Are You Enthralled by Vintage Radios? Your Age May Have Something to Do With It

KR explains that vintage radios appeal to a certain generation what this older generation is looking for:

well, this was definitely, in my case an example of "one just went for $34 and i was beat by a dollar, and that isn't happening again" so i paid $11 over that and now have to explain the package to mama...

here is a thought, and it may not be applicable to you jeff, but a possible reason so many of us are listening to shortwave radios is to try to hear or recreate the past....

primarily, people listening to shortwave are over 45 or so, which is on the long downhill slope of the human lifecycle. people may want at some subconscious level to hear or touch or remember something from when they were growing up. and shortwave fits the bill...

i believe part of the reason people want to get back into the past, is an effort to feel something from the time they were a child. i think we are all wet-wired to want love and tenderness and affection.

thus the time machine.

Comments

[gerald johnson]

good observation kr. as ive stated here before, its the hope that you could hear and relive the earth changing events and music that these radios once broadcasted. ive often sat in front of my 1965 sony and wondered who might have been listening to "ticket to ride" by the beatles after just hearing news of some new calamity in vietnam or news of nasa triumphs on the very radio im looking at. it is all about nostalgia. oh, and one other factor, i believe the quality of these radios is to this day unsurpassed.

[kr]

gerald, that is exactly the other thought i've had here: maybe if i listen to shortwave on an old hallicrafters or something, i can hear news from the past... maybe we don't like some of the ways the world turned out from then to now. so the question is, what would you change? what would you tell them back then to do differently? (saying perhaps that you had a transmitter)

well, we could tell them to take it easy on the gasoline :-)
or maybe don't let kennedy ride in that motorcade.

http://www.rigpix.com/hallicrafter/sx85.htm

[gerald johnson]

i think id tell people to buy mcdonalds stock and look out for something called microsoft!