For the new downtown apartment, we've purchased a Sonos ZonePlayer. What does this oddly-named machine do? It simply allows me to capture the signal of radio statios all over the world (through the internet connection), pipe them through the amplifier, and broadcast them on our old but functional speakers.
Quite a step up in standard of living, especially since over-the-air reception in our mountain town is severely compromised by the bumpy terrain
With this new device, I can listen to classical music stations from all the capitols of Europe -- all over the planet, in fact. I can choose from among 5 or 6 crystal-clear stations dedicated entirely to opera, as well as a few that specialize in the baroque period, or in chamber music, or piano. There are also five Beatles stations, one of them from Moscow! Several "big band" stations. An all Grateful Dead specialist beaming directly to me from Connecticut. An all Bruce, all the time.
I love the "Paris Chanson" station, twenty-four hours a day of Edith Piaf and friends, from Tokyo.
But so far my favorite is the all doo-wop station out of Winter Haven, Florida, which, on demand, has the power to return me to my teen-age years. Just now I heard the Jacks' plaintive, "Why Don't You Write Me," a song which functioned, earlier in my life, as a personal anthem of self-flagellation. And just at this moment, a glorious version (and one that I didn''t know) of the much-recorded "The Glory of Love." Aural bliss!
What's missing? A good American roots (1920s and 1930s) station. A station specializing in 1940s and 1950s black gospel -- definitely not "contemporary gospel" -- which, according to AH, the world's expert, is called contemporary because it is both a "con" and "temporary." An all Gilbert and Sullivan station -- but perhaps that would be a gift too precious to imagine?
But if there can be eight all-Elvis stations, shouldn't there be at least one that is all-Haydn, all the time?
And yet I've only begun to search. Who knows what other pleasures are out there in modern radioland?
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