Old and New Music Players

I spent a good part of my Saturday working on my wife's Jeep. It is a fairly new vehicle and so it didn't need any repairs. Instead I installed an amateur radio transceiver and antenna. We will be helping with the Salt Flats 100 ultra marathon at the end of the month and the radio will help us communicate with race officials as we drive to the furthest reaches of the race course.

I rarely have a lot of time on Saturdays and this past weekend was no exception. Fortunately I had the ability to multi-task while working on the car. A local radio station had a 2-hour audio program I wanted to listen to and so I did while installing the transceiver. At first I listened to the the Jeep's radio. That went well until all of the neighbor kids started making a lot of noise on the street right in front of my house. They got so loud I couldn't hear my program. It's not like I could tell the kids to go somewhere else or make less noise. After all, they were using their outside voices outside.

I thought about my predicament and realized I had an old portable music player. Not an old MP3 player, but an old tape player complete with AM/FM radio. We used to call them Walkmans even though they might be from someone other than Sony. I lost the foam-padded earphones along time ago and so I rummaged through a junk drawer for a pair of ear-buds and headed back out to complete my work.

This got me thinking about the evolution of personal music players and how far we have come since the revolutionary transistor radios that now seem so archaic. Interestingly enough, my Android phone actually has an FM radio app that would have also worked. I just didn't think of it first.