Stacks of Wax

The latest project in the home is one of Buffy's... converting old vinyl LPs to .mp3 files and eventually CDs. She has a number of songs that appearently have never been put on CD or she's not willing to spend the money to buy the entire disc for only one song. So she wants to break out her old records and convert them into a 21st century medium. Of course, I said to her that if these songs have not been converted to CD by now, well, there may be some things best left on vinyl.

Note for the kids: Vinyl LPs, or commonly known as records, was how we listened to music back in the day. There were no .mp3s, iPods, CDs, DVDs, etc. We took basically a wax disc, placed it on a turntable (which is now a musical instrument for the hip-hop crowd to do scratching), placed a needle on the disc and let it play. It came complete with scratches and pops so you had to be careful how you handled the record. And I'm not even going to get into 8-track tapes.

This past Saturday, I dug out my old JVC turntable of about 25 years. After about a couple of minutes of use, the first in essencially 18-20 years, it worked! I ran the RCA cable to the sound card in her computer. Now, I needed something to play on it. Looking through a few old records, I found The Who's 1982 album, It's Hard (now keep your thoughts clean). I thought, "hey, I don't even have a CD copy or .mp3 of any of the songs from this album."

I loaded up the record, started the wav editor program on the computer and started playing around with converting the music. It worked, but the volume level was very low. After recording the song into electronic format, I could adjust the level of the volume, but it also adjusted up all the hissing and pops and scratchs from the source album.

Recently, there has been some sort of revival of the record album. Even a story was featured in the Journal Star last week. Upon listening to this vastly inferior sound reproduction, I thought to myself, "Who in their right mind wants to go back to this?!" But Buffy said to me, "Oh, I like all the hissing and pops in the song." Whatever!

While converting some of the songs off of this album, I took a moment to look at the album cover and artwork. It then hit me. On the cover of It's Hard, there's a kid playing a video game. I wondered if that could have been the modern day Tommy. For those unaware, in 1969, The Who produced a 2-record album called Tommy. It was billed as a "rock opera" and was about a deaf-dumb blind kid who could play some mean pinball. Hence, he was deemed the Pinball Wizard. So was the kid on 1982's Who album a video game wizard?

I have to admit, I do miss having the big album sleeve with the artwork and lyrics. While you do get some artwork with the CD jewel cases, it is so small that you will ruin your eyes trying to read and look at it. But I guess you can't have everything.