Listening has gotten complicated

Everyone remembers Don McLean’s song “American Pie” about “the day the music died.”
Well, the music hasn’t died at our house, but it sure as heck has gotten a lot more complicated.
I’m a proud member of the vinyl generation. We’re the folks who bought 45 rpm records by the bushel, then bought album after album during the 1960s and 1970s.
By the time I left home for college, my record collection was my proudest possession. And I had to haul the vinyl with me back and forth between home and dorm on a pretty regular basis.
Oddly enough, with all those records, I didn’t own a record player when I headed off to Earlham back in the fall of 1966. I’d used the family console unit in the living room or borrowed a tiny portable left behind by my sister Linda.
Still, I took my records to college with me: Beatles, The Who, Rolling Stones and the McCoys from Union City. All of them went along. I guess I was hoping my roommate would have a record player or a cool sound system.
He didn’t. In fact, he didn’t care much about the Beatles, Who, Rolling Stones or McCoys as I recall.
So within days after arriving on campus, I made the trek to downtown Richmond to a great shop called Specialty Records and bought a small stereo with my saved-up earnings as a paperboy. The folks at Specialty were great, even giving me a ride back to campus so I wouldn’t have to lug the thing all that way. (I think they recognized a repeat customer when they saw one.)
About a year later, with earnings from a summer job as a teller at Peoples Bank, I was able to scratch together enough to buy a turntable and two bookcase-style speakers from a shop called Muncie Electronics.
I relied at that point on a roommate (a different one) who had an amplifier, some speakers and an AM-FM receiver. Combined, we were in business.
And we pretty much thought we were set for life.
Then technology intervened.
I continued to accumulate record albums, and upon returning to Jay County with my wife a few years later, also purchased a real stereo system.
How did I know it was the real deal? Because it was in the J.C. Penney catalog, that’s how.
But it worked, and it also allowed me to hook up those bookcase speakers (Fisher XP models) to boost the sound a bit.
The J.C. Penney system also had a little thing called a cassette deck. And we were off to the consumer races once more.
You could buy records. You could buy cassette recordings. Or you could buy blank cassettes and make significantly inferior recordings of your records. Why would you want to do that? Who knows?
The internet hadn’t been invented yet, and maybe the marketing geniuses figured we were bored.
Cassettes had the advantage of being able to be played in the car, which was a plus. (We never owned a car with an Eight-Track system, which was an even greater plus.)
Eventually, though, cassettes gave way to CDs and CDs gave way to digital music files and iTunes and Pandora and Spotify and who knows what is next.
Trouble is, if you’re a guy old enough to span all these eras, you have to figure out what to hold onto and what to let go.
I’m comfortable with sending our cassette collection to the landfill or the Smithsonian, which ever wants them. But we have way too many CDs, an iPod loaded with music, stuff on my phone and all that vinyl still staring at me.
Now I’m trying to figure out the perfect system, something that will make the transition from our Ja-Mar-purchased unit that dates from the 1990s to something that will handle vinyl, CDs, digital files and maybe even wireless speakers.
Current configuration: The Ja-Mar-purchased amplifier/receiver is hooked up to a turntable I was given as a Christmas present a few years back and to a dead CD changer and a who-knows-when-it-was-last-used cassette deck. Those are connected to — ta da — the old J.C. Penney speakers and — let’s have a round of applause — the Fisher XP bookcase speakers I bought at Muncie Electronics.
Clearly, it’s time for something better.
But in the back of my head, there’s this little voice reminding me that whatever I come up with will soon be obsolete. Music, maestro!