Tuesday, May 29, 2012

1984: A Form Of Inspiration



Technology, eh? How it moves on.

I remember thinking I was at the cutting edge when I chose my new birthday present this year.

I'd struggled back to school from Bahrain carrying an enormous - well, let's call it a ghetto blaster, even though I could never bring myself to use those words. It was loud, had lots of twiddly knobs, had FM radio and best of all had a double cassette deck. That's right! You could do tape-to-tape taping. It was amazing.

So goodbye turntable, and hello taping everything. I'd buy a record, tape it and play it death at my leisure. And of course there was always taping off the radio. 

Being the first one back I had the room to myself so cranked up Radio 1 to catch up with all the new music I'd missed hearing while I was away in the dusty Middle East. Coming through crystal clear was the hot new sound from OMD (Locomotion, which still sounds great today) and the latest from those Pointer Sisters, the catchiest, summeriest, bounciest new song of the moment, its use of out there production techniques highlighted wonderfully by this new machine. I'm not sure anything had ever sounded so good.

But what didn't sound great? Everything from Prince to OMD to Matt Bianco took on a new lease of life. This machine served me well for the next two years and may well have been my favourite piece of music equipment ever. Until the ipod was born.



3 comments:

  1. Interested to know, what was it? My money's on either a Sharp or a Hitachi.

    In good nick they still go for decent money, because by using the phono input (originally for your turntable, daddio) you can plug an i-device in to them for that big beat sound.

    Tesla Girls.

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  2. Well guessed, OP, it was indeed a Sharp. I should have hung onto it.

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  3. Sharp. "They got their name from their first product - The Eversharp pencil." [a propelling pencil].

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