One of the particular joys of my new found enthusiasm for motor transport is the rediscovery of the Cassette as the rubbish medium for music that it is. A twelve year old car has various things that still seem the height of new fangled-ness to me. Auto gears with 'Overdrive'; a Moon roof; Soapy water that squirts out the actual windscreen wipers themselves; even the dual drink holders strike me as luxuriant beyond even the most needy necessity. But the TSN-5125 Full Logic Control original car audio Cassette Player has me realising that everything except the steering wheel, the stop and go buttons on the floor and perhaps the mirrors are purely icing. Icing that will one day be as old school as boasting Auto-Reverse is now.
Auto-Reverse is, of course, the tape player's ability to play the other side of the cassette without the need for me to get the cassette out and turn it over. Does it save me listening to five minutes of silence at the end of each side? No. Does it mean I have no idea which side of a cassette is going to be played when I insert a new one? Sure, but why let this get in the way of some further tiny print on the front of the machine. There's already so many buttons that the off-switch has been reduced to a button half the size of my finger tip. Marked 'pwr', positioned just between 'sel' and 'auto-p' it is the quickest option for those of us who didn't want to hear really loud, poorly tuned-in radio in between our cassettes.
Next problem is not the fault of the enthusiastic developers at Toyota Audio. The range of music in cassette format available to me in 2009. I won't bore you with playlists, suffice to say: big shout out to Glyn in Auckland for allowing us to raid his old cassette collection. Don't know if it's your cassettes or my player, but all traces of bass guitar seem to have dissolved with time. And a big 'get your act together! To Nelson Hospice second hand shop, whose catalogue of cassettes is second to none only in the sense that it has a catalogue of cassettes. I want my dollar back!
Perhaps I waited too long to own a copy of Dark Side of the Moon. But Jay summed it up well when he reviewed it as 'sad' music. The unhappy feel of one of the biggest selling records of the late 20th century was added to by the slight tugging of the magnetic strip holding the tunes. Flattening the already downbeat drones and weightening the plodding beats. Cassette quality aside, I still recommend that noone ever bothers listening to this record ever again. You must always choose Easy All Star's Dub side of the Moon instead. It's simply a better version.
Next week: My kingdom for a Blipper and why on earth does my door centrally lock every door, but none of the others do?.
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