Hey
@Passive_audio_enthusiast - I am actually collecting the milestones in my personal music journey, it is all for nostalgia
. The devices I deeply loved for what they were - the wonder and the attachment and devices that are responsible for shaping my music tastes.
I will elaborate and it is going to be irrelevant and pointless and boring to almost everyone. So you can ignore after this point.
I bought my WM3 blue colour from Old Delhi - Daryaganj from my first MOM cash award at the age of around 15 - it was battered and beaten up but it worked - I paid 500 rs for it as it had sticky buttons; you couldn't rewind/forward and you had to pry the cassette door open each time. You could just play the cassettes though; I used that for 2 years;
this was my "stepping stone" in portable audio.
Once I collected a little more money and had all of 5 cassettes, I bought the WM32 RED COLOR for around 1500 from Palika which was again battered but it worked flawlessly- I ended up having a collection of around 30 cassettes that were written by the friends etc and
this is where the "portable music addiction" really started.
I then joined a startup at the age of 19 (I am a college drop out) and as we were only 7 odd people we all became very good friends. The CEO and now a very dear friend and business partner saw me struggling with the WM32 and lent me his SONY MD player with a bunch of mini disks as he has already moved on to MP3s. It was a fair bit smaller, it came with a remote control and fancy looking sony earphones. Now first of all I was blown away by how much better the sound was and how convenient it was to carry around.
There started my motorcycle riding with music on, and oh that MD player was my best friend everyday and specially on long rides.
I then discovered the pleasure of MP3s when the same friend above gave me a pendrive loaded with 100s of songs. I think the pen drive was 512 mb or something but it was a treasure trove. Now I wanted it all to go with me everywhere and I had no way to write MDs. I went crazy looking for something small but everything was very expensive. Comes a used Creative Muvo TXFM 256 mb from the very same guy and there was no looking back.
The form factor and the convenience of just loading whatever song you want - 100s of them to go with you. I stuck to that player like vestigial organ.
Then came in an iPOD Classic 80GB (not 1st Gen as I mentioned earlier); well everyone knows what that was all about. That wheel was heavenly
, you + your friend's + their granny's and their dogs and everyone else you knew could fill it up with everything they have got and it still had space. There was no choice to make, no difficult decisions. You fancy a song and you had it. And it never ran out of battery either.
This is also the time when I discovered Jazz and oh what a heavenly place that was. That iPOD will always be special.
**I then forayed a bit into the actives speaker and went crazy in that direction, but I never found the joy I could with my portable gear. All that money spent and I could never just relax and listen, always finding issues. Realised that was a pain the aH**e and went back full on into the portable stuff. And my search led me to the
iPOD Classic Video. Now again it was just a slimmer Classic with more storage,
but now I could have album art. WOW - pure joy!
A few others came in the middle - Zune 80 GB was another milestone, loved the UI and loved the device as I could finally dump ITUNES out of my life, hated that program.
iPOD Touch came - which was perhaps the single biggest jump for me in terms of experience after the transition from Sony MD player to Creative Muvo TX FM.
It was revolutionary.
Then my most loved device of all came into my hands. My dearest ZUNE HD (still have it, still use it). A simple sleek metal device that just went ahead and refined the UI of the original zune, was half the weight and size of the iPOD touch and had musician BIO, beautifully written snippets on all your favourite artists. That for me was the most beautiful thing of all things I had ever used. The Zune program on windows started giving suggestions for similar musicians if you connected it to last.fm
and that 1 device made me grow my music library so large that I was suddenly only spending money on HDs and nothing else. Cause it didn't matter what earphones I had, I just could never have enough of music. Some of my favourite artists are all thanks to ZUNE HD. Nick Drake, Alexi Murdoch, Wilson Pickett, Temptations the list is never ending. See almost everyone around me was listening to Metal and Pop and that music never grew on me. So ZUNE HD found me artists that spoke to my soul, stuff I loved, it knew my music preferences better than my mother knew me
. That was the biggest milestone ever I am still hoping it comes back.
In between these and after these there were many - SONY Walkmans (the FLAC ones); FiiOs, A&Ks, COWONs but nothing else came close to the experiences I had with the list above. Today I am back to the latest iPod touch (battery, UI, just simple stuff), just to make my life simple. But I have never been in love with anything after the Zune HD. Nothing ever blew me away, there was no true love ever after.
Sorry for the LONG irrelevant story.
