"The whole business is fraught with difficulty "

That about sums it up. Thing is, remember at one time that's all we had. Think of all that went into making this inherently imperfect system work "perfectly".

I liked it. I liked the challenge of making things sound as good as possible given rotating disks and moving tape across heads. I liked looking at the print of an FM tuner even and figuring out which one was best. Damn, I remember when there wasn't even a PLL in an FM tuner, it had a sharply tuned circuit to pick up the pilot frequency and then a doubler. No oscilator. (WTF is wrong with that spelling ?, I really couldn't tellya right now)

I really shouldn't feel this old at 53. It's like when I was born they just invented the car or something. This is weird. The first Man on the moon and ****. And BTW, for the conspiracy theorists, of which I am one but not a crazy one, we DID put a Man on the moon.

Know how I know that ? If you REALLY think about it, you figure out that it would cost more to fake it. Kids used to have telescopes back then, and if it were faked there would be about a hundred thousand kids in Russia calling us out on it. Remember back then ? you walked into a Sears or some store and they had telescopes right by the door. They were on sale.

If it ever comes out that they faked the moon shot I will be REALLY impressed. It's just too easy to get busted doing it.

Now it appears we have the source figured out. With digital recording nobody wants to go through the hassle of LPs. Really. In fact I don't even use CDs anymore, everything is one the harddrive. If you bring a CD to me it is getting ripped summarily, period. When the tunes are on the harddrive, it never skips, gets scratched or anything. Well it can skip but that is a software problem usually. Transfer the file to a good(er) system and it is fine as long as the file is not ****ed up.

Speakngg of which, now that my "server" is on Linux and I haven't figured out how to give the permission for the other PCs to access my main library, I'll have to check see where else I have a copy of Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie.

My how things have changed. How long ago was it I would just go to the record cabinet and look toward the one end for it.

BTW, use yuor finger of a brush or something to clean the "needle". DO NOT BLOW ON IT. The moisture in your breath is not good for it.