[quote=“FoolishOwl, post:39, topic:28484”]
The buttons do have feedback, particularly the play button, which locks into position with a loud click, but most of them would noticeably have an effect on the axles that turn the cassette, which you could feel and see through the window on the cassette slot. [/quote]
I agree the kids are mugging for the camera, but I think you’re still bringing your bias to it. You’re assuming its intuitively obvious that they’ll push hard enough to click the button into place or to look through the plastic window to see the axles engage. They don’t know how the device works, so that’s a big assumption. Will they eventually figure it out? Of course they will. That’s not really the point of the video, IMHO.
Given that most of the kids in the video were not teenagers, let alone college students, I’m not sure that comparison is that important. Most kids now don’t use MP3 players, they either use dedicated smartphones or tablets. A physical media player isn’t really in their experience.
I’m pretty sure that the teenager who is noting that isn’t saying ‘wow, headphones! I’ve never seen these before’ so much as he’s actually saying exactly what you imply: that these ugly low-tech headphones are ones he’s seen his grandfather use, as opposed to the beats or skull-candy pair he probably owns at home (i.e. oh, grandad has a seer sucker suit and skinny tie).
Of course the whole thing is an example of social engineering to elicit a response. That’s not the same thing as a blatant hoax. If you’d ever seen my kids reaction to my old VCR, then you might not find this as inauthentic.
My neighbour has one with some really old viennese Strauss 78’s from the 1920s. It’s sublime how the thing functions. Seriously, magic. Then I guess a person from 100 years ago would say the same thing about a smartphone.
I once listened to talk by Harry Kroto (one of the guys who won a Nobel prize for buckminsterfullerene) and one of things that concerned him was how the new generations of kids are going to get into science and engineering. Nowadays you can’t take apart any device you buy these days because of fancy tamper-proof screws and even if you manage to get inside, it’s all condensed into some epoxy covered microchip, leaving you only with “It just does” as the answer to “How does X device work?”.
I guess the modern answer is “look it up on Wikipedia”.
Yes. The amazing thing was they worked at all. My mum has Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius on 78’s, and had never noticed that the cello and double bass parts were all played on tubas. You had to fit the entire orchestra onto a single small room with a giant horn that went to the recording machine, and do the lot in one take. This meant they sat in racks, three deep vertically, and you could replace several double basses with one tuba, so they did.
