Since I've not had a functioning "record player" for quite a while, neither of The Girls were familiar with "records", so I grabbed a few out of a closet and started boring the heck out of Daughter #1 ... who'da thunk that The Association, The Byrds, and The Mamas and The Pappas would be so horrific to a 10-year-old! Heck, I was ten when "Never My Love" came out ... watsamatta with these kids?
I take it that The Wife only recently got the idea of getting this for me ... on Wednesday we went over to Daughter #1's school for the Winter Assembly, where she was both singing with her class and with the Afterschool Chorus. Once we got done with that, we headed over on Walton to get a bagel at Einstein's and I'd seen a display of these Ion iPT-01's in the window of Urban Outfitters on the way over there, and had commented how cool/odd it was that "record players" were popping up again in the same "portable" format that we had when we were kids back in the 60's. I guess she figured that I needed one of 'em.
Actually, Daughter #2 is very happy about this ... a year or so back we had picked up (at the Newberry Library Book Fair) some old Disney books that came with 7" records. Daughter #2 was very frustrated that she couldn't hear what was on those with the equipment we had, so as soon as The Wife got home with her, she ran out with one of those, which played remarkably well considering its vintage and having spent most of the past year on her floor, on various shelfs, in boxes, drawers, etc., all without the benefit of a dust jacket!
The downside of this is, of course, that I can now play any records that I can access ... which opens up a whole new world of cataloging! It would be great to find a service like LibraryThing which would let me key in some numbers from a dust jacket and have all the details pop up on screen. DAK has a cool product for getting stuff from records/tapes to CDs/MP3s (and I'm a "Dakonian" from way back in the 70's), so maybe I should think about picking that up and starting the LONG process of converting my 1,000+ record collection over to something "modern"!