My Geeky Whitney Houston Story

With Whitney Houston's untimely death this past week, it made me think back to the mid 80's when I first heard her amazing voice. At that time my sound system consisted of a component stereo system with a turntable, a cassette deck and a FM tuner connected to a Sony amplifier and with my old Synergistic speakers from high school. But by late 1985 I had heard a new technology was coming out, digitized music on optical disks where there was no pops, crackles or tape hiss to hear and incredible dynamic range (not like the compressed stuff on the radio.) So in 1986 my wife and I purchased our very first CD player, a standalone Teac deck we purchased at a now defunct appliance store near Crestwood Plaza back when people actually visited that mall. As a full-time grad student at the time, the CD deck was quite an extravagance, but as a audio geek, I just had to have one to try out the digital technology.


On the night we purchased the CD player, however, I knew I should purchase some music to listen on it, and I wanted to buy something fitting for this new technology. So I visited a record store in the mall and purchased one classical CD, (the New York Philharmonic playing a Beethoven Symphony, I believe) but then I also wanted to purchase a popular music CD. I mostly listened to typical pop/rock FM music back then (Y98 FM St. Louis!) and the one voice I knew who could bring justice to this new technology was a young new singer who had a few incredible singles like "Saving All My Love for You" and "How Will I Know" which I had heard on the radio. So the first popular CD I ended up purchasing was Whitney Houston's infamous debut album. Having heard her first few hits over the airwaves, I knew she sounded good, but hearing them on crystal clear, digital CD audio in our own Dogtown apartment was nothing short of spectacular. I am guessing she probably helped to sell CD players when they were first taking off in the 80's. I know I made a cassette copy of her CD for the car back then (and for playing on my original Sony cassette Walkman, remember those?) and once you heard the non-hissing, fully digitized CD version, my cassette copies just did not do justice to Whitney's incredibly powerful and dynamic voice.


You have to remember nobody had CD burners at home until the year 2000 at the earliest and MP3 players did not exist until around 2000 as well. These were back in the days before digital piracy, when if you did "pirate" a friend's record (yes, vinyl) it meant recording a hissing magnetic tape cassette, prone to physical problems and loss of sound quality over time. And if you wanted to copy someone's 45 minute album, it required a minimum of 45 minutes of your own time, as you had to put the album on your turntable and load your cassette deck and time things just right (don't forget the 5 second "leader" on the cassette!) We thought Dolby B noise reduction was great, and suddenly with the advent of compact discs there was no noise at all!


And now with Whitney Houston's passing in 2012, I can find all of her songs and music videos on YouTube to watch and listen to whenever I so feel inclined, all in pure easy access digital format. Plus with utilities like YouTube Downloader it is all too easy to just grab the media and save it and put it on a portable media player to take with you anywhere. I wonder how many people have watched and listened to her music in the past week without paying a dime or having to even get up off their behinds. Just reach into your pocket, pull out your phone or MP3 player and grab her music online. It does not seem the same as back in 1986 when had to I make my way to a record store to pick up her first CD and then take it home to play on my brand new CD player. The magic is gone in so many different ways.