It isn't 1982 anymore: Cutting the cable cord and digitizing your music

Live long enough and you're going to see all sorts of advances in technology.

Actually, with the pace at which things advance these days, you don't even have to live all that long to see revolutionary changes.

The most noticeable shifts in my 51 years seem to have come in the way we consume various forms of entertainment.

Think back to the mid-70s when I started watching TV and listening to music. The TV was a big (and I mean BIG) old console model that sat in the living room and did not budge for a decade or more until one or more internal components blew out beyond repair.

Changing channels involved twisting a plastic dial. If the weather was bad, your reception could be iffy.

As for music, I began listening on record and 8-track players, and later graduated to a Sony Walkman, which my brother secured for me when he was in the Air Force and stationed in South Korea. Cassettes! Portable! Lightweight! In 1988 I moved up to CDs, which were mind blowing at the time.

Now consider the way these things work in 2021.

A couple of weeks ago, we finally cut the cable cord and signed up for a streaming service (AT&T TV). I can now access far more channels on far more devices that are far more portable than the heavy Zenith unit on which I grew up.

I can just as easily watch TV on my mobile phone or iPad as I can on an actual TV.

On the music front, it's all digitized and stored on that same mobile phone (or iPad). No actual material media to worry about.

And it sounds great. I know audiophiles prefer vinyl, but I'm just fine with the quality of the sound being pumped through my AirPods.

Those AirPods are wireless, by the way.

Maybe I'm just easily impressed, but it's all so amazing to this Gen Xer.

Most people think the music they grew up with was the best

I became interested in popular music sometime in 1982, as I recall. It was a bit of a strange time to be getting into music since we as a society were still holding on to the last vestiges of what passed for rock in the late 70s and very early 80s, and we were just starting to get into the New Wave stuff that I liked.

Then came 1983, which I still consider to be the greatest year for music in my lifetime. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" came out that year and is still the highest-selling album of all time, but '83 also saw The Police's "Synchronicity," Men at Work's "Cargo," Def Leppard's "Pyromania," and a host of others that I convinced my mom to drive me to the mall so I could buy.

And of course I bought them on cassette. That was the medium of choice at the time. I also bought a lot of 45 RPM records. Kids, ask your parents what those were.

Anyway, the point is that, to me, that music was wonderful. It had melody, it had style, and I still listen to it. But to others, the early to mid-80s were probably a terrible time for music, either because they had come of age in the 60s or 70s (or earlier), or because they were too young at the time to appreciate it.

Not for a second would I claim that "my" music – or anyone else's – is the "best" music ever. The Beatles are great. I love them. But there are other artists whose music I enjoy just as much. I like a lot of the modern stuff my kids listen to now. And my car is always stocked with classical music CDs, because I have a long drive to work and nothing occupies it better than a Beethoven symphony, you know?

Some music we like because we connect it to a specific period in our lives. But for the most part, I like a piece of music simply because it's enjoyable. Because it moves me. Because I like the experience of listening to it. Doesn't matter if it came out in the 1950s or the 2010s or the 16th century, because I enjoy what I enjoy.

So you'll excuse me if I cringe the next time one of the old fogeys of my generation or earlier says, "This crap today is horrible! Our music was the best!" Or better yet, I'm going to hit them over the head with their own cane. That should teach them.

The Keurig vs. the iPod - Which is the greatest invention of the last 30 years?

As the son of a Gadget Guy, I gravitate naturally toward technology. I can rarely afford to buy it, you understand, but I do gravitate toward it.

Growing up, we were among the first people in our neighborhood to have cable TV, a VCR, and a home video game system.

Actually, I should have put "home video game system" in quotes, because what it was was a cheap, black-and-white Pong-based game from Radio Shack that my dad brought home one night in 1978. He hooked it up to our living room TV, and suddenly I was playing video games. At home. In my living room.

A stunning innovation at the time.

Two years later, he bought us an Atari 2600, and thus began a long love affair with video games and computers that peaked in the mid-1980s when I got really good at the arcade game "Track and Field." This was a game where you had to mash two buttons really, really fast in order to make your little pixellated video game athlete run and jump through a variety of events.

A lot of guys (and it was really only guys who played it) would cheat by putting a comb between their fingers, which allowed them to develop a lightning-fast rhythm that would propel their video runners to sub-8-second 100-meter dash times.

But I played it straight. In large part because I couldn't figure out the comb thing. The point is, I was really good.

Well no, actually, the point is I like technology and gadgets and stuff like that. And for my money, the two best gadgets of the past 30 years are the Keurig coffee maker and Apple's wonderful iPod.

My kids bought me a Keurig for Father's Day a few years ago. I was just getting into coffee then, and getting the Keurig pushed me over the top into full-on addiction. I'm proud to say I remain physically and mentally dependent on the hot brown liquid until this day!

