you’re doing analog wrong

for the last several years LPs have outsold CDs…

…which is awesome.

all the folks from my nineties life who made fun of me can eat my ass. yeah, i bought pearl jam’s no code on LP and it ended up sucking ass. you bought it on CD. you sold yours to half price books for three dollars, mine sold for $175 on eBay.

and that’s just the start of it.

not that this house is hurting for vinyl. i still have over 2,000 LPs and most will never be sold. people are catching up to what i said twenty years ago – vinyl sounds better, warmer, and has more natural overtones. that being said, not all analog shit from the 80’s and 90’s needs to be revisited. good on you for lusting after cassette tapes…

…but what the fuck is up with VHS?

LPs rule due to sound quality and nostalgia and bigger cover art and their size-laden ability to make a good rolling tray. cassettes were a handier form of 8 track with only a slight improvement in sound quality. but vhs? it was actually the inferior medium, and was the “PC” of it’s time.

lemme explain…

PCs outsell mac for only two reasons:

1. one button mouse clicking bullshit is wrong
2. mac is proprietary tech owned by apple

when ONE company sells tech “a”, and several companies sell tech “b” the latter will win out based on sheer numbers. while beta tapes had superior sound and video, it was proprietary tech owned by sony, where as VHS was pimped out by EVERYBODY, so it won and while beta didn’t go away, it was just relegated to the broadcasting industry, who adopted it as their standard for news footage.

true story.

but VHS sucked. and why the fuck would you (revisiting the image above) pay an average of $8 per tape for movies where the dvd (better sound, better picture, etc) can be found in the five dollars or less bin at wal-mart, or if you’re going used (as these vhs tapes are) you can hit any pawn shop ANYWHERE and get dvds for a buck a piece…or less?

it makes no sense!

so you ignore all this and drop fifty bucks (with tax, shipping, and hopefully a shame fee) and get your curated box of VHS gems. good for you. now what the fuck you gonna play em on? the REAL mall of america (not that shit box in minnesota – i’m talking about amazon) when probed for VCRs spits out fucking DVD players. there’s a couple conversion units that’ll play VHS so you can dupe em over to DVD (which begs the “why didn’t you buy the dvd instead?” question) for around $500, or you can go the used route for around $100. but that’s used. good luck with that. and forget about your local pawn shop for this – they haven’t bought one in decades. why? because nobody would have seen the return of inferior 80’s tech becoming a thing…

…and i’m really not sure it is, honestly.

almost every title pictured can be had for five bucks or less on eBay right now. most can be had of lots of ten to twelve tapes for the same $40 that’ll nab you five above. of course the cool kids won’t know if you got em at urban outfitters or eBay, so you still get to sit at the popular table at lunch, right?