with old artifacts.
A few months ago, my grandfather found a couple of old records in his house. He and my father made them about 50 years ago using the 1945 equivalent of a CD burner -- a home lathe, I guess, for cutting your own one-off records. These records are audio "letters" that were never sent for some reason, or were somehow recovered later.
This weekend I ran the records into the computer to give them the CIA pull-the-voices-out-of-the-static treatment and then archive them digitally. Hearing my dad's voice, recorded when he was 3, was a real trip.
Meanwhile, Mikey bought an old (uh, "vintage") Ampeg Jet a couple of years ago. The Jet is "just a practice amp" from Ampeg's perspective, but it's a Class A master volume tube amp with point-to-point wiring. They sound awesome. (Ask Girder.) Anyway, Mike never got around to fixing up his Jet, and I've wanted one for years. So I bought it from him and started ordering parts. This weekend I took apart the amp, started cleaning it, put in a new speaker, and bought some replacement hardware.
I was rubbing rust off of the amp's face plate while my dad's 1948 recording played into the PC (a 78rpm playing at 45, for extra incomprehensibility) and I laughed to myself. Will my grandchildren do this with digital amp emulators and mp3's? I can just see them trying to find compatible codecs for these ancient "files" they found of their grandfather's recordings, or hell, trying to get data off of an antique "CD-R". Or trying to find that one rare POD circuit board so they could get that vintage emulated sound.
Ah, analog.