What, no 8-track?

Until fairly recently, I have lived with­out a real stereo. Since mov­ing away from home, I’ve either lived in dorm rooms in which there wasn’t really room for a stereo, or in apart­ments with room­mates who had stereos. I’ve basi­cally just used my com­put­ers for all of my music lis­ten­ing needs. When I moved into my first place by myself last August, I started think­ing about acquir­ing a stereo.

For the last few years, I’ve noticed that records (remem­ber those?) are eas­ily found in large num­bers at thrift and antique stores, usu­ally for fifty cents to a few dol­lars apiece. Of course, much of what’s avail­able in the piles of vinyl thus priced is com­plete crap. But, there tends to be a fair amount of good clas­si­cal mate­r­ial, usu­ally in pretty good shape. When I started think­ing about assem­bling a stereo, I decided that I wanted to get a turntable, so that I might begin to assem­ble a col­lec­tion of good clas­si­cal vinyl on the cheap.

I found a JVC direct drive turntable at Good­will for twenty bucks. It needed a new nee­dle, which I was able to find at a funky lit­tle shop called Fon­bone. But, with­out a stereo or pre­amp, the only way I could lis­ten to records was via a con­vo­luted sys­tem involv­ing my lap­top, a soft­ware pre­amp, an exter­nal sound card, and com­puter speak­ers. Then, with the help of my down­stairs neigh­bor (also named Dave), I acquired an old 70s Pio­neer receiver/amp (com­plete with brushed alu­minum front and wood pan­el­ing on the sides) and a pair of speak­ers. This gave me radio and record player, and a cable into the aux­il­iary inputs let me plug in my lap­top or iPod. This was fine for awhile, but I soon longed for a way to play CDs with­out hav­ing my lap­top teth­ered to the stereo.

I started look­ing around at thrift stores, hop­ing to score a cheap CD player. I passed on a few that looked decent, because I was hop­ing for either Pio­neer or JVC to match my cur­rent gear. After awhile of not find­ing quite the right thing, I started to ques­tion whether I really needed a CD player. “I rarely lis­ten to my CDs any­way,” I real­ized, “because they’re mostly ripped as mp3 or AAC in iTunes.” Hmm… iTunes…

That thought, along with some patience and a mis­spelled eBay auc­tion, led to my recent acqui­si­tion of an Apple Air­port Express at a very good price. This sleek lit­tle device per­forms a num­ber of func­tions, but the one I’m using it for is its abil­ity to stream music from iTunes over a Wi-Fi net­work. So, now I can fire up iTunes on either my desk­top or lap­top, pop in a CD or select some already-ripped tunes, and hear my music on real speak­ers in another room. Another nice thing about the device is its size — it doesn’t exactly have a wall wart; the entire thing is a wall wart. That means that it’s nicely hid­den, putting a purely vin­tage front on this unholy union of 70s HiFi and 00s Wi-Fi.