Everything old is new again

By Don Keith


The largest convention in Las Vegas each year is the CES...the Consumer Electronics Show.  As of this writing, this year's meet is just now wrapping up and there is a perplexed look on many of the faces of the 176,000 folks who trudged from booth to booth to see what technology is new and exciting and can't-miss.

Perplexed because there really wasn't much new.  Same old drones, 4K TVs, smaller and smaller ear buds and digital storage devices, and the like, but all those things were there last year, too.  But even more perplexing to attendees was what was hot and what "new" technology attracted lots of attention.  It was...well...ancient technology.

Ancient technology like record turntables, speakers, high end audio amps, and even a Kodak video camera.  See an article HERE for the surprising story.

I do this blog to keep an eye on rapidly advancing technology and how it affects media, society, and even--occasionally--my favorite hobby of Amateur Radio.  But I confess that I rue the day when people started thinking that listening to music was best on a tiny ear bud that reproduces a frequency range that is so narrow most of it sounds like a mouse caught in a blender and those low bass notes are non-existent.

Maybe people accept this travesty because some of today's music (and I am showing my curmudgeonly nature here) actually sounds best when you can't hear most of it.  But for the real experience you need to not just hear the full range but to be able to FEEL it, too.  Terms like distortion and dynamic range mean something.  And I do dislike some of the digital brittleness found in much music reproduction, brought on by having to compress and modify in order to change everything to 1s and zeroes to cram the music onto web sites, digital storage media, and fit such a wide range of potential playback devices out there.

It is a fact that music from well-mastered vinyl sounds better and warmer than a digital download or CD, especially if reproduced on a quality turntable with a good stylus, amplified with minimal distortion by a nice amp and fed into well-designed speakers.

What's my reaction to the new old stuff attracting so much attention at CES?

Hallelujah!  And you can play that back loud and proud.
 
 
 
de N4KC
 

What do TV remotes, passwords and cash money have in common?

 
 
By Don Keith

Rapid technological change guarantees that some things we take for granted will be replaced by things and technology most of us can't even imagine.  I still get a kick out of those web sites that offer up sounds you simply don't hear anymore...like the squeaks and squawks of dial-up Internet service, the cheery "You've got mail!" alert from AOL, or the clicks of the old manual typewriter.

Well, here is a list of five things that one article claims will be gone in a mere five years.  I can't say I disagree with any of them.  I rarely use cash to pay for anything anymore.  I've probably electronically signed a dozen documents in the past month.  And when I visited a friend recently, we giggled over the astonishing number of remote controls he had strewn around his living room.  But we talked about how he would soon either use his phone to replace all of them or use some other kind of magical wand that employed wi-fi to do the work of all those battery hogs.

Yeah, I admit I am slow on some things.  Though I have storage for data out there in the cloud (an author really does get paranoid about losing a book manuscript seconds before typing "The End."), I still can't resist backing up onto a thumb drive as well as an external hard drive.

Still, whether it is five years or not, the time will come when we all get over that attachment to something we can see and feel and take advantage of all that space out there in the ether.  And then, bye bye thumb drive.
 
 
de N4KC