Back in 1993, for my 25th birthday, the girl I was living with gave me a jam box. It had a CD player built in to it, which at the time was a major breakthrough in my extremely-poor-man’s audio playback system. It, in fact, marked my first foray into the world of digital music.
As it turns out, I still have the damn thing. Better still, it still works as well as it did the day I got it, which is to say that the stereo sounds shitty, but the CD player works quite well. As for the tape deck, that’s another story. The built-in tape deck came advertised as being able to record whatever CDs you were listening to. Instead, the tape deck played tapes, and that’s it. The recording feature never worked. Naturally, I never did a damn thing about it. Honestly, the CD playback was decent and loud enough to get the job done, and so I didn’t really give a shit about the tapes since I never really listened to them by then anyway.
Once I acquired something more of a traditional stereo setup at home, I reassigned the jam box to the years-long duty of serving at my job.
I have literally used the machine to play CDs at work for 15 years, and other than the eventual breaking of the antenna by some anonymous dipshit coworker, the thing still works fine.
Not only that, for some reason, even the though box was built long before CDRs, the damn thing has an uncanny ability to play back CDRs that really have no business being played on anything seeing as how they have been scratched so much they pretty much don’t work in any other device.
As the era of the portable MP3 player stormed into our world, the near-omnipresent jam box really started to show its age. In order to try and play my iPod on the thing, I employed a couple of failed measures.
First, I tried using the little iTrip device, which is essentially a radio transmitter for your iPod. It worked okay, if I was desperate, but honestly, the loss in fidelity was pretty much inexcusable. If you’re gonna be blasting Emperor into the ears of your captive coworkers, the least you could do is have a stereo that doesn’t sound like the apocalypse is happening over the phone.
After that failure, I tried using a couple different cassette adapters that plug in your iPod. For some reason, these worked about 50% of the time, and again, when they did work they pretty much sounded like ass.
In other words, the digital revolution was moving well beyond the capacity of my now 17 year-old jam box.
I should add that the room I currently work in is a large, open-floored cement box, basically, and that there are electrical transformers in the room that hum 24/7. The first day I worked in there I was fairly certain that I would go completely insane. I am pretty sensitive to ambient noise. But, as it turned out, I found that after a time I could tune it out with the help of almost any sort of music. On top of that, something about the cross mix of the humming and the (usually) crappy music favored by my otherwise badass coworker — not to mention the near-endless sports chatter — causes me to not actually listen to any of it. Better still, I can recede into my head, my favorite spot, and focus on my job (i.e. getting it done and going home).
Jumping forward to my 42nd birthday, last Monday, and what do I acquire for my birthday but a much needed and updated jam box. Yeah, a jam box built this century. Hell, this millennium for that matter.
It’s got an iPod dock, plays CDs, and plays the radio. The sound quality is pretty decent, it has some basic EQ settings, as is generally the case for these tiny boxes now.
I realize this is veering into some sort of grandpa-meets-electronics horror story here, so I guess I’ll get to the point.
Okay, there isn’t one.
I will say this instead.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my professional life (ahem, professional, heh heh) thinking about, trying to manipulate and ultimately trying to control sound.
As much as I love music, as much I as damn near need it to fulfill something missing in my otherwise very noisy head, much of my recent work life has been relegated to the backwoods of musical enjoyment.
I don’t work in a progressive environment. The people around me, though great people, are not into what I am into. Out of respect, I’ll leave it at that. In order to keep the peace, not make waves, and out of a lack of desire to bash my head against the wall, my idea of what sounds pleasing has taken a huge fucking step backwards.
That’s why, as I bull-in-a-china-shop my way into the second half of my life, the gift of technology can be seen, if only to me, as a harbinger of a future that has a place for me at the table. Even if it is the kiddy table.
Pass the salt.
Thanks for the opportunity to post, K, et al, I enjoyed it.
I admire your sticking to the old warhorse and trying to make it change to serve your purposes. I had a clock radio for about thirty years that would just not break down. I really wanted to get a new one, but I couldn’t really justify it because the old one worked just fine. A few weeks ago, I decided that it was probably pretty dusty inside that old clock radio, so I got out the screwdriver and opened it up. It was, in fact, pretty dusty, but more alarmingly, there were what appeared to be the husks of some long dead bedbugs. Sometime in the last thirty years, I must have had bedbugs, even though I don’t recall ever being bitten. What a sneaky hideout–the clock radio was always near the bed and would, under normal curcumstances never be opened. If I were a bedbug, that’s where I’d live. Anyway, I cleaned the thing out really well, but ultimately decided bedbugs–even long dead ones–were a good excuse to get rid of the thing. I went out that day and bought another clock radio. The new one is much less substantial. It feels like it could break if I push the buttons too hard. On the other hand, it projects the time onto the ceiling, which gives me stupid satisfaction for some reason. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the old one. So now it’s in a box that will ultimately gather dust in a closet. I guess the thing to take away from this is: Don’t take apart your old jambox. Who knows what’s inside of that thing?
It’s funny you mention your old clock radio because mine is almost as old as yours. I use my phone’s alarm to wake up in the morning now, but I still use the the old clock radio as a, uh, clock. Now, I’m wondering if the damn thing is full of bedbugs.
I think of it this way –your old clock radios, jam boxes– loved you and protected you from all things bedbuggy. And what do you do? Go out and buy some narcissistic spaceman when your cowboy was serving just fine. Shame shame.
Jamboxes always remind me of my friend Noah’s jambox going back to senior year in high school, but he probably had it longer. It was the most ridiculously huge jambox I’ve ever seen –it even played records. But it stayed in his room because moving it would have been crazy.
Here’s what the grandpa says: dont throw away the old boombox cause I bet the new one won’t last beyond its warranty. they just don’t make them like they used to anymore.
funny stuff John. Apocalypse over the phone, i’m gonna remember that one.
I used to have a jam box with built-in stereo microphones, which I assume were there for live recording of, what, the radio? I used it to make idiotic little skits in which I would use two different voices (one for each mic, duh). Unfortunately for all of you, none of these recordings have survived.
I should add, by the way, that I have no intention of getting rid of the old box. It’s just being retired to my home, an environment more suited to its failing health.
I too had a jam box with built-in stereo microphones. I think I recorded just about every “album” I made with my friends between 1989 and 1991 on it, at which point I finally got hold of a cassette 4-track recorder. However, I used the jam box once more, in 1996, to record a tape of spontaneously composed songs called “The Food and Drug Administration Orchestra”, which included such perennial favorites as “I’ll Kick Your Ass”, “I Went to School”, and the original “Porno in the Sink”. That jam box RULED. Plus, it gave music recorded on it an extra kick by recording the hugely loud CLICK sound that occurred when you stopped recording.
It’s some sort of backwards historical document now. It will sit in a prominent place at the Houston Psyche-Scene Museum.