You Spin Me Right Round, Baby...
Wow! An audio component that can play ***200*** CDs worth of music?!? And it's no larger than a weekend suitcase? What a marvelous age in which we live!
(Okay, okay...I'll turn the sarcasm off.)
(Well, "down.")
I'm actually quite interested in the engineering of products like mega-CD changers, and instant cameras, and consumer movie cameras. Only with the benefit of hindsight can you pinpoint the exact moment when there's simply no point to producing a certain long-successful product any more.
It's definitely the work of good mechanical and electronic engineers. Was there a certain air of fatalism around this particular project? I suppose it would depend on when it was produced. At some point, it must have seemed like putting the last coat of paint on a building that you knew was going to be demolished in a few months' time.
That's to say: it's your job and you're getting paid, so you do it. But it's easy to imagine someone who designs these things for a living being able to fast-forward a little bit and seeing that there was no place for this type of audio component in the Push-Button World of Tomorrow.
(Maybe he or she was ashamed to recall the nasty things they said to the departing members of Sony's turntable division as the CD Engineering Group set up their offices.)
You Spin Me Right Round, Baby...
Wow! An audio component that can play ***200*** CDs worth of music?!? And it's no larger than a weekend suitcase? What a marvelous age in which we live!
(Okay, okay...I'll turn the sarcasm off.)
(Well, "down.")
I'm actually quite interested in the engineering of products like mega-CD changers, and instant cameras, and consumer movie cameras. Only with the benefit of hindsight can you pinpoint the exact moment when there's simply no point to producing a certain long-successful product any more.
It's definitely the work of good mechanical and electronic engineers. Was there a certain air of fatalism around this particular project? I suppose it would depend on when it was produced. At some point, it must have seemed like putting the last coat of paint on a building that you knew was going to be demolished in a few months' time.
That's to say: it's your job and you're getting paid, so you do it. But it's easy to imagine someone who designs these things for a living being able to fast-forward a little bit and seeing that there was no place for this type of audio component in the Push-Button World of Tomorrow.
(Maybe he or she was ashamed to recall the nasty things they said to the departing members of Sony's turntable division as the CD Engineering Group set up their offices.)