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Great quote on Marshall amps, the sound of Jimi Hendrix, and the beauty of imperfection.

Brian Eno discusses music and technology in this great article. I especially liked this quote, which explains one of the many reasons I'm into vinyl.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation - probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called "electric guitar." Or think of grainy black-and-white film, or jittery Super 8, or scratches on vinyl. These limitations tell you something about the context of the work, where it sits in time, and by invoking that world they deepen the resonances of the work itself.
From The Revenge of the Intuitive