Vinyl Is Back Baby!

Scott gave me a marvelous turntable for Christmas this year. It came with an LP record, a soundtrack album from “The Fountain” which is one of my favorite Aronofsky movies.

The turntable is a mix of 21st century technology mixed up with 20th century technology, so of course I love it. It’s a classic record player, with the arm, the platter, the needle - as well as an integrated Bluetooth circuit. So it’s a wireless turntable, in so far that the only wire is for power.

The world turned its back on Nikola Tesla, so we don’t have wireless power. We suck. Edison was a monster. Moving on.

So last night I was putzing around the house as I usually do and I looked at the LG Sound Bar that I won at a work event back in August of 2016. It clearly listed “Wireless Portable Sound” as a feature with “Bluetooth Technology”. So I spent a good quarter hour tossing the house looking for the damn instruction manual, which has probably been recycled and is inside a doggie bed by now, as it was several months ago. So online we go, to the manuals that are always there. How to get an LG Sound Bar to enter pairing mode? The manual doesn’t actually say anything about it, turns out the Sound Bar is in a state of perpetual pairing when the Bluetooth icon blinks when you first turn the device on. The manual doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about it, so I had perhaps said some uncomplimentary things about the country of China, a few times, while wrestling with poorly written manuals. And then the manual for the turntable, which also missed one important step in pairing Bluetooth from the turntable itself. So there I was sitting, LG Sound Bar in my lap, turntable running. I could very faintly hear the song reverberating through the pickup arm, so I knew the turntable was at the proper speed and the needle was doing its job, the device was playing music. I continued my rather off-the-cuff analysis of the Chinese culture and their country, and their manual writing proletariat while blindly fiddling with buttons in a manner that I imagined should work, since the manuals were less than essential for the operation. Frustration led to a kind of irritated screaming match between me and the technology sitting in my lap, of course, LG Sound Bars don’t listen, so it was really just a monologue of grumpiness. So when I gave up on pressing and moved to random tapping on “Bluetooth Pairing Buttons” I caught out of the corner of my eye that the turntables Bluetooth button turned solid blue (supposedly a good sign) and then my lap was alive with music.

So, the damn thing is paired and working. Ave Maria on that one. Paired despite some rather crappy manuals written in an off-hand way by people who basically telegraphed in their duty.

So now I can enjoy Vinyl Records again. Welcome to 1985, again. I marvel at how Vinyl is back, baby. While enjoying the music I chuckled to myself that CD’s took a rather long and winding elliptical orbit, from nothing to greatness and back to nothing again, with Vinyl on the opposite tack. What a world we live in. Vinyl in the 21st Century.

Wow.