Not the soon-to-be released one, but the standard-issue one has a built-in CD player. Most people who have come into contact with them know that. Some may even know that when you hit the "select" button you get to scroll through different screens of "eye candy" whose images respond to the amplitude and frequency content of the music on the CD. The really cool, nerdy thing is that a few of them look surprisingly like the setting on the oscilloscope that depicts a-b, or phase. I'm sure there's a negligable degree of calibration involved, but for anyone out there who is interested in learning, audio voltage can look like gain and some sort of understanding of cause and effect (i.e. big, slow moving lines correspond to low freq... fast, erratic patterns for high freq content. Trans Am's Futureworld, and I think a good degree of Red Line, was dependent on the scope. If it didn't make a good pattern it wasn't kept.

Tape Op is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the art of record making.

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