For 2019, Honda is bringing the Super Cub motorcycle back to America. This time with keyless electric start, electronic fuel injection, cast wheels, and an anti-lock front brake. Should this be my next set of retirement wheels?
It seems that Logan’s Run is right after all. Carousel renewal doesn’t work!
One of my retirement projects, as told back here, was to get my Sony 300-disc CD carousel changer working again. A couple of days ago I finally got around to doing it. There was no avoiding removing all of the CD’s, which took a while.
There are three belts in the player. One of them works the door, another turns the table around, and the third loads/unloads the discs. Immediately I could see that one of them had fallen off of its pulleys. There are text instructions, as well as various YouTube videos, showing how to replace the belts in a Sony MegaChanger, but I ended up finding my own approach to disassembly and gaining access to the belts.
The other belt in back was holding, but very loose, and the belt under the table seemed all right. But of course I replaced all three of them.
After putting the deck back together, I was very pleased with myself, because it worked perfectly. The table turned, the door opened and closed, and a disc loaded and played.
Not wanting to assume success before being certain everything was good, I didn’t replace the 300 CD’s. As explained back here, every CD player I have ever owned, cheap and expensive alike, eventually starts skipping. Unfortunately, the Sony carousel is no exception. I did the usual things in the hope of fixing the problem, but of course they didn’t help. The unit was made in July, 2000, so I’m not surprised.
This relic from the pre-streaming era of music can probably be fixed, but it isn’t worth the additional effort to me. There was a positive outcome to this little retirement project, however. Before the player started skipping I got through almost an hour of listening to music. Playing a couple of very familiar CD’s, the sound was exactly how I remembered it, with all of the advantages and disappointments of CD audio. Loud and clear, but with everything pushed up front and jammed together. Cymbals in particular didn’t sound real. Once again I was reminded of why LP’s have yet to die as a format.
I briefly contemplated buying a new CD player, but then I had a moment of inspiration. I went to the basement and pulled out the DVD player I retired when first moving to Blu-ray. It’s this little gem.
Wow. And wow. At last, Compact Discs sound like they should. I have ripped quite a few CD’s for playback on my Logitech Media Server network, and indeed they sound excellent on the Logitech Squeezebox Touch player. Which proved to me once again that it’s the quality of digital-to-analog converters that makes the difference.
Being amazed at how much better the Panasonic DVD player sounds than the Sony CD changer, I checked the specs and found the explanation. It has a superior digital decoder and DAC that support 192kHz/24-bit audio. Even today that’s considered to be something of a premium feature.
So for now I’m happy, despite being limited to single-disc playback. It’s better than having to rip all of those CD’s, or buy a new player for that matter. Here’s hoping the Panasonic player doesn’t start skipping tomorrow!
Joshua knows his Beatles!
John Oliver as Paul McCartney, the equivalent role that Eric Idle played in The Rutles. Further proof that Oliver is, as I have always suspected, Idle’s bastard son!
I missed getting this post done in time for Mother’s Day, but here it is anyway. The “double A-side” single “Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane” was a familiar sound in my house in 1967. Not only was it played frequently on Musicradio 77WABC, one of my sisters had the record. The world had changed quite a lot in the short three years since the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show!
One time when I was playing the record (without permission), my mother stopped and listened. Then she said, “This is the most original and creative music I have ever heard.” Her offhand comment has always stayed with me as a favorite memory. Six months later she threw out my comic books, which is my least favorite memory!
Audio from the original Capitol mono single that my mother heard is below, followed by the restored music videos that were released in HD a couple of years ago.
Here’s something to consider. This is the Strawberry Field Manor that was a fixture for John Lennon when growing up.
Thanks to his Aunt Mimi taking him in after he was abandoned by his parents, John did not have to live there, as it was an orphanage that began accepting boys in the 1950’s. Here is the Dakota Building, where John spent his final years, and where Yoko still lives.
Betty or Veronica?
Mary Ann or Ginger?
Anni-Frid or Agnetha?
Kate or Cindy?
Kristel or Karen?
But like the Scarecrow said…
A book that was assigned reading in high school was “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s,” by Frederick Lewis Allen. I enjoyed it so much that I read it again ten years later.
Last week on Ian Whitcomb’s Luxuria Music radio show, he played a lot of wonderful old tunes. But it was this 90-year-old toe-tapper in particular that gave me the idea of pulling out “Only Yesterday” for another read-through.
