Last Christmas I got a gadget that cleverly combined the new technology with the old. It’s a turntable that converts tracks off those big ol’ vinyl records into newfangled digital tunes that can hang out on your computer.

How it does this I have no idea. But I don’t really understand television, either, and I still half-believe there are tiny bands playing inside my radio. Anyway, the computer-turntable connection is surprisingly easy to use, unless you opt for the advanced editing program, which requires a degree from MIT. So I’ve been dragging boxes of old albums — at least those that survived the Great Basement Flood of 1992 — out of storage. I even found the first album I can remember owning, Pete Seeger’s Live at Carnegie Hall, which dates to 1963.

Back in the day, I did not keep my records in pristine condition, and some of them have so many scratches it sounds as though someone had been frying bacon in the studio. Perhaps it was Elvis, who was always partial to fried food.

Like an intrepid archaeologist, I dug deeper and deeper into my moldering boxes of vinyl, trying to remember what I once saw, or heard, in The Quicksilver Messenger Service.

As I pondered whether there were simply too many scratches on my battered copy of Full House by the J. Geils Band to make it worth saving, my 13-year-old son, Noah, wandered over, his infallible radar sensing a new gadget that he could use to display his overwhelming technological superiority over his old, slow, pathetic father.

But wait! Those big flat-black discs, turning around at a stately 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. They appeared to be playing music. Yet young Noah couldn’t recall seeing them before.

Ah-hah, boyo! You’re in my world now.

For Noah, the black artifacts were oddly fascinating. While the technology was clearly ancient, it was also unfamiliar to him and so, in a certain sense, brand-new. The idea that you actually had to place some sort of spike-like device in a particular spot on the disc to play a song implied a brute physicality that had a certain primitive appeal. It was like watching Neanderthals using crude spears to bring down a woolly mammoth.

Noah had questions:

What were those “records” made out of?

Some sort of black stuff.

What were these “grooves” I kept talking about.

They are, you know, grooves. Tiny lines. Only they are round. Or go around. You put the needle in the groove, and the song comes out.

And just how does that work, exactly?

Well. The, uh, grooves have these little ... thingies or something ... inside them and the needle picks up some kind of ... vibration ... from the grooves and then it gets, ummmmm ... amplified somehow ... by something ... and goes through the wires and into the speakers and the music comes out.

It was obvious I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

Then Noah’s eyes drifted to my computer screen, where the icon for the advanced editing program — which promised to eliminate much of the snap, crackle and pop on my vinyl — beckoned seductively. Could he try it? Huh? Could he? Just for a little while?

“No!” I said. I knew that as soon as my son started tinkering with it, we would be whisked out of my world and back into his. The name of this program is Audacity, and the idea of a 13-year-old playing with something called Audacity on my semi-creaky Dell made me nervous.

Anyway, I have to go out now, sharpen my spear, and bring down a woolly mammoth for dinner.

Andy Smith is a Journal staff writer.

asmith@projo.com