Big tactile knobs and switches. Hums, thumps, lights, crazy control schemes, wires going everywhere.
The beautiful bearings and smooth operation of good quality japanese direct drive turntables. Brushed aluminium and timber cheeks on receivers. The insane mechanical genius of 3 head cassette players with multiple belts and auto stop mechs.
The tuners too. Hefty weighted knobs, VU meters or staged lighting showing the signal strength and that magic little stereo light when you get it tuned right.
Its fun to play with, simple enough to tinker with and repair with mostly discrete components.
The music sounds right too. Its got pops and hisses and those big power amps thump and wallop and send me back to when I first heard those tunes.
You have to sit and listen and not skip tracks or skip genres. When I showed my daughter how to find her favourite track by counting the grooves on an LP it was like a rite of initiation. There is magic in that classic gear.
In recent years I’ve grown to prefer cable tv over streaming because I can turn my brain off and pick whatever is on.
What I do miss, is having the ability to store related material on a physical (SD card/usb or even a floppy disk). Maybe it is because I am old enough that floppy disks were useful, but I fell like there is something to putting in your school floppy, so that you are/were forced to work on one thing at a time.
Or maybe I am just old and have bad memories.
Many people can listen to CDs only in their cars, including myself. But I still like having CDs.
Browsing on the website just isn't the same as sitting at the table with paper that I can shuffle between.
No operating system has showed up since 1981 that can make it safe to do so again on modern hardware.
I miss owning things, like music.
I don't miss the space those things take. I do miss having a single source of truth, the original disk.
I'd say pretty much any live CD/DVD OS would break this claim
It's not hard to have a stateless (or nearly so, if you prefer to have some preferences stored on USB etc) machine if you want one
And then I have books to read in bed. Never got used to read prose on a monitor. And don't want to start with an eReader.
We need every effort to reduce plastic. Full Stop.
I'm an early adopter of technology that I see as viable for my lifestyle, so I'm no old fogy wishing for an idealistic past.
I started with vinyl when singles cost US .79 cents, LP's 1.99, because other than the radio, music was only available that way unless you had the money to buy expensive reel-to-reel tapes and the exorbitantly priced tape recorder/player.
Vinyl was fragile and a bit of a hassle to deal with if one wanted to keep them in near pristine condition, but the process of removing the LP from the protective sleeves and without touching the groove sides, flip it over between my open palms and place it on the turntable then lowering the tonearm into the entry groove was an exquisite tactile experience to be sure, like a smooth dance move.
And the album artwork and bonus gate-fold sleeves with additional information about the record and band made the minor hassles worth the efforts.
When cassettes were introduced I didn't like the loss of audio quality, but due to their size and robustness as a storage medium they truly made music "portable" like in no other time in history, and with the advent of consumer affordable in-car cassette players in the mid 70's the sales exploded and they became ubiquitous.
Despite the drawback of having tiny nearly unreadable "album" artwork, they were so much easier to manage and store, plus opening the polystyrene cases and slotting them into the player had it's own subtle tactile appeal.
But one had to de-Gauss the playback head occasionally, and regularly clean the head and capstans on the player with isopropyl alcohol as early tape formulations shed the iron oxide coating, degrading the tape and playback experience, muddy, muffled highs anyone?
The CD changed everything yet again with slightly larger "album" artwork and a case that initially took awhile to figure out how to open until one got the hang of it, and with proper handling the poly-carbonate CD disc's were much more damage resistant than vinyl.
Again, the process of opening the CD case, extracting the disc with two fingers on the edges and placing it into the tray and later on, slot, also made for an enjoyable haptic ritual of sorts.
The Mini Disc was a failure from the start, media was expensive, players were expensive and the benefits were not worth the effort to pursue.
I still have a sealed copy of Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust that I bought in 1987 and I never played because the player prices never dropped to a level I found acceptable.
Digitally available music ruined it for me, and aside from the total loss of "album" artwork and such, the mp3 CODEC delivered garbage sound quality on a well thought out sound system.
Thankfully, I quickly discovered .flac so the audio quality issue was resolved, but finding the music in my extensive multi genera library was/is a hassle.
I've never found a music manager that I like, and of course, digital music has zero tactile feeling unless you count mouse clicking and keystrokes, which I don't.
So I hope I live long enough to see the next big change in media and hopefully I'll like it better than the what I see in the clunky present.