enclosures replete with real wood veneers.
John had an extensive LP collection. Each album had a spine label on it, and each had its own 3×5 card in a filing system that tracked artist, title, release date, song tracks, and any notes like who produced the album or who was the sound engineer. (Note: you can find collection database apps all over the Internet today.) All of John’s albums were neatly arranged on his bookshelf in an upright position and in alphabetical order by artist. If you asked John if he had any Batdorf & Rodney or Electric Light Orchestra, he’d say “yup,” reach behind, and grab an example in a flash. But before he would hand you one of his prized albums, there was an audiophile “right of passage.” John would ask, “Know how to handle an album?” I sheepishly answered, “No, I don’t really.” I joked, “Grab it and throw it on the plater?” John was not amused and his slight scowl seemed to say “amateur.”
Doesn’t matter the timeframe—1971 or 2011—if you desire scratch-free vinyl albums, the necessary handling skills have not changed. I asked for a lesson and John obliged.
First and foremost, you never, and I mean never, put fingerprints on vinyl records. The trick, then, is to remove the album from its dust sleeve and cover jacket, and hold the album by the edge alone. John did this in such a coordinated fashion that it was clear that he had done this 100s of times before. You remove the album (still in its dust sleeve) from the cover jacket never touching the album. You then slide your hand into the dust sleeve so that your middle finger engages the center hole and you grip the edge with your thumb. Once out, you can hold and spin the album (to position side A in the up position) with both hands, again, by only touching the edge.
Second, John instructed that when you return the album (now in its dust sleeve) to the cover jacket, you do so with the dust sleeve opening pointing in the up or north direction, 90 degrees from the cover jacket opening to the east. Why? Because if the dust sleeve and cover jacket openings were aligned (e.g., both pointing east), it would be very easy for the album to roll out when you pulled it from the shelf. Never even occurred to me. Most of us amateurs kept the openings aligned for fast ingress and egress. If the album hit the ground, oh well, a few more pops or ticks to add “character.”
Third, John warned, “If you stack albums using a spindle, you have committed the most egregious audiophile offense of all. Don’t do it … ever!”
Fourth, never lend out your albums. It wasn’t until long after I had proven myself worthy as an audiophile who knew how to care for vinyl albums that John would break rule number four and let me listen to one of his albums on my system. I, of course, trusted John with my albums implicitly.
I could go on and on about leaving behind my days as an all-in-one amateur and gaining access to the wonderful world of the audiophile. I’ll spare you the details. I ended up with a stereo system that closely tracked John’s. I still have most of that original equipment today. A few years back I had both my tuner and amp refurbished by a specialty repair shop, but I feel it’s worth maintaing stereo equipment that is ancient by anyone’s standard. I hate to say it but the sound quality is still stunning even though the sound cones in my old Jensen speakers have lost a lot of their elasticity. Time to have them refurbished as well. Here’s a picture of my album collection as it sits today. Note that I adopted John’s spine label idea. The lower group of albums await spine labels they will never receive:
So, why am I telling you all of this? In part II I’d like to make the case that as we continue to pass from the analog world to the digital world, we will end up paying a hidden “care” tax. This hidden care tax is talked about in great detail in economist Jeremy Rifkin’s 2000 book entitled The Age of Access—The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience. (Contact the Foundation for my executive summary of the last chapter from Age of Access.) Rifkin argues that we are moving away from relationships that are in large part mediated by owning tangible objects, to relationships that are principally mediated by the process of gaining access, especially gaining access to digital worlds. Rifkin argues that we no longer own things; we access them through leases, rents, memberships, and myriad Internet accounts. To whet your appetite for part II, rather than learning about the care and feeding of vinyl albums (as an example), kids (and many adults) today simply gain access to an MP3 audio file. When it comes to an MP3 audio file, there’s no care and feeding; there’s just access. You don’t have to worry about scratching an MP3 audio file, or, for that matter, putting fingerprints on it. In fact, there is no way to put fingerprints on an MP3 audio file because it only exists in digital format and often in the cloud (Amazon.com’s cloud-based audio service would be an example here). Will moving from objects (like vinyl records) to access (like cloud-based MP3 files) affect the overall care environment? In part II, I will try to convince you that it will.
In the mean time, if you have an old stereo system and a vinyl copy of Toulouse Street, crank it up and Listen to the Music. By the way, vinyl records are enjoying a bit of a rebirth. My local Hastings Bookstore now has a decent vinyl record section. Artists like Katy Perry, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, the Misfits, and White Stripes are releasing (or rereleasing) their albums on vinyl.
