I remember being around four years old and all the adults in the house made the mistake of leaving me alone with the family hi-fi. The unit was a cassette receiver from a brand called Elizabethan, and I recall very little about it now apart from the stack of dials on the front and its rather fetching fake wood finish.
It was playing some classic Bollywood song from the 60s, and for the first time ever, I noticed the tone controls on the amplifier. Being so young, I had no idea what the words ‘treble’ and ‘bass’ meant at the time, of course. But once the dials were twiddled in a random fashion, I knew the one marked ‘bass’ did good things and should always be turned up to the max. The treble control, on the other hand, didn’t have any significant impact on the drums that the child-me was focussing so hard on and was quickly ignored.
