Life & Wisdom Quote by Alastair Wood

Wood lands the joke with the casual cruelty of hindsight: the moment you discover a new standard, your old pleasures get retroactively demoted. The line isn’t really about the Beatles, or even about sound quality. It’s about how quickly “good enough” becomes “how did I ever live like that?” once technology reframes your expectations. The humor works because it mimics a private thought people rarely admit in public: nostalgia is persuasive right up until the upgrade arrives.

The subtext is a quiet critique of progress as a kind of perceptual bullying. A record player didn’t suddenly get worse; the listener’s frame of reference changed. That’s the modern condition in miniature: the past is continuously re-audited by the present, and the verdict is usually harsher than necessary. Wood’s phrasing makes that sting feel light, even friendly. “I thought” and “pretty good” are deliberately modest, the language of someone not trying to win an argument, just confessing a small humiliation.

Context matters: this is the CD era’s victory lap, when “clean” and “crisp” were marketed as moral qualities, not just technical ones. CDs promised freedom from pops, hiss, and the physical rituals of vinyl. Wood’s line captures how marketing becomes self-fulfilling psychology: once you’ve been taught what “better” sounds like, you start hearing flaws you previously edited out. It’s an offhand sentence that doubles as a warning: progress doesn’t only add; it rewrites what you’re allowed to enjoy.