RCA Quadraphonic - Flew like a lead zeppelin.

Gather round, children, and listen to a story of hope and disappointment.

In 1970, RCA wanted everyone to buy a new audio system for the new four-channel (which came to be known as "quadraphonic" or "quad") music system. At that time, consumer-level stereophonic (two-channel) systems were still sort of new. Anyone with a stereo "hi-fi" system would have been considered an early adopter.

This RCA ad wanted you to drop everything and rush straight out and buy a new quad system. Now, stereo systems have twice as many components as mono. Two amplifiers, twice the speakers, twice the everything, pretty much. As a result, they cost about twice the money that a monophonic system did.

Along comes quadraphonic, and they cost roughly twice as much as stereo, with four times the components as a mono system, of course. How much was that? Well, the system pictured in the RCA ad sold for $250. Run off to the CPI inflation calculator page and we can see that $250 was about $1300 in today's money.  Yowza.

Having just bought a stereo hi-fi a few years previously, would you be prepared to jump to a quad system already? To the well-heeled douchebag subscribers of Esquire, it may have been a no brainer. It was also 1970, so, amazingly bad decisions on the part of pop culture were coming fast and furious. Maybe a $1300 bookshelf music system (look at the size of the speakers in comparison to the cassette slot) seemed like a solid decision? Maybe you would have looked forward to throwing this in the trash when hexaphonic sound systems came out a few years in the future? I mean, why wouldn't you assume that was on the way, right? Spoiler alert: that didn't happen.

Time would show us that not many people were into quad. Not very many albums were recorded in quad, and before too long, Dolby Labs would figure out how to make a stereo signal feed four or more speakers through clever phase detection. Stereo was pretty good enough, it seemed. Five-channel and seven-channel surround systems, which extracted multichannel audio from a two-channel encoded audio signal, would embarrass your lame-ass quad system by simply being more cleverer with less hardware. If you haven't listened to music on a surround system, you're missing out. It's pretty cool.

Of course, we are now looking at an entire generation raised on hyper-compressed music played through twenty-dollar computer speakers or came-free-with-my-iPhone craptacular earbuds, so, hi-fi, or "high fidelity" is sort of a dead thing for now. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the superpopular bass-is-all-I-care-about Beats brand of headphones, which are as close to high-fidelity as the squeaky earbuds they, in many cases replaced, to be honest. People love those too, because they're expensive.

Come to think of it, hi-fi early adopters at least cared about accurate sound reproduction. Maybe those douchebags weren't so silly after all. Is the idea of four speakers more ridiculous than choosing a pair of headphones because you like the color, or headphones that are engineered with permanent bass-all-the-way-up circuitry? The last time I tried to buy a pair of headphones in a store, the clerk looked at me like I was nuts when I told him I wanted to hear them before buying them. Apparently, caring about how accurately a music system reproduces sound makes you an eccentric outlier.

Maybe the douchebags weren't so silly.

Quatron Automatic 8-Track Stereo Tape Changer - The grooviest iPod of 1970.

The next time you're a totally with-it man in Nineteen Seventy, and you want to invite your laydeh over to your Holiday Inn Balcony Suite for a quick sixteen-hour layover (heh), you're going to need the Quatron Automatic 8-Track Stereo Tape Changer. It is the only way.

Think of it. You and your woman - what was it? Brenda? Yeah, Brenda - plus five hundred square feet of yellow sculpted pile that's kinda like the carpet in your van, and sixteen hours to kill until the guy from the convention center comes to pick you up. What shall you do with all that time?  Oh yeah. You could do Brenda. She lives near the hotel, doesn't she? Her roomate might be home, but that's okay. You've got your own hotel room. Ooooh, yeah. It is so on.

The Quatron's got you covered, with twelve of your best 8-Tracks. You've got other rotary magazines with different selections back at home, but good thing you brought the one that's best for gettin' down. It'll go like this:

You and Brenda begin with The Best of Bread, and then some Rare Earth and Blood, Sweat & Tears, and you're both starting to groove.

You might be getting up to change the record, if you were using your old turntable, but no way, man. The Quatron's just getting started. Mountain, The Ideas of March and the 5th Dimension are just kicking into high gear as you two take a breather and enjoy the five bucks worth of weed you bought from the kid outside the liquor store. Aaalll right.

But that's a shot breather, because you're really into Brenda, and she's really into you being into her. Peter, Paul and Mary, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap and The Troggs are inclined to agree.

