Four years ago, I was walking home and saw this in a charity shop and couldn't resist bringing it home. It kind of works, but really needs a total overhaul. I had hoped the tapes would also hold some magical secret, but I think they were mostly recordings of Radio 3.
There's something in it that is more than nostalgia, and this goes for my fascinations with all sorts of old technology and the products thereof. It's about understanding something of the past for me, about having something that enhances my ability to imagine what it was like, what it meant and what it can teach me about today.
The brilliance of analogue sound technology still amazes me, the ideas behind tape and records, that you can capture the effects of sound waves hitting a membrane and then at a distance of time and space use that capture to stimulate a similar membrane in such a way as to release a replica of those sound waves. And that you might then build machines for people to do that sort of thing in their own homes and that these machines might survive despite being overtaken by "superior"., cheaper, smaller machines.
And I think of my dad, taking such a machine one evening when he was practicing with his pals in their band in a church hall, l in the south of Birmingham, before I was born and wondering whether there's any treasure like that in the boxes of tapes he left behind.
