The trend of Retro

Just when you think that the whole world has gone digital and cyber-crazy a new trend emerges. It is the trend of’ old stuff coming back’, the ‘trend of Retro’ so to speak.

The above picture is of a Nokia 3310. Nokia announced that in the midst of all things ‘Smart’ they are bringing the 3310 back. It make sense I suppose because people are getting more and more frustrated(me included) about the battery life of the Smart Phones. At the end of the day regardless of all the fancy features, the primary function is still a Phone.

I had a 3310 and the battery would last forever. You could leave the phone alone for a month and you’d still have 99% battery life.

I grew up listening to Vinyl albums,singles and cassette tapes.

 

Then around 1982 this new invention was released, the Compact Disc player.(even though Philips already had the first concept of a CD player in 1968) The CD’s were supposed to be indestructible, they could even survive nuclear disasters.

The CD’s were the future and would replace all vinyl and tape formats.

 

Then come 21st century and the world has gone on-line. Apple came out with this pocket size device called the iPod.

It allowed customers to download music from the internet on the iPod. Many people think that the iPod was the first MP3 type of music player but in fact , the first MP3 player was developed in the early 1990s by Frauenhofer, but this player was unsuccessful. In 1997 Tomislav Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products invented the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, which is recognized as the first successful MP3 Player.

 

These devices were portable and would replace the Walkman’s and Discman devices. So the days of tapes and CD’s were surely numbered.

Sony Sports Walkman WM-BF59 This is a Sony Walkman WM-BF59 Auto Reverse Cassette Player Sports. The anti-rolling mechanism will stand up to normal Jogging. Originally fitted with MDR WM 15 Headphones has auto-reverse, Anti rolling, AVLS Auto stop FFWD and Rewind.

But the last few years there has been a revival of the Vinyl albums.And because it is now trendy to buy Vinyl albums again, record companies can charge these ‘Trendy’ new customers twice the price.

Even the cassette tape is set to make its return to a retailer near you. As for the CD’s they didn’t actually disappear.

Streaming is now the new format to threaten all other formats, but for some reason I don’t think that is really going to happen.

As for me I am holding on to all formats of music I have. I made the silly mistake in the 80’s to give away all my vinyl albums to replace them with CD’s. Not realizing that some albums were never going to be released on CD.Although in my collection at the time I was told that the debut  EP Queensryche by Queensryche was very unlikely to ever be released in a format other then Vinyl.

Lucky for me they were wrong.

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