January 29, 2026
#535
Gentile reader,
A note to you, the reader: I set all of my type in the same font and the same SIZE. No matter what I do to correct the problem. This program switches fonts and changes the size of some font paragraphs. Technology is a blessing and a curse. But, are we stuck with it?
I'm in my 70th year, I have lived in eight decades. I have seen a LOT of changes in the world in all of those years. Please bear with me as I lay out why I felt nostalgic when playing cassette tapes today. Young people today have little idea how difficult it was to be able to do things in "the olden days". Keep reading to see things you take for granted today being in your hand, purse or pocket which NO one had then.
We live in northern Virginia, which is on the East coast, here in the United States. We fared pretty well when the 2026 "Snow Storm of the Century" roared across the country heading right for us last weekend. We did not lose power, nor have a pipe burst or anything negative happen. We were fortunate. Atop the six inches of powder snow, an inch of sleet fell to turn the previously fluffy snow hard as concrete. I have never encountered that before in my 69 years.
I had made my way over to our neighbor Erica's house to help her and the kids find their driveway. That's when we discovered just how hard the snow was. The tracks you see above are from Nancy driving her Maverick pickup truck around while the snow was still coming down. No snow plow had come through yet.
Later that day, I later heard a truck coming. Hoping it would be a snowplow, I hurried to the window to see what it was. It was one of these. They are obviously big and heavy. I watched from the office window, saw it turn around in the cul-de-sac and, to my amazement, it did not crack the snow or leave any kind of tracks!
Nonetheless, aside from going outside every day, moving snow around, and yesterday punching foot holes to make my way across the snowy front and back yards using the heels of my boots so that I could safely make my way to all the bird and squirrel feeders to refill them, I have not left our cul-de-sac. (That's quite the run-on sentence!)
Being snowbound is a great opportunity for the music lover to listen to their music. I normally pick out some LPs or CDs, but, instead, I looked up to the wooden rack of 100 cassette tapes which Nancy and I painfully whittled down from the multiple hundreds we had between us when we got married in 1996. Today, I picked out a couple of Peter White smooth jazz cassettes. One from 1992 and the other from 1993.
It is difficult to photograph things which are shiny, such as cassette tape cases.
This is the 3-head cassette deck which is part of the Listening Room system. It is a JVC KD-V6. In certain lights, it has a rosy look to it's faceplate.
Prior to our getting married in January, 1996, I had not yet been able to afford to buy a CD player for the stereo. LPs and cassettes were it, as far as music. In the past decades, I'd found and bought a number of reel-to-reel decks but saw no reason to keep owning one, as I had never found commercially recorded reel tapes.
This is the only photo I have found of one of my reel-to-reel tape decks. That is Leah, one of the two "mitten kittens" sisters we adopted in 2001. I have no idea what that little device is she is squeezing over.
This is the stack of components is in "the office" a room we designated for sitting inches to my right, adjacent to the PC I am typing this into. Note the Nakamichi cassette deck. Nakamichi concentrated on making the finest, most realistic sounding cassette decks back in their hey day. I was so excited when I saw it in a thrift store marked for $6.99. It works perfectly. Nonetheless, I bought the belt kit for it when one or more eventually fail.
Right about now, you may be thinking, "Okay, you said you were going to show me why you got nostalgic!" Bear with me, I'm getting there. I'm still "setting the scene".
If you ARE a regular reader, and thus, know what all those things are, please scroll down until you see a picture of my family.
Starting with speakers which are, largest to smallest: Cerwin-Vega LS-12 models. They were the last ones made in the U.S. The bottom pair are my fifty-year-old Dynaco A25XLs. Atop them are the most recent (a gift from our next door neighbor, Jack The Robb Collections: Having Friends Who Are Neighbors is a Wonderful Thing! Gifted Klipsch Speakers And More.) are Klipsch RF-35 models. Their matching other pair are in the living room and along with the matching center channel speaker and massive subwoofer which have made watching TV and movies WAY better!
The two power amplifiers on the floor are: A Douk Audio RB587 4 wpc tube amplifier which was driving the super-efficient Klipsch speakers. The large amp is solid state and is a B&K Components ST1400 which was driving the Dynaco speakers.
The Robb Collections: World Premiere Review of Douk Audio's Exciting new Class A DJ587 Tube Stereo Power Amplifier! The tube amp was positioned atop the larger amp. I wanted to keep an eye on how loud it would play and bought a second Radio Shack Realistic APM-300. It has two scales 0-2 watts or 0-200 watts. I had to add ridiculously large rubber feet to make room to have that meter underneath it. The article explains why.
When I later bought this Douk Audio DU3 Pro meter set, I had to place it on top of the big amp and moved the tube amp. The Robb Collections: Setting Up and Running a Douk Audio DU3 Pro Audio Meter-Amp-Speaker Switch Okay, so, now I hope you are all caught up.
