Oh, hi there, everyone, and sorry I didn't get a chance to get an update posted yesterday; the transit back to Chicago left me a little exhausted, to tell you the truth, so I just took it easy instead. I'm back today at Dollop Coffeehouse in the Uptown neighborhood where I live, once again around young, sexy, artistic, liberal women, every corner I turn, which of course I love so much.

So, a couple of days ago I got to talking about what was probably the coolest Christmas present I received this year; an ADSTech "Instant Music" hub, for connecting old analog stereo equipment (like turntables, cassette players, etc) to a computer, for digital conversion of old music tracks into MP3 format. And I of course have wanted one of these conversion systems for a long time, because just like most people my age, I already have an expensive collection of vinyl and cassette recordings that I collected throughout the '80s, and have been saving them this whole time because I couldn't stand the thought of spending all that time and money collecting a dead format. And of course the main thing that had stopped me this whole time was horror stories about the tech equipment needed - hubs connected to hubs connected to hubs, special cards to install on your motherboard and the like.

So needless to say I was a little skeptical when first seeing this little ADSTech thing, which is just a little $20 plastic box with analog plugs on one side and a USB hub on the other, not even needing its own power supply. And according to the enclosed literature, Mac owners didn't even need to install any of the software on the installation disk; simply open GarageBand or your other favorite sound-engineering software, and everything else will automatically detect and connect to each other.

And I had never even used GarageBand at that point either (although in Chicago I do use Soundtrack Pro, which is actually more powerful than GarageBand), and so thought "could it really be as easy as ADSTech makes it sound," so tentatively plugged everything together and booted up GarageBand. And I created a new project, then opened a new track, then told it that it was a "real instrument" coming in via USB hub, and told it to act as a "monitor" as well (so that I could hear what was coming in on that track, no matter if I was recording or not), just like the GarageBand tutorial told me to. And lo and behold, I had a perfect stereo signal coming in from the old analog equipment, 30 seconds after I opened GarageBand for the first time in my life, and five minutes later had my first project recorded and edited, and five minutes after that converted into MP3 format in iTunes and with metadata added.

Kapow! There are few times in life, I think, when an inexpensive and apparently non-fussy piece of tech equipment actually works as flawlessly as promised, so I wanted to take an extra moment and acknowledge that this ADSTech analog-to-digital hub really does. (I gotta come up with a shorter term for that today, too - hmm, I think I'll just refer to it as the 'hub.') I legitimately was amazed that the entire system hooked together so easily and with so much automation, considering it was three different companies that had made the various components, and with some of those pieces being almost a half-century old now, and I just wanted to let everyone know from experience that hooking up your old analog equipment really is that easy now.

So, tech nerds, I'm sure you're dying to hear how it all went together, right? Well, okay, we start with the computer, of course, my dad's Mac PowerBook G4 laptop on loan for the project, hooked up to the hub via USB. And then that has standard analog input plugs that snake in this case to a Sansui 7000 preamp system, which in turn is hooked up to a United Audio Dual 1019 vinyl turntable. And you know, that's pretty much it - that creates a really stable audio connection from the phonograph's needle straight to the computer's hard drive, at which point you use whatever software you want to capture it, edit it and convert it into MP3. And so in the case of GarageBand, for example, that software already comes with powerful editing capabilties built into the system, in this completely intuitive way, kind of like good scanning software you use before opening the image in Photoshop, so that from the start you can be bumping up the bass or treble as needed, removing pops and hisses, etc.

And the irony, of course, is that the analog side of this setup is right around 40 years old now, and is still working perfectly after all these decades, and was built smartly enough that even in 2005 it can accept the right plugs needed for digital MP3 conversion. Well, okay, that's not the ironic part - the ironic part is that this is because of my dad, who right after his bachelor's degree went out and bought pretty much the most expensive stereo equipment even for sale in the market, under the assumption that it would last for 40 years and never need replacing, saving him money in the long run. So how ironic that it now really is 40 years later, and his assumption has finally been proven true, and has been done so through the cutting-edge topics of iPods and MP3s? "Let's get going!" "Not until you think about the irony!"

I will remember for the rest of my life, for example, how carefully we were required to handle dad's stereo equipment when we were kids and making mix tapes and the like. And I will always remember how much that had all been drilled into us even then - that this is really expensive equipment, and instead of being sore that there were all these rules for using it, we should be glad to have access to such great equipment in the first place. And that was definitely true, and was also definitely true that we always had the most kickass-sounding mixtapes out of all our friends and their sad little Target stereo setp at their place. And besides, respecting such equipment became a natural compulsion whenever you were around it, because it was plain how expensive and beautiful it was, what a wonderful noise it would make, and how fine-tuned that noise could be manipulated. And of course this was in the early '60s, when all the tech equipment had a zillion little blinking lights, all housed in an Eames-looking wooden trapezoidal Modernist thing, and it's hard to be around it and not be dazzled by it all, even to this day.

