Make:

It's a real sin to destroy these high impedance antique's! Users of vintage radio equipment spend great efforts to preserve their old radio's and often need to find quality set's of these old high impedance head sets to get proper enjoyment of these old radios. Don't destroy antique electronics in the name of something stupid. There's no good reason to chop up a good old set for the sake of making your $1.00 poor quality toy's sound better.

Antiques have value for two main reasons; they give us a connection to the culture that created them and they have monetary value in the marketplace. There is no doubt that singular hand crafted works of artists and craftsmen demand preservation as they give us unique information about past cultures. However, vintage mass-manufactured goods hold little unique cultural information, they have value only in the marketplace.

While modding an antique may destroy it's monetary value, it also transforms it into an object that now preserves unique cultural information about the present. So it all depends on what you feel is important.

I point out that one of the headphones pictured in the website (top left) are a set of WWII US Army headphones. I don't mind the others nearly as much as the loss of a hard-to-find relic of the past.

Subscribe today, save 42% and get web access to MAKE free. MAKE Digital Edition is available only to subscribers.

$34.95 / 1 year
(4 Quarterly Issues)

Subscribe now