(A Shitty System Photographed By A Shitty Camera Phone)
We here at The FSS have great respect for music. We feel that it should be played, no matter the format, through the best possible system. Possible. And we hope to be reviewing components, good, decently priced, well-designed components for you, our three readers. We hope to get those earnestly manufactured gadgets free as fuck as well, cuz that’s why we started thing nonsense to begin with anyway. And we may actually in the future receive free electronics to review. Possibly. But that time is not now. And goddamnit, when it is not possible to get good, decently-priced stereo necessities, you have to grit your teeth and do what is necessary, because silence is just not an option. Sometimes you just got suck it up and get some heinous heinous bullshit.
Like I did this past weekend. There was a BBQ around my way this past July 4th and I needed something, anything that would play music. Having a little over 44 dollars my options were painfully limited. To make a long story short I ended up dropping my last 44 dollars on a Memorex desktop CD player. With a remote Control. It is a righteous piece of shit. Holy fuck, it is bad. I think it actually hates music. And pretentious, it shines a weird blue-light as it queasily, grudgingly plays my lovingly chosen selections. There is a smell of ozone and death that comes off the thing when it is turned on. It has a clock but the 3rd number never changes and the remote control will only fast forward or reverse, not stop or change the volume. And it is cracked, I guess to save me the trouble of doing it myself. It sucks so fucking bad, but I need and it works (badly).
So now I’m gonna give ya’ll a brief list of shitty, shitty audio that has made a difference in my life. Because I know at some point some garbage walkman, some retarded radio or some Mongolian ass-backwards CD-player has straight saved your life.
Yellow Tape deck (MAKE UNKNOWN)
It was yellow as fuck, tiny and shaped like a Pringle crossed with Venetian blinds. I played my first U2 tape on it till the tape snapped. What a piece of shit.
Pioneer Shelf system
I actually dug this out of my basement in the late 80’s and no one claimed it, so it became mine. The tape player only half-worked and was actually vomited on twice by two different people.
Studio 44 (?) Setup
A friend of mine from grammar school was given this monster for Christmas, his parents had gotten it from Steve around his block who dealt in dubious merchandise. The bass in one speaker didn’t work and the actual make of this silver monster all-in-one system (tape deck, record player AND 8-track) was aggressively scratched out and red stickers put to replace them saying STUDIO 44. Utter trash.
Some European Walkman with tiny speaker adapters
My friend brought this feces back from the Old Country. I remember listening to a Sex Pistols tape on it through the criminally bad mini speakers you could plug into the thing. It sounded like The Pistols were playing in a sewage tunnel and we were 4 floors up listening through a toilet.
Anything by Coby
I lived in Iceland for awhile, Coby owns the shitty electronics market over there. I don’t know how many marathon parties I have destroyed my liver in while getting down to the miserably replicated sounds of Coby. Nicely played, gents.
Any port in a storm, that’s what Popeye used to say. And noise, by any means necessary, beats the quiet of your stunningly boring life.
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You also know it’s shitty when it does more things than it should. My first portable CD player which I bought to listen to Ice Cube’s The Predator album also had a built in AM/FM radio. It was twice as thick as the more expensive Sony models out at the time and came in a plain brown box with no words or anything on it. It also weighed about 20 pounds. But I could listen to Wicked all day long and that was all that mattered.
In high school before I could afford a record player of my own I found about 10 record players in various relatives attics that they all gave me for free. I think 2 of them worked. The first was enormous. I had to sit it on the floor in my room because it didn’t fit anywhere else. It broke about one week later. The other needed a needle and managed to stick with me for a good 5 years or so despite my efforts to kill it to justify buying something better. The only thing i remember about it was that it weighed as much as a feather.
Basically equipment that weights too much or too little should also be suspect.
Currently at work I have an older Panasonic shelf system. Both tape decks are broken. When you turn on the CD player it makes these god awful loud clicking noises. The only thing that works is the auxiliary input where we have a Sirius radio hooked up. Of course even that is a pain in the ass as all day long the volume will rise and fall on it’s own accord. Sometimes it gets really loud for three seconds then low again. Sometimes it’s loud all afternoon. If you try to change the volume yourself you only anger it. It’s best to just let it do what it wants. It has a mind of it’s own and this mind tells it that by no means should it do anything right.