Home Audio Evolution, Part 1: Sony PHC-Z10
Starting today, I’m doing a series on the evolution of my home audio systems over the last decade and change. This has been in the works since 2020, and it started out as a very long post, but I’ve decided to split it into multiple posts to save you the headache of reading one long piece about a bunch of nerd shit you don’t care about. Instead, you can endure the headache of several shorter ones.
I won’t dive into sources of music in this series. Perhaps another time, I can dive into MP3-CD players, Cowon iAudio X5 with Rockbox installed, iPod Classic, and the like. But for now, let’s talk about speaker systems.
In 2010, my home audio was that of someone who lived with her parents, and that’s because I did. After all, I was in college. I had one of those bookshelf stereos, which, presumably because of the nature of the then-dying music industry, had all the overblown bombast of a Transformer. It was the one, the only, Sony PHC-Z10.
Somebody else’s Sony PHC-Z10.
This thing was great. It could play five whole albums in a row, it had two cassette decks (perfect for making mixtapes), and it even had an AM/FM radio. Later in its life, I used the cassette deck as an input for a tape adapter. At first, I plugged various MP3-CD players into it, and later, my iPod Classic. What a relic this beast was. I’d had it since the early 2000s. It served me well.
But as I moved away for college, I found myself regretting every extra ounce of bulk in my life. I became a minimalist. I threw away everything I didn’t need. I still needed this stereo—how else would I play music? But each year, I moved into a new off-campus apartment, and each year, I felt the weight of that thing as I carried it into its new home. I also realized it probably took up a quarter of whatever desk space I had at the time. For the amount I was moving around, that desk itself was too big, and only to accommodate this absolute unit.
I realized I needed something much smaller. In the next post, you’ll find out what that was. Stay tuned. In fact, subscribe to this blog in your favorite RSS reader like it's 2010 again.