CDs & Records: A UX Reflection

My lime-green Memorex, over 15 years old. Complete with skater-brand stickers.

I was visiting my parent’s house back in my hometown. Upon arriving, I unloaded some of my things, brought them upstairs to the spare room — what was once my bedroom — and unpacked. Turning towards the door I was filled with a visceral feeling of nostalgia: an old, beaten-up Memorex was sitting upon a TV tray.

A Rich Feeling of Joy

After deciding to bring the boom box back to my apartment whenever I left town, I salvaged a few of my older CDs from far back in my childhood closet. My most anticipated experience was to be a mystery box of CDs I had purchased a year ago from a local record store in Bloomington, IN. Landlocked Records has a yearly purge of backstock CDs that they package in brown boxes, and then sell for $10 even. You are guaranteed 20 CDs, as well as the experience of being completely ignorant as to what they might be.

The $10 mystery box of CDs.

It’s strange to admit how much fun it is to crack the cardboard open! In a time when we usually have fast-paced interactions between voice and screen-based interfaces, it’s almost alien to think about the joy it brings to open 20 CDs that may be subjectively trash, or a rare find that I wish I had back when I was in middle school. For instance, I found The Low Down Theory, by A Tribe Called Quest, alongside the first Mazzy Star record, and the strange throwback of the soundtrack to Sleepless in Seattle. All the possibilities of pilfering through each album’s little leaflet to look at the illegible typography from the 1990’s brings me the rich feelings of curiosity and joy. This recognition of feeling this way brings me to a question.

Is this the feeling records give a different generation?

The majority of my record collection.

I’ll admit, I have bought into the record-player craze that has come about over the past decade. But why? Typical reasons given are because the grooves, analog, etched into its materiality, carries greater sonic information — records force a ritual of laying down the album, placing the needle on top, and carefully closing the lid so it won’t skip, etc.

I agree that there is something to all of this, but I cannot help but be skeptical of this user experience. It seems as though artists — along with the marketplace — were able to target those users who grew up with these large records as the primary (if only) vehicle to mediate having your favorite artist in your living room.

My hypothesis

My Audio-Technica

I believe that the idea of audiophiles is a great way in which people justify their love of record albums. To justify the utilization of this analog ritual, it can be objectively defended with something like, “Oh, everyone knows that the sound quality is richer in an album, it’s closer to what the artist sounded like in the studio.”

But what about the subjective values that might be closer to the truth of the matter? Maybe there is something more psychoanalytic at work here. My hypothesis is as follows: We love the first music-mediating-device we come into contact with, regardless of the objective sonic qualities.

My Argument, or a Memorex Boom Box

This brings me to my point of reflection.

I love everything about my childhood boom box. I have a particular mastery over its interaction. I understand that I need to make sure the lid is closed or else the disk won’t spin. I know that if there is a skip on the disk, I should breathe on it and wipe it down — gently — with my shirt.

I like that it has a digital interface that tells me which number track it is currently playing. There is an inherent understanding that I can skip between tracks, but I wouldn’t do that until I listen to it all the way through a couple of times. Some of these sorts of procedures are not facilitated with a record player, such as going forward to the next couple tracks, or to back up or restart a track with the flick of a finger.

But what about the sound quality?

Yes, it is flatter, more tinny. It is compact. That’s okay, because it feels like home. It feels like I am laying in my room, after finishing my homework, before calling my girlfriend on the land-line phone, flipping through my new favorite CD that defines my sense of self at the time.

Who knows — in a few years there might be a new rise in the “cool factor” of CDs like there has been in record albums. There is an undeniable romance to the experience of opening up the plastic CD cases, carefully popping out the disks, and turning through the lyrics (which might even flip over to reveal a poster of the band!).

To conclude

What I have come to tease out here is that through my own personal reflection between my record player and my boom box, there are surprising subjective, human-needs I was unaware of until I revisited my CD collection. They are as follows:

1. The user is not always seeking out the most optimized product. In fact, an optimized product may alienate us from our true need, which is to relate to the context of how we came to know the artists and art that we love.
2. We should probe users about first-encounters with their artifacts. Maybe the first tool they mastered was a record player. Or maybe, as in my case, mastery was first realized over a boom box and then my car CD-player. What about cassettes? What expectations, rituals, and ways of knowing from old, mastered systems are forgotten and left behind in favor of efficacy, simplicity, or techno-solutionism? With the advent of online streaming, future generations may never understand the procedures and individual ways of dealing with a disk that starts to skip. Maybe users will find real delight in being the one person who could always make the CD work properly. What about the deeply personal, yet communal act of carrying around your CD collection in a protected, zipped-up case? When looking through someone else’s CD binder, you are suddenly placed into someone else’s world. “What, you listen to Christian Rock?!” “Nooo, but I used to.” Things that may seem faux pas become moments of elicitation and bridging gaps in communal identities.
3. Every generation has its own unique ways of coming to know the world for the first time. My experience with a boom box cannot speak as deeply to the person born in the 1950s, or to those people born after the advent of Spotify. What I would like to push here is that we must come to recognize the forgotten subjective moments that reacquaint us with a version of ourselves that may have previously slipped by with our fast-moving times. There is certainly value in that.