Remember when we used to record stuff? Put vinyl records on, make mixtapes on cassette, play them in the car, give them nervously to prospective girlfriends with a carefully hand-written case insert, wondering if that track near the end isn’t a bit much for that stage of the relationship?
Where has it all gone? These days you’ll be lucky if your hi-fi amp even has a ‘record out’ around the back. It almost makes me chuckle when I review something which still has an input labelled ‘tape’.
It was compact discs which did for recording, of course, because once you could copy digitally and burn your own CDs (though heaven forbid I should suggest you so much as think of copying digital music in any way because we will get rude letters from lawyers forbidding any mention of such fun if do), the whole mixtape game was up. File sharing just made it even more quaint, while for our tastes sharing a Spotify playlist seems rather lacking in romance by comparison.
But now we are enjoying the revival of vinyl, and to a lesser and faintly ridiculous extent also of cassette, which must have tickled or perhaps utterly baffled the Dutch inventor of the compact cassette, Lou Ottens, before he died earlier this year, aged 94. So perhaps the time has come again for some recording fun. The makers of the Sugarcube clearly think so. Not only will they help you record your vinyl, they’ll even make it sound better in the process. (And
