Sunday Morning Lineup
There is an interesting essay on one of the Amazon blogs called Car Lust. The essay is titled The End of an Era and the writer is lamenting the disappearance of the factory-installed cassette player in automobiles. The beginning of Anthony Cagle’s posting is a quote from a recent New York Times article:
“According to experts who monitor the automotive market, the last new car to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck in the dashboard was a 2010 Lexus. While it is possible that a little-known exception lurks deep within some automaker’s order forms, a survey of major automakers and a search of new-car shopping Web sites indicates that the tape deck is as passé as tailfins on a Caddy.”
From there, Cagle reviews the chronology of music-playing systems mounted in autos and he does a good job with it. Personally, I don’t remember the passing phase of record players mounted in cars, but I suspect that it was only offered and then quickly withdrawn when nobody ever ordered one. But it would show up in an internet search and the overall posting is fun to read (CLICK HERE).
An underlying theme in the essay is the constantly-changing technology and presentation of recording formats. About every 20 years the method of collecting and playing recordings is so completely overhauled that the poor consumer is almost forced to start from scratch and rebuild their personal library of favorite recordings. When the digital CD made its appearance in the late 1980′s, I resisted for several years. I could see the benefits of the CD over the cassette, and they are compelling, but I didn’t want to toss my collection of cassettes that were mostly compiled from my favorite phonograph records plus tracks from commercial cassettes. But we didn’t have much choice, did we?
The recording industry declared the cassette to be dead and stopped making them, eventually discontinuing even the blanks that we used to make our own custom tapes. I remember when my local Best Buy store opened about 15 years ago that about 1/4 of the showroom floor was occupied by row after row of CD’s. The various music categories were a shopper’s paradise and you could buy literally any recording including some that were first produced 30 years earlier. But after everybody had rebuilt their library (again!) sales plummeted and the floor space shifted to other electronic toys and we had to go online to find and buy CD’s that we wanted.
Now even the CD’s are starting to dry up because everything is being pushed as downloads over the internet in the MP3 format. But that means you have to have an MP3 player. I don’t. And I don’t think I am going to. I will spend my final years sitting in some nursing home somewhere with an old Walkman listening to my ancient CD’s and living in the past, when things were simpler.
We can’t take our next step forward to the past until we get this equipment checked out, though. So let’s get started while I go fix some more coffee and see how the Sunday breakfast is coming along. See you back in the day room in a little while.
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