Analog to Digital?

[lsanderson]

State of the Art
Digital Life for Analog Keepsakes
By DAVID POGUE

Millions of baby boomers today live in fear of a diagnosis of AFLS.

AFLS — Analog Format Loss Syndrome — is the depressing realization that all your old photo prints, cassette tapes and vinyl records risk being lost to the dustbin of obsolete analog equipment. But with just a few changes, you can avoid becoming another AFLS statistic.

(O.K., spare me the indignant e-mail — I realize that record players aren’t yet obsolete. But there’s still value in digitizing your records; otherwise, you can’t listen to them in the car, while you jog or anyplace else you don’t have a turntable handy.)

Where there’s a problem, there’s an entrepreneur to exploit it. Three new AFLS remedies have just hit the market: a photo converter from Hammacher Schlemmer, a cassette-tape converter from Ion and an LP-converting turntable, also from Ion.

All three purport to simplify turning the relics of your analog life into shiny new digital files. But not all of them improve on existing conversion technology. More