Sounds about the same as every generation before.
Talk about the young people and how they’re inferior to the previous generation 
“When I was your age, I was the exact same age you are right now!”
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It’s good to see that the Rhodes piano technology is being made fresh again with the Rhodes Mk8. ( thread )
And there are a few companies that refurbish and rebuild old electromechanical keyboards too.
And with even older keyboard technology – pipe organs – there are dozens of small companies around the world that both refurbish and rebuild, as well as build pipe organs new.
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Yeah, funny thing is though young people are saying it too, and sadly most of them seem obsessed with the 80’s, still!
To clarify I was not implying they are inferior, just missing out.
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Something something Mark Fisher and lost futures
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I love old tech. In many ways I prefer it to a lot of new tech but that doesn’t always mean it’s better. I have gear that still uses floppy disks 
but it might be improved by emulators. I love records, tape, vhs, tubes, transistor organs, hand saws, coal forges, etc, but they’re all wracked with problems on all levels from manufacturing to end use. Hell, I bought a truck from 1978 from my neighbor last night, same issues.
If consumers demand higher quality products they will be built. Overly simplified? Sure, but companies won’t release robust (and far more expensive) products unless people are willing to pay the premium. I recently saw an old synthesizer ad from the 70s (Moog maybe?) with the tag line “if you can afford a truck, you can afford a synthesizer” boasting about how cheap their keyboards were.
I want to push for this stuff but I have to divorce myself from nostalgia. At what point am I essentially saying “the Amish really have it going on”? Disposable technology is disgusting but I don’t think we need to keep every obsolete media storage device in production.
I guess this is a long winded, first cup of coffee way of saying I’m conflicted. Haha.
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For me the thing is build quality and repairability.
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I know, I just like to tease people 
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It is a thing though that people do that “it was better in my day, these damn kids don’t know a thing” which was not what I was trying to convey, rather that the culture does not appear to offer them the freedoms we had as youngsters, everything seems too corporate and pressured.
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In some cases I’d say it’s better to get new. Old synths can require a knowledge of electronics and specialized repair. A lot of 80s+ stuff can have very archaic and lousy menus. It’s mostly just quality of life improvements like having usb and a driver, MIDI connectivity.
But lots of stuff it wouldn’t matter when it was made. A good guitar, a good mic. Any good outboard gear.
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This, completely. People, especially younger people, are spending hundreds or even thousands on devices that emulate vintage things via DSP without realising that the real things are available, much cheaper and usually infinitely better.
The classic example for me are many of the DSP delays that ape BBDs quite poorly but cost several hundred, but vintage BBD delays can be picked up for £50 (and, allegedly, not picked up, but somehow I haven’t mastered that approach yet…).
It’s the same with saturation and drive. You can pick up compact mixers that overdrive beautifully for literally next to nothing. I have several Fostex ones that were paired up with their cassette 4 track range and paid no more than £15 a piece. One of them even has AUX channels and another has a compressor circuit!
What bothers me is that so many people don’t know this stuff which results both in them get taken advantage of and in the cycle of substandard gear production perpetuating.
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We were pressured too (cigarettes for example) but we weren’t in a state of constant contact with corporations like kids are now.
We can thank social media for that.
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Got one, love it (insofar as it’s possible to love only being able to send texts and make calls).
I do probably qualify as an old fart compared to the yoof though.
Here’s to more and more of less and less!
Except I did then have to buy a sat-nav, an MP3 player and will soon be wanting a camera 
If you insist…
People above a certain age who learned computer coding skills frequently had to transcribe the code, one character at a time, from a magazine, into their computers. Millennials, on the other hand, can search the internet for massive amounts of functions and libraries, copying and pasting them into their projects.
Back in the day, when we walked uphill both ways in the snow to the computer lab, the compilation of a large project or document could take hours. Now, the same project can be recompiled hundreds of times in the same amount of time. More care had to be spent, in the past, preparing and understanding code, prior to compilation.
A couple summers ago I took an entry level computer science course online (C++). The teacher was my age. On a couple days, he lectured the class about cheating. How rampant it was. He said he had a very well-developed sense of cheating-detection. I think he liked me because my kludgy code was a testament to the fact that I was not cheating. If older people had the cheating-resources available to youth…when they were young, I have no doubt we would have used them. But the fact remains we didn’t. We were thus presented with the choice to either learn something or fail miserably.
Now, all the conveniences of modern computer usage don’t preclude a young person from acquiring more fundamental, deep, low-level computer knowledge. But with the older generation, this approach to computers was more of a necessity.
We were forged in fire. You are a bunch of snowflakes.
