Write a commentDo you remember your first audio system? What were your first headphones and audio player? I use the term “audio player” broadly to cover portable devices and home gear. Were you plugging a huge pair of “cans” into the front of a record player, or was it a Koss CD player with eight whole seconds of anti-skip technology?
For me, it was somewhere in the middle. I can’t recall the exact year, but sometime in the late 1980s or early ’90s, I was gifted a bright red GE knock-off Walkman. It might have been a Z8. My aunt gave it to me for either Christmas or my birthday, and likely bought it at Radio Shack. It had those terrible scratchy on-ear headphones with a thin metal band that pulled at my hair. Conveniently, I wouldn’t have it for very long (the hair, that is). I have fonder memories of its replacement, a Panasonic with a four-band EQ that I’m pretty sure had the ability to fast-forward to the next track or rewind to the beginning of one. In hindsight, I can’t imagine how much damage that did to the cassettes.
What I remember about both, incorrectly of course, was how great they sounded. More than that, I remember how much I loved the music. Being so young, I was discovering so much music for the first time. Columbia House, rightly regarded as a scummy company, really isn’t that much different from Spotify now. Essentially, it was a subscription service getting whatever music you wanted. Far fewer songs and at a much higher price, of course, but it let me experiment with bands and genres I might not have found otherwise. During the early ’90s, radio stations in the Boston area were legally restricted to playing only Aerosmith, Boston, and “Edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks. Can you imagine how my little, undeveloped brain was blown first hearing Apollo 18, Ramones, Ten, or Use Your Illusion II?
I’m sure you all have similar experiences. Maybe it was your parents’ record player or an older sibling’s hand-me-down, but unless you were super-young, I bet you fondly remember your first gear and the resulting transcendent experiences. It makes me wonder how much this drives the audio industry today. Nostalgia is a powerful force. Chasing after that high of discovery, of first-time experience, could be giving an unconscious (or maybe even conscious) push for that new amp, those new headphones, that ultimate DAC.
And so what if it does? I recently bought—overpaid for, actually—a new camera. Not a camera to replace my current camera, but an addition to my kit that already includes a full-frame Canon mirrorless, four huge and heavy lenses, and more action cameras than I can carry. This new camera, a Fujifilm X100VI, has a smaller sensor and a fixed lens. It is, at a casual glance, inferior to my Canon. However, it’s fun. It’s small, takes amazing photos, and brings me great joy every time I use it—which is all the time. It takes me back to the time when I got my first real camera, learning new things and creating something cool to share with friends and family.
Amazingly, despite writing about audio gear for a living, I still occasionally get glimpses of those transcendent audio experiences. Sometimes, with the right headphones and the right song, I can tap that atrophied part of my brain that releases that little bit of dopamine and the resulting rush causes me to think, “Oh yeah, there it is. That’s the good stuff.” Then I crank the volume even more, and once again I’m that skinny kid with the most hair he’ll ever have, walking his paper route in the rain, and meandering through a great undiscovered country of music with the whole world ahead of him.
Powerful stuff, that nostalgia.
. . . Geoffrey Morrison
