Be Excellent To Each Other

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8117619.stm

The BBC made a 13 year old kid swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

I recently unearthed my old Walkman. My nine-year-old nephew looked at me goggle-eyed as I explained it to him. As though I was showing him a zoetrope or something.

I look forward eagerly to the dfay when I get to tell my infant cousins that I remember when people said 'search' instead of 'google', when 'anti-social' meant 'anti-social' instead of 'displeasing to the government', and when Michael Jackson was black.

Whom the fuck is Michael Jackson, they'll say. And then scoot off on their hover bikes.

I want a hover bike.

I also doubt that they will say 'whom'.

No, they totally will! You know how text-spk and auto-correction on mobiles has corrupted our spelling? Well in the future, their Apple iNeurones will have trained them into an annoying hyper-correctionism in everyday speech.

I want Apple iNeurones.

I also doubt that Apple iNeurones will exist.

Don't you get it, man?! They already exist.

Whoa. Déjà vu.

i was very late into the mp3 thing. I thought that until recently they didn't have enough storage for a good listening experience, so i used a discman instead. In my 2004 holidays in southern spain i had my discman broken so i took my old walkman instead. Ahah, felt really good.

Precocious little blighter, isn't he? Also: he makes me feel old. I was thinking "tchoh, I was using a personal stereo when I was at uni," then I realised that was nine years ago. When he was four. Wah.

And quite right, too. Nobody says "whom" unless they really desperately want to be elbowed in the face.

The fuck?

Well, like I say, it's the future-day equivalent of saying "random" too often.

I bucked this trend when I was in 6th form. I said "arbitrary" too often instead.

I had a MiniDisc player when I was at uni (nine years ago in September). Isn't that bit of tech just a drop in time...

In other news I'm really looking forward to the new series of Doctor Whom!

Doctor Hindwhom

Sucker!

I've still got it actually (a deck and a personal). I swear, in 1999, that was the thing to go for. Problem is, the storage kinda gets shown up when you have iPod Classics on over 100gb of memory. I preferred them to CD-R for making compilations though. And they're still good for recording the radio.

But that's admittedly because I'm pretty old school on that front.

[edit] Tempted to run it through my DAC and see how it sounds, now.

I had a minidisc player, but they didn't really kick off, did they. I loved it, even though I had to record music onto my discs at 1x analogue which took about 4 hours per disc. Then I had to manually add the start/end points of each song as well as the tags for each. It was a complete nightmare, but I could fit four albums on one disc and didn't have to carry CDs around with me - priceless back then.

We're all using DAT now.

Yeah, I won't miss that.


Optical connection, dude. Does it for you.


As recently as early 2004 (shit, not that recently then), I was hardcoring my MD player. Then I got an iPod mini and that was the end of that.

I'm also not gonna miss that weird SonicStage software that was incompatible with anything else in the world. Sony and their fackin' proprietary obsession.

I didn't have anything with optical out back then, unfortunately.

Their software was shit, aye, though I didn't have to deal with it. My brother had a minidisc player a bit later than I did - his came with a PC dock, and of course that dreadful software seemed to be the only way to access the player. It was a complete crock of shit.

We used them alot in radio. In fact I have a barely used portable Sony that I can't really sell on as I have so much archive stuff on MD.

At one stage I had a Hi-Fi seperate MD player, an MD player in the car and a portable and they were all used a hell of alot.

Great for interviews, VO sessions, anything where you needed to make a recording. Took mine in helicopters, planes, gliders, interviewed famous people and more. The only time my portable glitched was when we did a winch launch when I was doing a feature on gliding. From memory we went from nothing to 2G in under a second and the poor thing just stopped pretty much until the cable release about 40 seconds later. Trick was to ensure you had the extra battery pack plugged in when flying as the machine would need to use it's cache and spin the motor faster when it had just been jolted which could kill the battery quickly.

In fact for one flight feature I used two, one for ambient and one plugged into the aircrafts intercom. Sounded fucking excellent.

Last used mine in anger 3 years ago when I did a quick to mic piece for some friends at an event I was attending in order to piss off their larger rivals. No trouble as it was so small and I already had a mic on me. It's all flash recorders these days apparently.


ChinnyTRUFAX: My older silver portable (that stopped recording but played fine) spent a month in 2004 sitting in a rack playing a message on a loop. The message that a certain national radio station plays online when you try and listen to the football or any other sports where they don't have the internet rights. All those messages were played from MD and there was a shortage of units at the time. Couldn't get hold of a pro unit to buy for love nor money. I wasn't willing to volunteer my newer unit and risk burning it out but I set the older one up and it did the job just dandy.

