Alan Jacobs


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By the way, we’ve always known that my son Matthew has extraordinary hearing. He told me the other day that when we were in France, he took a hearing test at a science museum, and learned that he really can hear far outside the range of normal human hearing. He also said that once, when we lived in Philly, he went around the corner to an old-fashioned record store, and got the man to play a vinyl disc for him. He said he was knocked out by the texture of the sound. He’d never heard anything like that before, having been raised on digital recordings. I told him that I’d stored all my albums almost 20 years ago at a friend’s house here in West Feliciana, because she had a record player and I no longer did. Would he like to go hear them sometime? Yes, he said, that would be great. My 13 year old, in 2012, now wants to hear music in a format that became obsolete in the 1980s, because it sounds so rich and fat to his audiophilic ears. Maybe one day his son will want to know what it feels like to read text on paper, and will ask him to take down from the attic all those “books” he has stored up.