Oh yeah, before I forget, there’s the small issue of the “album” concept versus the “single download” concept. As an example, Pink Floyd refused to put their considerable catalog on iTunes unless the album concept was preserved, that is to say, one must buy the entire album of songs and not just one track. I believe Pink Floyd has since moved away from their defense of the album concept, but it begs the question, “Should the album concept be defended?” Without the album concept, we would not have grand works like Jesus Christ Superstar, the Who’s Tommy, or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Will Rifkin’s access play a role in diminishing large conceptual schemes or narratives that challenge one to sit long enough to take in large sweeping wholes? Let me put it this way, should Amazon.com allow us to gain access to just one chapter from a book? Or should Netflix allow us to gain access to just one scene from a movie? And what will this objectification process do to our ability to engage in the EF (Executive Function) skill of taking in large sweeping conceptual frameworks?
In hindsight, I think what really blew me away about John’s audiophile world was all the thought or EF that went into it: the planning, the research, the setup, the ritual, the housing, the cataloging, the care, the pride of ownership, the pride of craftsmanship, the enjoyment. Maybe more than pristine sound, it was EF I was after. Sadly, it is hard to get that type of EF experience listening to single MP3 tracks (whose sound quality suffers greatly from the compression algorithms used) on a smartphone. Ahhh … I know what you’re thinking: “But kids and many adults really care about their smartphones.” I’ll agree. But maybe too much, which is where we will pick back up in part II. In part II, I will argue that we are witnessing the birth of a new behavioral system (to rival those of attachment, caregiving, and sex) whose motivation is to simply gain access, especially access to digital communication devices. Lets call it the access behavioral system. Within the access behavioral system, means become ends, which distinguishes it from the other behavioral systems.
COMMENT: The Care and Feeding of Vinyl Records (part I of II)
Back when I was in junior high, I had an all-in-one Norelco stereo system. These systems were popular back in the late 1960s – early 70s. Each stereo cabinet would house a record player for playing vinyl records (either 45s or LPs, which spun at 33 1/3 rpms), an AM-FM radio, and a cassette player. Pop quiz: How many grooves does the average LP have? Answer at the end of part II. Because components were housed in one small cabinet, these stereo systems were easy to move around and locate on the top of a dresser. Here are some of the records I used to play on this old Norelco system (records still in my LP collection today):
Pretty eclectic eh? Back during my junior high days I didn’t take good care of my LP collection. I’d leave them laying around the room out of their dust sleeves and cover jackets. If the sun hit them, they’d warp like a Pringles potato chip. I’d bring them to a friend’s house and if that friend had a record player where you could stack albums on a spindle, we would stack away. There would be this eerie sliding noise as the top album slid across the one below during a drop from the stack. Because of my poor LP care, my junior high albums contained many pops, ticks, skips, and other scratch noises. We kids of the late 1960s and early 70s simply accepted that poor sound fidelity was the price one paid for having and not caring for vinyl records.
Well, once I entered high school, I gained considerable LP care skills. I entered the realm of being an audiophile. Today, when I play that sound in my head—two albums sliding across each other during a stack drop—it’s like nails on a blackboard. What happened? In the rest of this post I’d like to talk about how I gained my vinyl record “care and feeding skills” and why I feel that they are important. In part II, I’d like to end by commenting on how a loss of such skills could play a role in the loss of care skills on a societal level. Lets get started.
When I entered high school I met a friend who’s still a dear friend of mine even today. Lets call him John (not his real name). John was (and still is) an audiophile. Loosely speaking, an audiophile is a person who takes pleasure in listening to recorded music with a high degree of fidelity (thus the term HiFi or High Fidelity). Yes, WiFi is a play on the old High Fidelity era. When I first spied John’s stereo system, I was in awe. First, no all-in-one stereo system. For the best audio fidelity, audiophiles knew that individual components were a must. John’s system consisted of a record player (which audiophiles called a turntable because there was no stacking mechanism), an AM-FM tuner, a stereo amplifier, a reel-to-reel tape deck, and an external Dolby noise reduction unit that was used for reel-to-reel recordings and playback. When John fired up all of his stereo equipment—all neatly housed in a stereo cabinet that John built (he did carpentry jobs to fund his hobby)—it looked like the control panel for a recording studio, which, in many ways, it was.
John’s stereo system had an undeniable presence to it. You could viscerally feel the heat, which is why John’s cabinet contained cooling vents and a fan. But presence was only part of it. When he fired up the first track from the Doobie Brothers album Toulouse Street (Listen to the Music), it was stunning. The sound quality just blew me away like Maxell’s “chair guy.” Here’s what really caught my attention: absolutely no scratch noises. More on this in a moment. Not a pop, skip, or click to be heard, which was unheard of. It was simply pristine. I found myself saying, “I want pristine sound.” I was hooked. It was clear that John took great pride in having a high fidelity audio system. Heck, he even built his own stereo speaker enclosures replete with real wood veneers.
