Transmission Received

Roughly 10 years ago, I bought my first new car. More accurately, my first new car was bought for me as a graduation gift. Five years of sleeping in late and writing a few papers were rewarded with a degree, national honors, and a 1995 Dodge Avenger. Great gig, college.

At the time, CD players were on the cusp between being an add-on option and becoming standard equipment in new cars, but as it happened, my new Avenger had one. I, on the other hand, was on no such cusp; almost everything I owned -- a rather large collection -- was on tape, and at the time, I had no way to convert that stuff to CD. I became determined to find a way to play my tapes in the car.

Now, most people had the opposite problem: they had plenty of CDs but only tape players in their cars. Those folks bought portable CD players with cassette adapters and got along quite nicely, despite the jumble of cords that extended from the player to the cigarette lighter (at the time, there weren't extra "outlets") and to the cassette machine. There was, of course, no such adapter to play cassettes through a CD player, but there was something better. For about $20, one could buy something called a "SoundFeeder," a small, low-power transmitter that, connected to an audio device, would broadcast it to an available FM frequency. It was marketed to remove the jumble of cords from CD players, but it solved my tape problem quite nicely.

Over the years, as my music collection became more digital, I found other uses for the transmitter. As portable TVs and VCRs became popular, I would feed that audio through my radio. In terms of constant use, at a cost-to-use ratio of $2 a year over 10 years, that chunky, little, black SoundFeeder is one of the best buys of my life.

Fast forward.

At this Sunday's matinee, a cast member placed his cool, little, white iPod in the girls' dressing room so that we could hear a David Sedaris bit broadcast through the radio there. His version of the SoundFeeder, made for iPod, is called iTrip. Girls in the room oohed and aahed.... How was this possible? His iPod playing on the radio? Crazy, man. Magic!

I feel so old. Or are they so young?

Meanwhile, I can still boogie when I hear Cheryl Lynn warble "To Be Real" on my jambox -- yes, jambox -- thanks to an old SoundFeeder and a new iPod: a bit of technological archeology spanning 4 decades in a one-foot space. And I like it!

Whippersnapper!