Thursday, November 20, 2008

Love Lives Here

Wishing you happy and enjoyable listening. -- manual for the JVC JR-S61M/61W/61H

Continuing my quest back in time, my friend Strick gave me a rather large JVC stereo receiver for the office- complete with manual. And it is a whopping 18 watts per channel, 1970s of a sound machine. It is big and silver, has large knobs and can play both tape or radio. I hooked it up to a modern style seven compact disk changer and J.'s old Infinity speakers. And though one of the speakers needs a cone repair, it sounds awesome.

To really get it tested out, I figured it was better to listen to music actually made in the 1970s as Stricker warned me that, "Mark, it will probably take a good hour for this thing to warm up." And he was right, as a I enjoy the warm, rich tones of Woody's guitar on some old instrumental Face's song (the song for the record it is called Pineapple & The Monkey)-- I really appreciate what he meant. I may have to drag one of the turntables up here for a real test!

I am ashamed to say that, although we have the DJ setup in the downstairs lounge, we have always been listening to a boom box upstairs. A crappy, tinny, no-bass-at-all, Sony radio/cassette/CD player. Man, I have been letting us down(musically) in the office. This new rich, big tone is a much better replacement. It sounds better, no matter what I have listened to today-- we have tried a variety of 'test' CDs including: Santogold, Pharoah's Funky President mix cd, TV On The Radio, and my favorite of the day (besides the Ronnie Wood: the ballads CD) has got to have been the The Very Best of Otis Redding. And an old golden throather like Otis sounds just right coming out of the ancient JVC box. I had to listen to it 3 times already.

So all you kids out there that are happy with the tinny, crappy headphones listening to compressed and degraded MP3 digital files: come to my office, sit down and I will play you something cool. Hey, you may have never known any better if I hadn't schooled you, eh?

Old school rocks, literally.

Analog in 2009!

Ooh la la.

6 comments:

Jason Gusmann said...

if only mp3 files were degraded in the right way. ooh la la indeed.

mark said...

As in "S & Mp3"....

Anonymous said...

I am enjoying that new TV on the Radio disc --- Thanks library ---Also having a good time with Paull Weller on his newe disc 22 songs ---

mark said...

I don't know about the NEW Paul Weller and I am a big fan of his solo work. I'll have to look into that....

And I really like the TVs, I have an earlier LP, Return From Cookie Mountain as well as the new one which had to grow on me, but I like it too. Which incidentally are both borrowed from our library as well.

Anonymous said...

Doesn't some of the TVOTR (TV on radio) sound a bit like Prince --- Get that vibe from a couple of the traxxxxx

mark said...

I do agree with the prince connection, as well as early bowie sometime, they seem to have a lot of old flavor vibes going on- which is a good thing!