Survival of old tech

[JamesM]

My kind of porn

[dee]

Our Nespresso coffee machine started pissing water out of the bottom yesterday… I’ll fix it no problem. Worn seal… I’ll sort it. Love doing that kind of thing.

Flipped it to find out I can’t just unscrew the bottom off - its a sealed unit! Bastards.

More determined now to get in there, even if I have to take my hand forged Swedish axe to it.
I cant stand this kind of disposability.

Now I know why it only cost £40.00… well i’m going to get £80.00 out of it.
HA!

[dee]

Yep, that’s lovely.

Those little resistors in the bottom left… the colours. Like a sweater from the 80’s

[PeteSasqwax]

@mleaf

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?

Without wishing to derail, this goes back to what I believe is a key source of poor mental health in modern society. We have the technology and skills to work much more efficiently than ever before - and we are well aware of this - yet many of us are still working longer and longer hours under even more stress purely to stay afloat while the cost of things spiral around us.

[mleaf]

Indeed, yes sorry a bit off topic, but it’s all sort of connected when you burrow backwards (or forwards).

[PeteSasqwax]

I also think that it feeds back into the new toys thing too because we (justifiably) often feel as though we deserve something new and fun.

Wherever possible, I try to make the “something new” into “something new to me” but I wish I had more skills to repair old tech. I’ve got a couple of reel to reel units in the loft but I don’t know where to start after checking that the problem wasn’t just down to corroded belts!

[JamesM]

Since I was a kid I thought they looked like liquorice-all-sorts. It’s sad to imagine that children of the future won’t know the disappointment I did trying to chew on them.

[Matoshi]

I recently replaced all the capacitors in my Atari ST. I don’t think I could go back to using it day-day but it’s nice to know I could, if I wanted to*. Amazing to think a 35 year old computer can still knock out a tune or two.

*Actually this goes double for my Amiga, it’s also happy doing some tracker from time to time.

My kids laugh about how nostalgic I can be with old tech (without seeing the irony of continually borrowing my 1958 style Telecaster)!

[dee]

Thats true! Even the wiring looks edible on that circuit board… fitting really as Flanging as effect can give you a ‘chewy’ type of sound

[Angstwulf]

It’s fascinating to me what old tech everyone prefers and why. Reasons differ.

I’m happy vinyl has made a comeback, other than it causing the price of used vinyl to skyrocket. I dug out all of my old records and bought a working turntable. The experience is so much different than CD’s or digital files.

I love the feel of a roaring tube amp. I may shed a tear when solid state/modeling becomes the norm but I really don’t have a problem with tube amps becoming mainly collector’s fodder.

I do not understand the fascination with cassette tapes. I always found them to be compromises and PITA’s.

For me, the old tech that I miss are dial landlines and flip phones. I like all the other things than my iPhone can do but I’d be just as happy to have that as a separate device and to have a dedicated phone. Weird, I know.

I used to live in a dark room, on the other hand. It was fun and fulfilling but switching to digital photography probably had a greater impact on me than any other changing technology.

Music equipment in general? New tech, old tech, very little has disappointed me.

[Airyck]

@mleaf

What would that world look like

Star Trek

[mleaf]

Thank you for this, first I ever heard of William Morris. My next read

[PeteSasqwax]

@Angstwulf

I like all the other things than my iPhone can do but I’d be just as happy to have that as a separate device and to have a dedicated phone. Weird, I know.

This is exactly what I do. I’ve got a collection or old iPhones, from a 4 to a 7+, and none of them have ever been used as a phone as long as I’ve had them. My kids break them, they get new ones & I fix the old ones which they then no longer need/want…

As for tapes - they were such a massive part it my childhood and teenage years that it’s impossible to not love them. I didn’t know anything about not overdriving the input and my midi hi-fi system didn’t have VU meters so I had so many albums that I recorded with zero dynamics at all. Between that and the obvious defects that tape as a medium provides, I have an odd skew towards those kinds of sounds in my productions.

[DoS]

@PeteSasqwax

I didn’t know anything about not overdriving the input and my midi hi-fi system didn’t have VU meters so I had so many albums that I recorded with zero dynamics at all.

Sometime in the early '90s, our circle got quite into recording vinyl to cassette with all the bass bumped up, then dubbing them again on a dual tape deck to make extra-heavy bass versions of albums that benefited from the process. I can’t now actually remember which ones they were; edit: I think it was the various versions by Laibach of “Sympathy For The Devil” that started the process.

[PeteSasqwax]

Hehe that sounds something we did a lot of but totally accidentally (and without any concept of why all our dubs of the same album sounded different).