Now, as I wrote at the top of the article, I am hoping to show you how different it was thirty years ago from how it is now. Now, most folks use their phones for EVERYTHING. Sit back and enjoy the journey.
This was our combined family thirty years ago. All of those kids are now in their thirty's or forty's. Nancy is standing wearing the red blouse on, I am to her left.
Okay, Nostalgia time!
So, to begin, cell phones, were a rare sight to see. Thirty years ago, very few people owned one. We could not afford them, and certainly, a child NEVER, ever had one. They looked like these:
The Internet was still largely unknown by most people, since most people could not afford to own a personal computer. And believe it or not, they had a good life. They lived then and there, not spending hours watching things OTHER people were doing or had done on a small screen.
America On Line, aka: AOL, mailed out hundreds of millions of CD-ROM discs (above) to everyone in the U.S., trying (and often succeeding) to get millions of people to use AOL to get on the Internet. But first, there was still that expensive hurdle, having to own a computer.
The Internet was largely used by universities and sometimes, big business. When we looked for people sitting at our desks by making phone calls. We used these huge books called reverse look-up directories. IF we had a phone number for the person we were looking for, we could look up that number and, just maybe, find an address for them from that telephone number. When I found someone, I dictated my report into a cassette tape recorder similar to the one above. Stenographers then played that tape and typed up what we had spoken into the cassette tape recorder. 
Also, prior to audio equipment makers making compact cassettes sound good, the best tape format for home audio was open reel to reel decks like the one above.
Yes, there were 8-track tape and before that, four-track tape, home tape players, but those tapes were more often used for playing your own music in cars than at home listening.
Techmoan calls Reel-to-Reel tapes THE MOST EXPENSIVE MUSIC FORMAT and he is not wrong. The most expensive music format (in the world) - YouTube
Whew! Okay, now, let me explain why I felt the way I did. Old folks like to reminisce, I found myself doing just that when Peter White's amazing guitar playing started coming out of the speakers. Why? First of all, it sounded REALLY good! I had forgotten that cassettes could sound that way. Secondly, I remembered just how much simpler our lives were then. Look at the images above and below. It's the same room.
This is what that room looked like in 2010, after Bekka moved out. It was originally the "master" bedroom of this house. The original owner bought the house with the lower floor unfinished and he built a large bedroom downstairs which is what we use. The stereo (then much simpler) was in the living room. We had the most humble of "home theater" equipment and put it and the TV in the room we called "the den". Just look at those tiny speakers hanging on the wall! I liked to do simulation racing with my son Dan, thus, the two steering wheels.
Before marrying Nancy, this was my stereo. I did not own a camera until 1995. My original 1970's Dynaco A25 speakers and the PAT-5 preamplifier I built fifty years ago. The FM-5 Dynaco tuner sits on top of it. I had two cassette decks and the integrated amp beneath them I was using as a power amp. See those records? That was 2/3rds of my entire collection then. I now have over 2000 LPs, over 1000 CDs and let's not forget the 100 cassettes. It's crazy!
All that equipment was bought used and locally. I had never even heard of this thing called the Internet!
We each had one car. Both were 1993 compact Ford Escorts. Mine was a wagon (you might not know what that is) and hers was a two-door hatchback. Both had manual transmissions. You probably don't know what those are either.
Mine looked like this. No, that is NOT a crossover, it is a station wagon. Crossovers and SUVs are simply tall station wagons which people fool themselves into thinking are tough and can go anywhere. And, believe it or not, all four of my kids and I fit fine in that tiny station wagon.
And, finally, the music itself is what took me back. In the 1980's Smooth Jazz was taking the airwaves (radio) by storm. Every major city had at least one radio station that played the format. And I fell in love with that type of music!
The majority of the records on this shelf are Smooth Jazz. Yes, there is traditional Jazz artists as well and Big Band Jazz too. But, frankly, I don't get a lot of what traditional Jazz artists created. How many ways can the different musicians play the same tune? Smooth Jazz is usually up tempo and makes me feel good while listening to it. I was so into that Nancy and I got into that little red station wagon and drove all the way to the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland to a huge record store looking for Smooth Jazz music cassettes. They only had the particular one I was looking for on CD. I bought it only because Nancy had a "boom box" which had a CD player on the top.
It wasn't until I finally found a CD player in a thrift store was I able to listen to CDs through the stereo. When it finally stopped working, I took it to an electronics repair store and he told me the laser had died and that it would cost more than buy a brand new CD player to fix it.
I prefer to have my CDs horizontal. It makes it far easier on the neck to read the labels. It also makes it a pain in the ass to add new ones to the collection because I have to remove so many CDs to make room for new ones.
So, what do you think? Am I just another old man yelling in the wilderness for "the good old days"? Perhaps. But, I am happy and that is what truly matters.
Thank you SO much for taking the time to read this admittedly way longer than I intended it to be article. Feel free to comment below or on Facebook.
Scott Robb
January 29, 2026
#535
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