Machine+Medium
First came the turntable, and my old collection of vinyl records was soon supplemented by yard sale finds (a few new additions thrown in for good measure as well). Then the tape deck returned, mostly providing an analog repository for my music projects—adding friction... literally. And now the loop's complete: a few weeks ago I bought a Sony DVD player, to act as a CD transport for a 220+ disc collection that's been living in boxes for years.
I call it a transport because that's all it does: the player's connected to my Yamaha amp via coaxial output (i.e digital), bypassing all of its internal processing in favour of the amp's built-in DAC. The CDs themselves are slower to load on a DVD, and the lack of display on this particular model is a bit annoying, but once the music starts to play...who cares? It's a laser sending ones and zeroes to an external decoder that transforms them into sound waves. Machine + medium = music. Simple. Sounds pretty good, too.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said of a 40GB iPod Photo I tried resuscitating, purely out of curiosity (or coherence, maybe). It still works fine, keeps its charge, but refuses to fully load when plugged into my Mac. This is a machine unlike the others: it requires a middleman, and the middleman's AWOL. I'd hoped for a musical time capsule, a way to revisit old tracks and playlists frozen in the early 00s, but the iPod was empty and it looks like there's no way to fill it again. Instead I've got a quaint white box that lights up and makes clicky sounds. Still plays games though.
I think there might be a lesson here about resilience, obsolescence, and the paths we choose to take...