OK, not something to be proud of, but also not something to be denied. Coffee snobs will tell you the Keurig makes a low-quality drink, but I ignore them. What it does is make coffee as fast and convenient as it can be. It's ingenious, really, and it spawned an entire industry of companies that do nothing but make those little K-Cups.

All of which is cool. But the iPod? Well...the iPod is mythical. When I was a teenager, I was really into music. And the accepted medium for popular music in the 80s was the cassette. I had lots of cassettes. Like hundreds of them, all stored in cheap plastic holders that my dad undoubtedly bought at a discount store and screwed into my bedroom wall.

Cassettes were an extremely portable form of music, if by "portable" you mean "assuming you're willing to lug around a 13-pound boom box on your shoulder." But then came the Walkman, which allowed you to listen to your favorite cassettes in a little metal box that weighed less than a pound.

I figured that was the pinnacle of technological achievement. You had to carry multiple cassettes if you wanted musical variety, but that seemed a small price to pay.

But then – I don't even know how to describe how stunning and revolutionary this was – Apple came out with the iPod in the early 2000s. There were no tapes involved. Everything was digital. And the darn thing fit in the palm of your hand.

I just...I mean...if you're old enough to remember it, you know what I'm talking about. Suddenly, the future was here. You could carry around hundreds of songs. And nowadays it's well into the thousands.

Amazing.

So while the Keurig and the iPod are both life-changing inventions for me, if you ask which one is better, I'm going with the iPod. Every time.

Seriously, I can listen to Iron Maiden AND Air Supply back to back with just a couple of screen swipes? Yeah, I'm buying into that.

The miracle of the iPod

I've said this many times before and I still believe it's true: The iPod is the single greatest item that Western Civilization has produced in the last 20 years.

Actually, I should probably use the generic "MP3 player" there, since I think all of these devices are incredible. But like Kleenex and Scotch Tape, the iPod has so dominated the market that its name has come to be used for any related product. So if you own a Zune or a SanDisk or a Sony or whatever, rest assured that you're still part of the club.

We're an iPod family. Everyone but Jack has one, and I don't doubt that he's close to wanting one. The kids have essentially grown up with them, so it's probably difficult for them to imagine NOT having a small, thin, handheld device that holds the equivalent of thousands of 45 RPM records.

That's what I started on: 45 RPM records. When I first got into music round about 1982, you could go to your local record store and sort through racks and racks of vinyl. There were the 33 RPM albums, of course, but I was more interested in individual songs at the time, and those came in the form of 45's. You had to buy the little adapter so that your record player could accommodate the larger 45 RPM record hole, which you did gladly because darn it, how ELSE were you going to hear the latest from Kool and the Gang outside of the radio?

There were also cassettes, of course, and eventually I graduated to those in the mid-80's. With a cassette deck you could make easy copies of other peoples' tapes -- music piracy is no new phenomenon, kids -- AND record songs off the radio. It was perfect! And with the advent of 17-pound boom boxes, it was easy (relatively speaking) to take your music with you wherever you went. At one point I had about 300 cassettes in racks mounted on my bedroom wall.

I received an early version of the Sony Walkman in late 1982 from my brother, who as a member of the U.S. Air Force had been stationed in Korea, where the latest consumer electronics were readily available. The Walkman was cool, and over the next 20 years or so I took a Walkman with me on countless runs and bike rides.

Then came Christmas 1987, when I received my first CD player. The CD wasn't any more portable than the cassette, but the sound! For years we had been listening to dull, muffled recordings, and we didn't even know it. The CD was something.

But like cassettes, you had to keep large supplies of them in your car if you wanted to listen while you drove. Some people had multi-CD changers installed in their trunks. So while we had the sound quality, we still had the hardware problem. This was just something you lived with, and yet it still seemed as if we were living in the best of all possible worlds.

So when Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, it was little short of a miracle. Even the earliest iPod Shuffles could hold hundreds of songs. Hundreds! Without having to trade out CD's or tapes, and without carting endless plastic cases around. And the sound was still great, even with those little white earbuds. Seriously amazing. I didn't get my first iPod until 2005, and it immediately became such an important part of my life that I gave it a name (Bruce. We have a Christmas ornament of an old-model iPod with the name "Bruce" inscribed on it. My current iPod Nano is named Milo. Yes, yes, I know, I'm a freak. Let's just move on.)

My point, I guess, is the same point that countless old men before me have made: You kids don't know how good you have it! You're spoiled, and you're lazy with your digital media players and your iPads and your Chipotle burritos and your zip-up jeans without button flys. When I was a boy, I carted my 36-pound Walkman 8 miles each way to school. And it snowed in September and it was of course uphill both ways and the teachers would hit us upside the head with 2x4's if we so much as looked at them the wrong way. AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY, DO YOU HEAR ME? WE LIKED IT THAT WAY!

Sorry. My point really is that iPods are awesome. I hope I made that clear.