“Oh no!” my wife said. “The CD player on my boom box is broken. What am I going to do?”
If there was ever a more dated thing to say, it was this. Why not just mention the 8-track player in your 1978 Gremlin was acting up again? Or the VHF stations weren’t coming in clear on your rabbit-ear Magnavox?
You do know what a boom box is, don’t you? A box that brings the boom. It wasn’t that long ago we actually used these. It was a big black or silver box with a CD player or terrestrial radio that would pump out music through two bass-heavy speakers the size of tractor tires.
Total weight: Kansas!
Cheaply made in recent years, they’re only built to last about as long as you can hold your breath. But when you need one, you need one. Like my wife, a pre-school teacher gearing up for the start of the school year. A fair amount of what she does revolves around simpler technology like pencils and tape and songs about dancing hamsters learning the alphabet.
They can only be had on CDs – those shiny, silver disks that transmit music via laser players that read the digital information, scoff at how you’re listening to dancing hamsters and then begrudgingly play it, even though it’s ridiculous and unrealistic. CD players are known to be highly judgmental.
But they’ve gone out of style over the years thanks to streaming music, and the fact that we want our lasers to destroy things, not play music. Teachers, however, have vast libraries of educational songs stored on these little discs, and therefore are still reliant on CD players and boom boxes.
When one of these devices dies, the Earth shakes with screams of, “OH NO!!!”
Husbands are highly insensitive: “Can’t you just stream or download it?” I asked my wife.
She looked at me like I was one of the world’s three dumbest people. Maybe first on the list.
“Are you kidding me?!?” she said. “This is vintage. They don’t make stuff like this anymore. These are classics only found on CD. Without a player, it’s game over. I’ll probably have to change professions. What will I do?”
Because I’m one of the three dumbest people on the planet, I offered a solution: Since I’m pretty much a technical wizard and love doing research, I offered to find her one. Because, I mean, come on! How hard could it be? It’s just a CD player with some speakers. This would be a piece of cake.
One … of … three … dumbest … people.
CD players haven’t completely gone the way of the dinosaur. You can find them out there if you hunt. But what you’ll realize is they fall into two categories: 1) Cheaper than dirt, made by some company you’ve never heard of with a name like “Zoomacrappa” and guilty of some major downsides (like you might receive more radiation than you get at Chernobyl) or 2) Super hipster-y and ultra expensive with a polished mahogany case, a spiritual adviser app and the ability to receive the latest images from the James Webb Telescope.
My “easy” research started going down an endless rabbit hole of futility and frustration. Exasperated, we went to a brick-and-mortar big box store and asked in the electronics department. The guy did a double-take and then contorted his face into something that looked like a melted pretzel.
“Hold on: So, you say you people are looking for a CD player that is ALSO a boom box?” he replied. “And nobody – say a friend, or maybe a relative – explained to you that it is 2022 and if you really want one, you better go try an archaeology dig? HAHAHAHA!”
OK, maybe he didn’t say this, but his look sure seemed to say it. Surrounded by cel phones, OLED flatscreens and wireless soundbars, he was perplexed. It was like asking a rocket scientist if he had a glider.
I can’t say the last time I’ve listened to a CD. Like so many things – terrestrial radio, photos actually shot on a camera or churning ice cream by hand – I’ve moved into the future. My music streams wirelessly and I wouldn’t know how, where or even if you can buy a so-called “album” anymore. Where do you go? The black market?
But while searching for a CD-compatible boom box, I got nostalgic. The more desperate the search became, the more I started feeling … sad. It wasn’t just about another piece of technology fading into the background as we streaked into a wireless, discless future. I had grown up on CDs, graduating from mixed tapes to this pinnacle of sound at the time.
It was a time when stereo systems resembled mission control at NASA. Separate components for the CD player and the receiver had enough wiring to run a city. Big box speakers looked like I was about to host a Bon Jovi concert. A teenage boy’s sound system in the 80s could draw enough power to require its own nuclear power plant.
Only, in the age of streaming, CDs have become nearly obsolete. But not for teachers, and there’s something thrilling and wonderful about that. Which is why my wife and I will keep hunting. Keep digging. Keep posting on social media in hopes of finding someone who has one in the backseat of their 1978 Gremlin, along with a dusty box of 8-track tapes.