Anybody who knows me knows I'm interested in vintage technology. I'm just fascinated by old, analogue, fully mechanical devices doing things we now take for granted. Take, for instance, the vinyl record. I am enamored by them and as such own a turntable set up. Now I'm not one of those people that thinks that vinyl has better sound quality. My set up isn't high enough quality to make an objective decision. Instead I'm in love with the process. With a CD player the process could be summed up as "A laser reads the information on a disc and plays the song." An MP3 player is even worse. It's just playing a file stored in memory. But with vinyl there's almost a magical quality to it. A tiny needle reading even tinier grooves somehow produces sound. And you can see it happening, too. You can see the tonearm rising up and down and you can turn off the speakers and hear the sound coming off the record. It feels almost as if it shouldn't work and yet it does. It's stunning.

But I digress. My parents are both retired and have as of late been cleaning out the house, pulling out boxes, sorting through them, and figuring out what to keep, what to sell, and what to toss. And one of the things they found was a box full of old 45's. Knowing that I am a fan of vinyl they offered them to me and I gladly accepted. So last night I sat down and went through all of them. Now one thing you need to know here is that both of my parents are baby boomers. So the box contained the sorts of things a kid growing up in the 60's would have listened to. To put it another way, I had on my hands a treasure trove of late 50's and 60's culture in seven inch form. And it did not disappoint. It had all the stuff you would expect (The Beetles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, etc., etc.) plus a lot of stuff I didn't recognize. Then there were the unexpected things like the occasional novelty single (Alley Oop, Purple People Eater, even the Monster Mash) or the appearance of a Captain Beefheart single. There was even a copy of the theme from the original Batman! And some of the records were in good enough condition to play straight out of the box. Quite an experience putting on a record that probably hasn't been played in several decades. Some of them, though, were in desperate need of a cleaning. The most unfortunate was a copy of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth single that had the misfortune of being right up against the inside of the box. I do plan on trying to clean that off later today. On the plus side the box also contained about twenty 78's dating all the way back to World War II. We're talking things like Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Fats Domino, and the Andrews Sisters. Sadly, my turntable doesn't have a setting for 78 RPM so I can't play them but they are still very neat.

So that's what I spent last night doing. I still can't quite believe I got a chance to go through all of those. To put together a collection like this from scratch would put one back hundreds of dollars and yet this incredible collection just fell into my lap. It makes me wonder what other treasures are hiding in the corners of this house.