Go to a Steampunk Radio Museum 📻

Ask any sound engineer I’ve worked with over the years. I’m not a gearhead. I started in radio during the waning days of reel-to-reel tape, which made me weep in frustration. Then I survived the introduction of failure-prone DAT and minidisc recorders, and stayed up many a night on deadline trying to undo some mistake I made in ProTools or another DAW. 

As a survival tactic over the years, I’ve adopted a stance one might call “Do I Need to Know What This Knob Is For?” If my touching the knob has the potential to make things worse, then I do not want to touch it. I defer when possible to an engineer who is not only going to do a better job, but knows when the knobs are about to be replaced by some other technology.

Whether you’re a gear enthusiast or gear-avoider, the cure you need this summer is to visit a wireless museum. These shrines to audio tech, scattered around the US and many other countries, are filled with restored — or at least cleaned-up — gear going back to the dawn of radio. Here, you may find the heavy, wide-belled loudspeakers that preceded electrical speakers. There will be wood-cased radio receivers covered with knobs, and you can rest easy not knowing what any of those are for. You may encounter vacuum tubes, telegraph levers and weird-looking microphones. Everything will smell of metal filings and WD40. You may hear the faint signal of AM radio wafting from some old receiver on display, one that’s been fully restored or donated by a person who’s kept it in working order for decades.