I hate the past. To me, the past is something we should learn from but never return to. I have no desire to return to the days where gay and the r-slur were every day jokes and and “Tits or gtfo” was a common reply to women on the internet.
But I love old machines and gizmos. I love gears and levers and buttons. I love things that clunk and whir. Vinage music boxes, Clockwork toys and VHS machines that sound like they’re trying to go into orbit when you rewind a cassette. I’ve always liked old stuff for as long as I can remember.
Is it nostalgia or just autism? Is it something I should be ashamed of?
In the realm of music production and instruments, there’s often an association between vintage gear and “character.” The modern stuff is great for pristine exactness, but there’s something people find attractive about the imperfections in the old gear; unpredictable behaviors in analog circuits, old janky digital to audio converters, the “sizzle” 12-bit samplers add, myriad flavors of tape artifacts/effects. Today’s flaws are tomorrow’s je ne sais quoi‘s.
I’m thinking there’s a similar thing going on with other vintage technology. Blu rays or streaming will give you perfect 4K visuals, but the perfection makes the delivery mechanism invisible. Old VHS tapes and machines, their imperfections made them feel like they’re part of the creative process rather than a pass-through.
I have a vcr and crt bexause they hit different. The pan and scan version of the phantom menace on an old tv makes it seem like an episode of a tv show like xena, the bad cgi is too blurry to tell it isnt a bad practical effect. I’m also using it for music, got a aux to patch cable so I can run my tv audio through pedals to an amp. So im gonna record some stuff, dub it to vhs, run a magnet over the tape and then play that back again through pedals for an analogue deep fry
I love CRTs, I wish I still had one. I gave mine away in 2016 (I think) and regretted it ever since.
I like that they sound like they’re going to electrocute you to death every time you turn them on. Also they’re heavy as hell, like heavier than you’d think they are.
Fun fact about CRTs, did you know that the sound of untuned channel snow/noise/static is the sound of 13.7 billion year old cosmic radiation?
This is your useless Dort fact of the day
My parents got a big screen CRT
Believe you me, I know how heavy they are
Damn thing took me (a stout lad) and three men who were even stouter and laddier than me to move
I did know that! However ot isnt exclusive to a CRT. You can still get the snow channel on a 4k tv. That isnt a cathode ray thing. It’s a radio signal thing. That’s another reason I like analogue stuff. I know how a lot of it works