General

This thread’s pushing all kinds of (physical, real) buttons for me. Begin multi-quote…



I spent insanely significant parts of my life striving to keep records from being scratchy and CDs from skipping—privately, professionally (home audio a.k.a. “stereo” repair, 1981-1995), and otherwise (KALX UC Berkeley, 1980-1995), so this gets a 🤦‍♀️ from me.

Fun 1980s Fact: both CD players and discs could contribute to skipping. Customers tended to blame the expensive player(s), so market pressures led to player manufacturers improving tracking abilities well beyond the original Philips/Sony Red Book CD standards. Major (U.S.) recording labels went the other way: cheaping out, making shittier and shittier discs which were far outside the standards… and the players had to deal with them.

I repaired right about 1000 CD players over my career (yes, i counted). Many times when the disc was the problem and it was one or a few discs and not the whole production run, i offered to buy a brand-new copy of the disc to give to the customer in turn for keeping the defective one. Built up an amazing CD torture test disc library that way… way more stressful than the industry-standard Philips 5A test disc, and could even beat the Pierre Vernay Digital Test disc set.



Me too, friend. Every day. Many’s a time i strive to repair the “unrepairable”. Sometimes it works.



That’s a thing. Early 1980s, visiting grandparents of my then-Love. They pulled out a portable cassette machine to play some music. Sounded like mud! That thing had so much built-up shedded tape oxide on the head that the oxide wore down, rather than the metal of the head! Quality time with isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs, and the head was like new!



I do that as well with digital files, whether extracted from physical media or purchased from Bandcamp or the iTunes Store or wherever else. Yes, the managing and backup/archiving is time-consuming, but i’m doing that anyway with other important files. Does not look good on a shelf, but with cover art displayed in iTunes, it’s pretty good. Same issue with friends looking over the collection: easier on a shelf, but still about the same experience reading what’s in my music library in iTunes.



1) There was a lot of tech available… just not so much digital.
2) Decently-made and -maintained things were not always breaking.
3) Brands and models ranged from breathtakingly amazing through average to crappy junk.

At this moment, there is a fully functional* 1968-1969 component audio system at my mom’s house, used most days. Yes, i’ve repaired the Dual turntable and Kenwood receiver a few times over the years, but not often!

*there are a few minor glitches i haven’t had time to fix, like the dial lights being out on the receiver and the mute switch on the turntable needing work.

))Sonic((

I miss the Internet forum. Discord or FB groups is a step, or a couple steps back. Forums were indexed by search engines, threaded, searchable. It made collecting large information banks much easier.

I go on a few old school forums. They are the equivalent to a quaint town while social media is like a busy and loud city full of bitter people.

On a related note I am tired of Reddit and Quora monopolizing the search results.

What forums you recommend?
About Reddit and Quora: Reddit is Okayish but Quora looks like an AI-generated website these days.
Btw does anyone here still use Usenet?

+1 on forums. Thankfully, we’re on one right now.

Up until the last few years, there were still quite a few independent forums with their own looks, feels, history, etc. Most of the ones i went to got swallowed up by VerticalScope Inc. While i’m grateful to them for keeping the forums going as forum founders got worn out, bored, age out, etc., they consistently nuke what made each of the sites unusual or unique, to shoehorn into their XenForo Fora standardized platform. Yeah sure it’s all well and good for one learning curve across many forums, but it’s a sad loss. For one example, try a Wayback Machine view of automaticwasher.org* vs. the current site. For another… Dimensions!

Some things that used to be, say Yahoo! Groups are now on groups.io. The Tektronix oscilloscope group is the one i discovered was still alive there.

I miss Usenet Newsgroups. Got off track on those in the early 2000s, having trouble finding a server with the switch from dialup to broadband Internet. So much more sane to have the basic text rather than all the HTML (and later CSS) overhead of a WWW forum.

* Having trouble figuring out how to escape colon slash slash to keep the Fantasy Feeder system happy and have the Wayback URL still work. So… use the link, and when Wayback complains, edit XGG or whatever it comes up with back to colon slash slash, and you should be good. Or start your own search for automaticwasher.com and choose a year around 2019 or earlier.

One of them is an autism community (Wrong Planet) and the other one focuses on lost media. (Lost Media Wiki)

I have often deleted my Reddit accounts. I might keep my current alt but for now I am thinking of finding an alternative. In my case it impacts my mental health with all the doomerism.