Excuse me but i’ll branch back to the topic.
There is a large and well researched web-site with the stories and details of 220+ years of music technology, and 120+ years of electronic music technology.
It’s primarily stuff before 1980, but is a vast trove of the old and older and oldest music tech. It would be great to revive any of it.
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Yeah, I’m definitely not arguing for not getting rid of anything, just saying there is no need to completely abandon the past to move into the future, which feels like the overarching trend during my lifetime.
About storage media, I saw a lecture once, and I believe it was by Steve Albini, where he was talking about how so many master copies
of artistic works have been lost to proprietary storage media. Basically, intellectual properties prohibit people from rebuilding this tech. This was an argument for why everything should be archived to tape, where the tech is relatively easy to build and there are no IP issues.
I saw an amazing documentary about tubes a long time ago on YouTube (wish I could find that again), and it was basically saying how we can no longer build vacuum tubes of the same quality as back in the day because all the R&D info, manufacturing logs, etc was destroyed when the big plants folded. People just assumed there was no point in keeping it around, so it’s all lost in the sands of time.
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Capitalism and technology have not been joined at the hip for a long time.
To full on raging capitalists, science, tech and other stupid things like knowledge are only to be accepted if it makes more money and allows them more dominance. Think of all of the anti-scientific propaganda in which we are awash these days.
Not just in America where I am but anywhere that is controlled by a large industrial interests.
For example, I’ve argued with some MAGA types that green energy will actually allow us to make more money and to hold more people around the world in our sway. (Think about it, the successful drug dealers are the ones who don’t do drugs). But since that means weakening US oil/gas/coal production then I must be wrong. Even at the expense of other developing industries and our national wealth.
It’s nutso.
Those few rich guys are staying rich because they are suppressing technology.
Don’t get me started about COVID and how anti-vax screeds are actually making the country poorer…
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Lost to the world, and something i wish would be repaired and understood is Raymond Scott’s Electronium.
It is combination synthesizer, algorithmic composition / generative music machine. I’m sure it is an amazing piece of technology. Only one exists, it is not working, has not been restored and i doubt it will ever be.
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I suppose you’re right. Take Apple Computers, for example. Steve Jobs said he was willing to spend his war chest suing Android and others for copyright infringement. A large portion of Apple’s profits were used for stock buybacks. Other companies grow too big to fail, swallowing up competitors and acting like monopolies. Antitrust is dead in the U.S. Our politicians are bought, and the Supreme Court will continue doing nothing to challenge our corporate state.
Humans are so fussy. I try and get back to what’s essential a lot, but even as a modern human, my desires primarily revolve around the visual and the sonic. It’s hard not to feel like we live in a highly visual culture these days, where the screen has basically become the main point of life.
I think with the visual, the constant evolution of resolution has this bad effect of making previous gen stuff obsolete. Even though cathode ray has its charm, it’s only really useful in some isolated situations, and by and large analogue transmission has been switched off. You can still play with VHS I suppose.
But for what it’s worth, most of those things can actually be replaced and fixed at some local electronics house, most people just don’t bother.
Even audio, lately I’ve been finding some pretty high quality speakers on the street, like bookshelfs and stuff, that work totally fine, as people upgrade to Sonos or Alexa or whatever.
The Syd Mead Skywalker type reality is a nice dream, I’d like to live there. It seemed like that more in the 60’s maybe. Maybe the world really does need to move to a kind of AI driven robotic future to free us all up, but then, it’d be nice to be able roll back to human scale production, where everything is made by hand, and maybe get rid of the robots completely.
I’m not sure what future would be more efficient? Living in a cave but somehow surrounded by projection and holograms. I think projection will continue to evolve and maybe one day replace or at least supplement TV in some way.
It gets back to my original feeling about what modern human life is for - is it to afford toys? Audio or visual, vehicles, houses to build etc etc.
Lately I wish for a life of a sort of free participation, where one can choose to go and engage where they want to, rather than having to work out of necessity where one doesn’t necessarily want to. What would that world look like, if every day people just went and lived their dreams, instead of turning up for a dollar?
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Amen to that.
I owned all the Strymons and Eventides (pedals) Despite all their DSP glory, their endless algorithms, nothing in there sounds as beautiful as a musty old PCB sticky with decades old flux, effluvial capacitors and a rainbow of resistors. All of which I’m at liberty to desolder and substitute, repair and replace. Unlike the troubleshooting Eventide provided me with on the H9, “Sorry, they do crash. It’s just a computer. Restart it and reload the firmware. Send it back if it bricks.” 
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