He played it a thousand times — THE FIRST CD PLAYER | Audio Story

In October 1985, a basement in New Jersey turned into an oven. The fire never quite reached Robert’s record shelves, but the heat did. Two thousand vinyl albums — every Beatles first pressing, every Miles Davis classic, decades of jazz, rock, blues and quiet memories — sagged, warped and fused into black puddles. His beloved White Album, bought the week it came out in 1968 and played a thousand times, became an unrecognizable lump of plastic. Insurance wrote a number on a form. The real loss couldn’t be itemized.
This story follows Robert and his son Michael through that loss and into the strange comfort of a new technology: the compact disc. We hear the silence in that burned-out basement, the skepticism of a lifelong vinyl purist staring at a shiny Sony CD player, and the moment Sgt. Pepper starts playing with no pops, no scratches, no wear. What finally convinces him isn’t “better sound,” but the promise that this music won’t melt, won’t wear out, won’t disappear in a single bad night.
The vanished thing here is more than vinyl records — it’s the era when music was fragile, finite, and physically owned. As CDs arrive and later give way to streaming, the story becomes a quiet argument about permanence: what it means to own music, to lose it, to rebuild it in a different form, and to leave behind boxes of discs and one melted chunk of White Album for the next generation to puzzle over. Listen if you’ve ever loved an album so much you could recognize it by its flaws, and wondered whether “perfect forever” was a blessing or a lie.

The Analog Hour brings to life stories from a world that no longer exists — a time before automation, convenience, and digital noise.

Each episode is an immersive audio story told through the voices of those who lived it: forgotten jobs, obsolete tools, slow domestic rituals, and quiet moments when the world changed — like when the first microwave arrived, or when a washing machine saved a woman's spine.

Not facts, but feelings. Not timelines, but time capsules.

Perfect for slow evenings, nostalgic hearts, and anyone who wants to remember (or imagine) life before everything got fast.

🎧 Audio storytelling. Sleepcasts. Nostalgia from the analog age.

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