SIGNALS

Truck. Stick shift. Left front tire needs airing up every 100 miles or so. Two-lane blacktop. Passing zone. No-passing zone. Day fades into night. Low beam. High beam. AM radio. Baseball game. Bottom of the ninth.

Most people go on trips, a trip comprising point A to point B, then back to A. Some people go on journeys, a journey comprising strictly A to B. The best kind of journey is A to B where B is undefined. That's why life is often described as being a journey, the kind where B is undefined.

I am old enough to remember black-and-white TV. More vividly, I remember going to a neighbor's house to see their new color TV. I cannot lie. I was both impressed and envious, envy being one of the seven deadly sins. It was probably an RCA set, although it might have been a Motorola. If you are similarly old, you might recall that Motorola's Quasar TVs featured Works-in-a-Drawer that facilitated repair. This made complete sense when TV repairmen were still a thing.

I am also old enough to remember three channels. If you lived in a rural area, your TV antenna was motorized so it could be rotated to aim at distant cities endowed with TV stations. Three channels if you were lucky. More realistically, none at all. The picture-to-snow ratio accurately described how far your fringe location was from civilized society. City folks had a lot less snow.

For reasons lost in the sands of time, I was only marginally devoted to LPs. Vinyl was fine, but my passion was open-reel tape. I scoured the back pages of audio magazines for advertisements for pre-recorded open-reel tapes, and purchased way too many. A significant investment in such a fragile medium, but one that paved a direct path to one of my future careers — working and teaching in recording studios where two-track and 16-track (later, 24-track) tape reigned supreme.

The Sony PCM-F1 rocked my world. This little box magically laid down stereo audio data on videotape. Suddenly, the fridge-sized professional machines, with analog electronics that demanded to be calibrated daily, and heads that continuously self-aligned to anything that was not plumb, seemed extremely quaint. I should give a special shout-out to the 3M open-reel digital recorder in our studio. Yes, 3M. I'll bet a million dollars that no one reading this will have the faintest idea of what I am talking about when I refer to the green leprechaun toilet paper. No, I didn't think so.

Partly because I had embraced DSP in grad school, I was immediately certain that digital audio was The Future. When it came to digital, although somewhat less lithe, I was as enthusiastic as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Man, I rode that digital audio wave. Whenever a new technology is introduced (such as steam, electricity, computers, etc.) that obsoletes an existing technology it also obsoletes established practitioners and their years of experience in the older tech, leveling the playing field, thus giving newbies a golden opportunity. Pro tip: When something revolutionary comes along, embrace it.

Of course, in any retrospective of Greatest Inventions of the 20th Century, the Compact Disc deserves a place of honor. I bow and scrape before the Philips and Sony engineers who created the CD. The optical pits, laser pickup, EFM modulation code, CIRC error-correction code, oversampling D/A converters — all of that was genius-level stuff. Vinyl-fetishists (not to be confused with normal people who just enjoy listening to records) thought otherwise. In response to my ardent affection for the CD, they routinely referred to me as The Great Satan, a sobriquet that pleased me greatly. To their credit, they only burned me in effigy in a figurative sense.

The rest of the journey went by way too fast. As they say, life happens. My only regret was that I never figured out why pickleball is so damn loud.

It's getting late and I'm tired. The Moonlight Motel. Cash only. Color TV. Probably an RCA. Three channels. More realistically, none at all. And I'm okay with that.