Vintage Tech: How Nostalgia is Shaping Modern Trends

Everything is better through the eyes of nostalgia. That Peking duck from a restaurant in a town you moved away from years ago, the classic N64 game that seemed so real when, in reality, it still used 8-bit graphics, the best friend from college who you forgot irritates the hell out of you (and still won’t pay for dinner).

- Aron Vaughan

Yes, sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie and reminisce fondly on days past.

Of course, the free market has other ideas. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Yesterday’s technology harnessed some tangible and intangible resources that got lost in the sands of time, to the detriment of the modern consumer.

Vinyl

It’s no secret that vinyl has made a resurgence in the last decade. The analog medium saw an 18.5% year-over-year increase in sales in 2020 alone. Renewed interest in vinyl is not exclusive to hipsters, either. Music lovers are choosing to spin LPs and 45s instead of bluetoothing music from their phones to their AirPods because records just have more soul.

It’s all about the harmonics. Any music — any sound in fact — consists not only of the main frequency, but also all of the countless sub-harmonics and superharmonics created by that fundamental note. Now, with analog, the initial note is seamless — continuous — so that its harmonics are unbroken.

That majestic sonic landscape is how we have traditionally experienced music. In digitizing music, we break an analog wave up into separate bits, and process the information that way, making it much easier to work with. Unfortunately, in doing so, we produce a main wave that consists of millions of small sections — like a picture composed of millions of dots creating an image of high resolution.