I still use my minidisc player on occasion to record mixes, also it comes in handy if you keep it recording constantly when you're making music just in case you play something unrepeatable.

DAT's great.

When I worked for (not ITV - Ed) a client (for we were a commercial arm) decided to send us a load of DAT tapes with the promise that this would be a regular thing.

Panic job, we had to borrow a DAT from the local radio station down the road to do the gig. After the panic was over it was returned and I decided it would be prudent to put in an order for our own DAT machine. Nearly 900 quids worth of kit but well worth it to not be humiliated when it turns out we don't have a pretty basic bit of kit (until very recently it was still fairly widespread in broadcasting as you can timecode it and there are huge archives).

Took a while to get it and eventually it turns up all shiny and new. I proudly rack it up as it looked all shiny and splendid. I looked forward to using it.....

Never used the fucker. Bet its still sitting there 5 years on never having had a single tape pass across its heads.

That kid is pretty eloquent for a 13 yr old, I bet he knows what a despot is!

I was thinking the same thing! Really nicely written article for a 13 yr old! I could not write that now. I don't know any 13 yr old's that well educated.... mind, they're all under the patio.

I have to doubt it's 100% his own words, unless all columnists happen to be 13 years old and get paid minimum wage.

itsallwater (aged 28 and half)

I could have written that at 13; I'm sure they would have picked a bright kid for something like this.

But not bright enough to know what a Walkman is.

Why would any 13 year old know what a Walkman is, regardless of how bright they are? It's not like they would ever have seen one, used one, or been taught about them at a school.

It says at the bottom he writes for his own news site, so I guess he's pretty bright.

Why would I have known what a valve radio or a 78 RPM record was? I did though

Kids don't totally live in a bubble, I hope. Even less so today, with wikipedia and that.

Cassette tapes don't magically disappear. Neither has video. This is the equivalent of a 13 year old saying "What is a SNES?". Or even "What is a Playstation?"

EDIT: What Kalmar said.

Don't forget the new Sony mp3 player is called a Walkman, too.

Vinyl would BLOW HIS MIND. If not only for the fact that it also has two sides. Like some CDs and DVDs...

There's a part of me that's yelling "What a quaint... liar!". (May be my mouth.) But who knows what kids get up to these days.

Pah! At least his one had rewind. I had an old black and red sanyo 'walkman' that didn't even have rewind, if I wanted to go back i'd have to physically remove and flip the tape, fast forward it and then flip it again

It also had a natty belt clip and a strap so it could be slung over a shoulder

By the time tape walkmans (walkmen?) had pretty much reached their technological high point the units were tiny, hardly bigger than the tape itself seemingly, could play either side at the flip of a switch, auto detect to start of songs (if there was enough gap) and had inline remotes, decent radios with a digital display.... I remember being pretty impressed at how they seemed to advance so much feature wise. I think I must be harder to impress now, or more expecting of devices to get smaller and more feature-rich quickly.

CD's with two sides? Really?

No, not really. And I haven't seen a flipper DVD in ten years.

My first portable personal cassette player was a red and black cascade one that was fairly bulky. I later had a Memorex one which actually was sleek black and sounded really good. Better than most of the big name ones actually. It even had a switch to reverse the tape. Brilliant it was. Right that's it then, no one's getting a mix cd from me now. Cassette tape all the way!

The Without A Trace DVD set that the wife and I are watching at the moment uses flippers.

Can still be purchased:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-WMEX651-WM-EX651-Tape-Walkman/dp/B0007UB548/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1246359136&sr=1-7

My Goodfellas DVD is a flipper, that cuts out halfway through the film and asks you to flip over. Gnnngh.

I give him the benefit of the doubt. He's probably familiar with VHS tapes as they're widely in use still, and you can't turn those over.

I can't say I can recall ever seeing a cassette tape that hasn't been labelled 'Side A', 'Side B'... but I suppose it could be read as an indication of the 'correct' side to put in, as some cassettes are single sided.

Earache are doing an entire "classics" range with an album on one side and a DVD on the other.

In the late 80's Mastertronic started to put CPC and Speccy games on the same tape. CPC on one side, Speccy on the other.

Quite annoying to set your computer up to load, walking off and coming back five minutes later to find nothing had happened as you'd been loading the wrong side.

Load the right side, then.

Put it in your Speccy then.