And so, okay, I got the hub on the 25th, and dad and I got it connected on the 26th, and then I left the 29th, so I didn't have too terribly much time to play with it - just long enough to record a number of random tracks, confirm that a ripped vinyl pressing on such equipment can sound pretty much as good as a CD source, and to start looking through my endless old vinyl collection, deciding on what would be priorities the next time I was back in the area, mostly likely this coming summer. And I was surprised, really, to see how much in my old vinyl collection back then had really fallen by the wayside since then, or had never really been in the cultural radar to begin with, just to me and my dorky little punk/goth/nerd friends in the '80s when it was happening. And God, what ridiculous kinds of money I would spend on such material back then too, when I was working 40 hours a week and had nothing but disposable income. I mean, just a casual look over Christmas made me immediately start laughing and cringing again - coming across Skinny Puppy's first album, and bauhaus', and Fishbone's, and tons upon tons of British imports from such groups as the Housemartins, the Proclaimers, the Style Council (and the Jam, for that matter), just on and on like that. Oh, and lots of bootlegs bought originally on vinyl, and old 7-inches from old buddies in local bands, and obscure B-sides released by the various Matadors and Minty Freshes of the world over the years. And I'm certainly not the only one in this position; my old buddy Tom is all excited about using it as well, because he has something like 800 old albums saved on magnetic cassette, and my brother's excited as well because he can finally rip all his old Japanese extreme-metal imports from the '80s, all the Loudness bootlegs and the like.

And I have cassettes to convert as well, I should mention, although I don't think I'm going to bother with any of my old music; I do have lots of old spoken-word tracks to convert, though, from ramblings on an old Bell & Howell when I was eight, to drunken recordings my friends and I made in the dorms as undergraduates, to all my old radio shows at KCOU, back in Columbia, Missouri. And so that was pretty weird as well, digging out all those old voice recordings, some of which I hadn't heard in a decade or more, and listening to how much higher my voice was back then, and how goofy I sounded, and how fucking annoying, etc etc. And I'm sure that will just keep getting weirder and weirder, as I find more and more old tapes to dig out and convert.

Okay, so all I need now, I guess, is a video equivalent of all this, for running my VCR signal into my G4 and burning off DVD copies. Oh, and I suppose I'm going to need a memory and processor upgrade for my G4 too, because it can handle video as it stands but it's awfully slow. Okay, so who's going to get that stuff for me?

Okay, so a little theory that I'm just playing around with these days, that maybe I'll expand out into a full journal entry and maybe I won't. Discuss amongst yourselves...

If like me you consider the Information Age to have begun after World War II (with the original inventions of the Internet, satellites, the Space Race and the like), then you could arguably count the '60s counterculture movement as the first revolution of the Information Age, like when the trade unions first gained power in the late 1700s, at the beginning of the Industrial Age - in this case, proving that culture didn't necessarily have to all be doled out by a handful of corporations, that there was room for even hippie artists to carve out a pretty good niche for themselves.

So then following this logic, could we argue that what we're seeing right now is the second great revolution of the Information Age, kind of like Ford's factory in the early 1800s, not the first innovation but the first to have a lot of success and really catch on? And in this case, proving that the companies themselves are no longer even necessary; that the creators of culture can simply go out and give it to the masses directly now. We needed the '60s to create an environment where such artists would even be taken seriously; and we now live in an age where the technology makes such a thing realistically possible, plus where it's not just snooty pot-smoking undergrads consuming self-published culture, but everyone. And this of course goes back to what I noticed at my recent family get-togethers over Christmas - that all my middle-aged suburban relatives know what blogs are now, and are reading them themselves, and most likely even writing one themselves now, either as part of their job or to keep friends caught up with their family, etc. There are more people than ever, in fact, downloading self-produced bands and listening to self-produced podcasts, printing and reading self-produced books, both because the technology evens the playing field, and because more and more people have been convinced that good artists might want to self-produce in the first place. What we're seeing right now, with the rise of citizen media and social networking, isn't a sudden new development at all, but rather the cumulative growth of 50 years of changing thought, starting with when the military ran lines between all the bomb shelters and universities and called it the Internet to begin with.

Some food for thought, I guess, or at least something I'm chewing on right now. And let's not forget that Ford's innovation (and rapid adoption of it by society at large) created a lot of havoc before it got better - sure, we're living in a much cleaner place than before, with a lot more human rights, and city parks and national forests and all the rest, but first we had to go through decades of riots and pollution and child labor and anarchist movements and the like. And we can expect a certain amount of havoc in the coming years as well - I mean, shit, the music industry just posted another 7-percent loss for their entire industry in 2005, which is something like the fifth year in a row where their entire industry has lost over 5 percent of the previous year's revenues. And things are going to get worse and worse at these companies, which means worse and worse for us too, and eventually it will all come out all right and with a very different society than what we have now, but first there's going to be all this turmoil and confusion and new ways of doing things.

So how do we do it again without the riots, pollution and child labor? I guess that's why I'm always so interested in reviewing the previous Age, to see if there are lessons we can learn from that and apply to these current times, to maybe make the whole thing go just a little smoother for us. I mean, I'd hate to end things up again with another two world wars, wouldn't you?