Music, music, MUSIC
After “graduating” from elementary school and entering middle school, sixth graders took a class on good study habits: creating a personal “study area” in your house, ideally a desk (not your bed), supplied (pens, pencils, crayons, paper, etc.), quiet and away from other family members, where you go each evening to complete your homework without distractions. No TV, do radio, no toys just do your fucking homework.
Yeah, right. First, my younger siblings could not understand quiet time at their ages. Second, music has always been an important to me and rarely do I do anything without music playing. One assignment required drawing and explaining our personal study area, followed by describing how it helped completing our home work on a recent evening. Knowing what Mr. Hand, our student counselor, expected, I just lied through my fucking teeth.
My music habits continued after entering the work force, listening to my music collection through headphones, evolving from cassette tapes to CDs to iPods. I even set up a personal Shoutcast server to stream to work. At home, Sonos plays songs randomly home office while I work. Navidrome is my current streaming solution, stream to hotels, cars, even in-flight. I am rarely without my music.
Non-Digital
At least once per year, if not twice, I stop listening to digital music and instead play all my albums. My collection is fairly small, approaching 200 albums, but is mostly composed of music I don’t have digitally. While working, I’ll pull an album, play it, repeat ad nauseam. Simple, fun, new music to listen to.
I realized last week that it’s been a while. I grabbed an album, put it on the turntable, lifted the tone arm and …. nothing. Lights went on but platter didn’t move. The belt is intact but the motor doesn’t move. Bummer.
I can’t be too disappointed. I purchased the turntable, a Parasound TTb720, forty years ago while in college. Believe it cost $125. Parasound is known for their high-quality amps but for a brief period manufactured turntables, so brief that information is tough to come by. A 1987 New York Times article lists it as a good and inexpensive option. I am not a true audiophile have always considered the quality to be pretty good. Though replacement parts are available and likely it can be repaired, I’ve definitely received my money’s worth over forty years and am leaning towards replacing. A quick search found many – and expensive – options, so need to start investigating and see what fits my needs.
Follow-up
I reached out to Parasound to see what years they manufactured turntables. Turns out they don’t know: turntables were white-labeled from a third-party manufacturer and, other than that, Parasound has no other information on them. Bummer!
