Music Media

The media for music storage has come a long way from the pioneering days of the cylinder. My father was the proud owner of a three foot high piece of oak furniture that housed a clockwork record player. You had to wind this thing up by means of a large handle that projected from the side, and which resembled the handle on my mother's mangle***. It played 78 rpm records delightfully, just needing the occasional turn of the handle when the pitch descended! I can still hear my dad's favourites, Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' and 'American in Paris', but I went in for the real class, like 'I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts'.

Eventually, that museum piece disappeared from the house, to be replaced by a semi-portable electronic device that could play not only 78s, but 45s and 33s too. That was great fun, even though the mentioned 'Bunch of Coconuts' didn't sound quite so 'lovely'. At about that time, stereo, which had been pioneered by enthusiasts with a combined passion for electronics and music, was finally finding its way into the homes of Britain, along with telephones and electric refrigerators (the earlier ones ran on gas). So, sometime in the early-sixties, our family jumped on the bandwagon with a stereo radiogram. It sounded pretty good, even though it was the new-fangled transistorised type rather than valve (that was a retrograde step as far as hi-fi was concerned). Several years later, consumer technology had advanced miraculously. The original gramophone needle had evolved from something akin to a miniature steel stiletto, almost a 1 cm long, to a tiny, very low mass diamond-tipped structure; and the best transistor amplifiers were, to my ears, indistinguishable from the best valve amps.

The compact tape cassette became a popular music medium, not through its appeal to hi-fi buffs (it was distinctly inferior), but because of its robustness and portability. Now, of course, we have the CD. It's still not as portable as the cassette, but it combines some portability with excellent music quality - even though there are those, like myself, who insist that the old LPs sounded better.

So, what's next...solid state? I think so. RAM and flash memory are becoming very capacious and very cheap, not to mention very small. Maybe a pack of music cards, similar to a pack of playing cards, would be a convenient way to store and transport more music than we would ever have time to listen to.

***This was during the last days of the mangle. A generation earlier, only those with sufficient affluence to be borderline hoity-toity became proud owners of mangles, hence the derisory phrase sometimes used by squabbling kids: "just because ya mum's got a mangle".

"Time is what prevents everything from happening at once" - John Wheeler