If you're one of the folks doing all your music making in-the-box, with your DAW and plug-ins, then you can skip the rest of this rant. Consider yourself lucky, as this older analog gear is getting really hard to repair and keep in service. Stick to your software, and email me if you have any boring, old analog gear you need to get rid of; I can help you "recycle" it. For the rest of us still using that outdated, analog junk, I've got one massive concern: Parts. The beauty of older analog gear is that we can actually fix it with fairly common parts, or at least we have been able to so far. I recently sent a pair of 1950's-era RFT bottle mics< to Scott Hampton, of Hamptone in order to upgrade their power supplies and he had this to say, "These things are beautiful, in the fact that it's like working on a 1940's truck. Everything is easy to access and is straightforward. [The work is] going quick and smooth." This is a much different experience than troubleshooting why a DAW stopped working after the operating system was updated. Better than throwing away (or, hopefully, recycling) incompatible computer components that are less than five years old. And way better than trying to fix a piece of analog gear built with surface mount technology circuit boards that cannot be serviced.
An Endangered Species?
