Great example of OLD and NEW!

Just finished rebuilding a 1950 D1615 Truetone radio.  It has a phono input. We have an iPhone streaming Perry Como into the old radio.  That's a 64 year merge of technology.  The sound is incredible.  Hope you truly do have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Old TVs playing like new!

This is actually a follow-up from an earlier post about the old TV's in my collection.  I was finally able to repair both of these Philco sets.  Here are a couple of videos of them in action.    The first set is the rare 1958 Philco Predicta. I was able to locate a picture tube in Washington State.  What an ordeal getting that thing shipped via Greyhound bus!  As far as I know I have one of the last picture tubes available for this set.

This next video is a clip playing on a 1948 Philco round tube set.  Both play beautifully.  You may notice the copy protection bars on the episode of the Honeymooners they fade in and out. The older B&W sets were not able to filter out these new schemes.  I found a copy protection filter to clear that up.  So what do you think?

Thanks for returning to my old blog.  I am thrilled to find this on Google.  I had lost if a few years ago.  There were a number of old photos and memories that I had written about and it was like an old friend coming back for a visit.  I don't expect you to have the same feelings but hope you get a kick out of the old/new idea - especially as it relates to technology. Here is a link to one of my earlier posts - Jesse was 20 when I wrote that six years ago.  Love that photo:  http://kentrundiga.blogspot.com/2007/12/old-and-new.html

See you again soon!

Please take a memo...

My brother noticed that this blog is lagging far behind. He is right. Actually, I have had an old reel to reel tape recorder here on my desk for months as a reminder that I need to update the blog. So I have a few minutes and I will go ahead and update.

The technology of dictation began shortly after the wire recorder was invented. We have talked about that ancient form of recording voice onto a spool of wire. And somewhere along the way Dictaphone developed a sleeve recorder that was very popular in the office. Maybe I can get my hands on one of those some day and demonstrate how it was used.

But today we will take a look at the progress that has been made in dictation. Here is a photo of the Olympus America DS-71 digital voice recorder. It retails for around $500. The device uses flash memory to store around 1000 hours - yes, hours, of recordings.

Now let's look at how far we have come from the 60s. Here is a General Electric Reel to Reel Portable deck. You will hear a local NC pastor dictating a promo piece for an upcoming campaign where Vance Havner is the evangelist. I found this recorder several years ago in a flea market. The tape was included.

Think how far we have come...

Another great comparison of technology, old and new -- music.

Over the years, I have collected several mediums of music "storage."

We have the 78 RPM Victrola. In our home we listen to Christmas music every Christmas morning on the old Victrola. There were a few early formats that used diamond needles, stainless needles, flat bakelite disks and cylinders (the Edison).

We have several 45 RPM record players and collections of the vinyl disks to go along with them. Most folks have heard of the other vinyl format, 33 long play, Hi FIdelity, etc.

Then there are the magnetic formats, starting with early wire recording - sounds reproduced from a spool of wire, Reel to Reel magnetic tape, then the rare Two Track (the mini-predecessor to 8 Track). Then 8 track, and finally the cassette. Ther are many tape formats still in use, most are digitally encoded.

But from the basic analog formats grew a digital format called Compact Disk. CD's will soon be outdated and replaced by electronic formats.

There are so many electronic formats of music, that I wont even try to list them. But a few are worth mentioning as they laid the ground work for what we listen to today. One very popular format was the MID or MIDI format. The Musical Instrument Digital Interface. By connecting a keyboard or similiar device (synthesizer) to a computer, the music writer could produce life-like sounding music that could be reproduced and shared with the personal computer. Lot's of folks just played scores directly into the computer and then cleaned them up with software. I can remember many years ago listening to classical organ music by the hours that was produced in these formats. If you had the right sound card in your computer that was able to reproduce the pipe organ sounds, the music actually sounded pretty good. However, many folks did not have the right equipment to listen to the music so it sounded very amateurish and game-like. The beauty of MID files was that the files were made up of simply numbers. So the files were very small - on the order of a few Kb even for an extended organ piece. I was please to see that one of my all time favorite MIDI sites is still going strong: http://www.classicalarchives.com/

Let's jump ahead several years to the more current music players: These are usually lumped into one category called digital audio or MP3 players. However, many of the devices are using newer audio formats like AAC, WMA, MP4, and others.

My Ipod has a 60 GIG internal hard drive. It stores up to 15,000 songs. Right now I have just about all the music I like - around 1500 songs - the equivalent of 4 straight days of music. If I loaded it full of music I could listen for weeks and never hear a repeat. Actually that would be around 42 days orf continuous music with no repeats. Imagine that.

If there is a point to all of this, consider how FAR we have come in our lifetime in the wonderful world of music storage and playback.

PS. If you can think of another format that I have missed, please mention it here...