John had an extensive LP collection. Each album had a spine label on it, and each had its own 3×5 card in a filing system that tracked artist, title, release date, song tracks, and any notes like who produced the album or who was the sound engineer. (Note: you can find collection database apps all over the Internet today.) All of John’s albums were neatly arranged on his bookshelf in an upright position and in alphabetical order by artist. If you asked John if he had any Batdorf & Rodney or Electric Light Orchestra, he’d say “yup,” reach behind, and grab an example in a flash. But before he would hand you one of his prized albums, there was an audiophile “right of passage.” John would ask, “Know how to handle an album?” I sheepishly answered, “No, I don’t really.” I joked, “Grab it and throw it on the plater?” John was not amused and his slight scowl seemed to say “amateur.”
Doesn’t matter the timeframe—1971 or 2011—if you desire scratch-free vinyl albums, the necessary handling skills have not changed. I asked for a lesson and John obliged.
First and foremost, you never, and I mean never, put fingerprints on vinyl records. The trick, then, is to remove the album from its dust sleeve and cover jacket, and hold the album by the edge alone. John did this in such a coordinated fashion that it was clear that he had done this 100s of times before. You remove the album (still in its dust sleeve) from the cover jacket never touching the album. You then slide your hand into the dust sleeve so that your middle finger engages the center hole and you grip the edge with your thumb. Once out, you can hold and spin the album (to position side A in the up position) with both hands, again, by only touching the edge.
Second, John instructed that when you return the album (now in its dust sleeve) to the cover jacket, you do so with the dust sleeve opening pointing in the up or north direction, 90 degrees from the cover jacket opening to the east. Why? Because if the dust sleeve and cover jacket openings were aligned (e.g., both pointing east), it would be very easy for the album to roll out when you pulled it from the shelf. Never even occurred to me. Most of us amateurs kept the openings aligned for fast ingress and egress. If the album hit the ground, oh well, a few more pops or ticks to add “character.”
Third, John warned, “If you stack albums using a spindle, you have committed the most egregious audiophile offense of all. Don’t do it … ever!”
Fourth, never lend out your albums. It wasn’t until long after I had proven myself worthy as an audiophile who knew how to care for vinyl albums that John would break rule number four and let me listen to one of his albums on my system. I, of course, trusted John with my albums implicitly.
I could go on and on about leaving behind my days as an all-in-one amateur and gaining access to the wonderful world of the audiophile. I’ll spare you the details. I ended up with a stereo system that closely tracked John’s. I still have most of that original equipment today. A few years back I had both my tuner and amp refurbished by a specialty repair shop, but I feel it’s worth maintaing stereo equipment that is ancient by anyone’s standard. I hate to say it but the sound quality is still stunning even though the sound cones in my old Jensen speakers have lost a lot of their elasticity. Time to have them refurbished as well. Here’s a picture of my album collection as it sits today. Note that I adopted John’s spine label idea. The lower group of albums await spine labels they will never receive:
In the mean time, if you have an old stereo system and a vinyl copy of Toulouse Street, crank it up and Listen to the Music. By the way, vinyl records are enjoying a bit of a rebirth. My local Hastings Bookstore now has a decent vinyl record section. Artists like Katy Perry, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, the Misfits, and White Stripes are releasing (or rereleasing) their albums on vinyl.
Oh yeah, before I forget, there’s the small issue of the “album” concept versus the “single download” concept. As an example, Pink Floyd refused to put their considerable catalog on iTunes unless the album concept was preserved, that is to say, one must buy the entire album of songs and not just one track. I believe Pink Floyd has since moved away from their defense of the album concept, but it begs the question, “Should the album concept be defended?” Without the album concept, we would not have grand works like Jesus Christ Superstar, the Who’s Tommy, or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Will Rifkin’s access play a role in diminishing large conceptual schemes or narratives that challenge one to sit long enough to take in large sweeping wholes? Let me put it this way, should Amazon.com allow us to gain access to just one chapter from a book? Or should Netflix allow us to gain access to just one scene from a movie? And what will this objectification process do to our ability to engage in the EF (Executive Function) skill of taking in large sweeping conceptual frameworks?
In hindsight, I think what really blew me away about John’s audiophile world was all the thought or EF that went into it: the planning, the research, the setup, the ritual, the housing, the cataloging, the care, the pride of ownership, the pride of craftsmanship, the enjoyment. Maybe more than pristine sound, it was EF I was after. Sadly, it is hard to get that type of EF experience listening to single MP3 tracks (whose sound quality suffers greatly from the compression algorithms used) on a smartphone. Ahhh … I know what you’re thinking: “But kids and many adults really care about their smartphones.” I’ll agree. But maybe too much, which is where we will pick back up in part II. In part II, I will argue that we are witnessing the birth of a new behavioral system (to rival those of attachment, caregiving, and sex) whose motivation is to simply gain access, especially access to digital communication devices. Lets call it the access behavioral system. Within the access behavioral system, means become ends, which distinguishes it from the other behavioral systems.