Yesteryear's Musicplayers

Yesterday, I have just gone through one full circle in the possession of music players . A strange feeling of 'retro' started to sink in.

The first year in my college life, I didnt have any device to listen to music. Then my first ever music player was organic.. it was a hostel mate who resided in the adjacent room, and sang all his favourite songs in his inimitable genre. This unfortunately caused the old hostel walls to quiver as if hit by mild tremors. This also made 11 other souls who could hear his voices , to respond with their own style of 'returning the music'- using the same language like angry young rappers always do..!

Then came along my most loved and inorganic Aiwa cassette playing walkman, whose spools had to rotate on battery power almost every night of 3 long years. In the final year however we inherited an amplifier and a large speaker which resembled a small fridge, designed to bring the roof down. This strange combo was still used to render all of ARR's and HarrisJ's latest hits and endured endless hours of playing 'Vaseegara'. But there was one fatal problem of the 50Hz power supply noise which got added to the music, so a listener would get the impression of riding a diesel-powered motorbike and listening to the music at the same time !

The days of the Compact Disc had become a reality in India, by the time I left for Singapore a CD player was among first in my list after getting my first stipend. My friend Ravi and I actually bought an unknown brand Compro for $99, within just a few weeks of university life - the reason being the walkman could play it could ACD,VCD and Mp3 for just 100 dollars! But we realised only later that we got much more for the money than what we desired. The MP3 decoder inside had a soul of its own, and would improvise any song rendered as a Solo by adding some ghost voices and making it sound like a chorus instead !



A few weeks later a beautiful slim blue-eyed model became our roommate disguised as a 2.1 multimedia speaker with a cute looking bass speaker. She was sooo photogenic that I even practised my modelling photography on her ! And she could really SING , and I truly understood that music with no bass was like a night sky with just stars but no moon..! With her, I enjoyed 2 more years of moon-lit skies and soothing music.

Photographers and Audiophiles have one thing in common - they cannot stop yearning for better quality features and higher performance devices to enrich their passion for photography or music, and can fall into the trap of burning their own purse in pursuit bigger , better gadgets. And imagine the plight of someone, who is both ! Eventually the blue fairy was getting older, and needed replacement.

This time it was Toshiba DVD player which seems to play everything including photos CDs. And another audiophile friend who overgrew his system of Rotel amplifiers and PSB speakers, sold it to me. Just how nice it was to shut off all the windows, put all the noise-generating flatmates to sleep, switch off the ceiling fan, and even breathe slowly-- just to listen to the music without distractions.

All was well, but something was missing! There was too many songs in many different genres, too much technology involved, too many CDS and Mp3 compilations ....but all seemed too familiar and offered no element of surprise, reminded nothing close to the heart.

I remembered how my tamil teacher in high school Mr.Baskaradoss once told us, how every kid in his native village were new fans of the 'radio box' but had a fear hidden deep within their hearts. All of them apparently thought that it was a little 'bhootham'(ghost in tamil) which resided and sang all the melodies from inside the box, whenever invoked.

I too longed to be mesmerised by the bhootham and bought a little AM/FM tuner, put it unobstrusively by my bedside, turned on the late-night old melodies programme on 'Oli 96.8', enjoyed the songs that mydad would have enjoyed as a kid and ....... slept !