Finally, you and Brenda share a cigarette on the balcony overlooking the Zayre parking lot, wrapped in the flannel blanket together. You talk about your dreams while Sergio Mendes, Classical Gas and Vanilla Fudge bring your love-plane in to land. Maybe you offer her a beer, and just to prove how much you care, you take a hit off of it first, just to make sure it doesn't have a cigarette butt in it. That's how Brenda knows you care, baby.

Man, you two were in the saddle for sixteen hours, and it only felt like the first side of that album by Zager & Evans. Far out. You didn't even take a nap, but that's okay. You're pretty sure the limo guy will have some coke. You'll just sneak out while Brenda's in the shower. She'll be cool with it. Just don't forget to grab your Quatron on your way out the door.

Dodge Phonograph - Like a record, baby.

You may have heard that, at one time, you could get a 16-RPM turntable installed in your car as a factory option. Here's a page from a Popular Mechanics preview of the new 1956 models from (among others) Dodge, showing their under-dash record player. Does it still count as a 16-RPM record when the car you're driving is spinning at an additional 2 RPM into a ditch because you were dicking around with the 16-RPM record while driving?

The unit was designed for 16-RPM records? What were those? They were 7" in diameter, which was the same size as a 45. However, the 16-RPM standard was generally monaural, and the slower playback speed of the program material brought with it the additional downside of decreased sound quality. This brings into question to Chrysler's name for the feature, "Highway Hi-Fi". Let's not forget that "Hi-Fi" is supposed to mean "high fidelity". Inferior quality, mono audio. That's some good marketing. Name it after the very thing it's farthest from.

More here from Wikipedia...

Some recording, (sic) such as books for the blind, were pressed at 16 2⁄3 rpm. Prestige Records released jazz records in this format in the late 1950s, for example two of their Miles Davis albums were paired together in this format. Peter Goldmark, the man who developed the 33 1⁄3 rpm record, developed the Highway Hi-Fi 16 2⁄3 rpm record to be played in Chrysler automobiles, but poor performance of the system and weak implementation by Chrysler and Columbia led to the demise of the 16 2⁄3 rpm records. Subsequently, the 16 2⁄3 rpm speed was used for narrated publications for the blind and visually impaired, and were never widely commercially available, although it was common to see new turntable models with a 16 rpm speed setting produced as late as the 1970s.

So, a format that found its biggest audience in the blind, offered as a feature in cars. No irony there. Maybe they should have marketed their Highway Hi-Fi to the hearing impaired, too? Wooooo! Take that, Chrysler of 1956!

According to Popular Mechanics according to Chrysler, you could change the record "without taking your eyes off the road". This may sound pretty stupid, but surely no less stupid than typing a quick SMS while driving, right?

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Vivitar - The sound of gettin' it on.

Most decades take two to three years to really form their identity. For example, The Eighties looked a lot like The Seventies until about 1983 or so. The Nineties looked a lot like The Eighties until about 1993. So how long did The Seventies - everybody's favorite decade that always seemed to have a rash that just wouldn't go away - take to assert its The Seventies-ness? Less than one year. Yes, this 1970 Vivitar ad is real. File under WTF?

 How do you sell stereos? Show people shower-fucking, stupid! (or in the preliminary stages of shower-fucking, anyway). But Vivitar weren't total skeezebags. On the opposite page, they did have the decency to show the recently-moistened couple cuddling... naked.

Thank you, The Seventies, for never disappointing! Surely there must be more ways you can show us how appropriate you were at every opportunity? Here, let me get that for you. Phil Are Go Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade! Assemble! Pksshoww!

Click it to big it. You know you want to.

Good work, team! It looks just like it jumped right off the news stand and onto a filmy, smeary glass coffee table. You earned a break, PAGBGPB, go take several Silkwood showers and report to the Phil Are GO! PTSD Recovery Office.

Clicking it will only make it bigger, you know.

RCA - Inspired and uninspired.

This two-part ad ran on consecutive pages of LIFE magazine in 1970. It's a good thing the identical layouts make it clear they're from the same company, because the designs couldn't be more different.

On page 72 there was the ad for RCA stereo components. Square boxes, just like every component system you'd see in every rec room for 20 years to come. Were they designed to be invisible? I hope so, because if they were, mission accomplished. The specs seem impressive, because in my experience, stereos that looked like this always sounded muddy, with five watts of power. You know. You'd pull off the foam screen from the speaker and find that, although the thing was 15 inches tall, it had one single 4" speaker cone in it? I think memories like this are a symptom of the grey market imitating the look of name brands like RCA, and we mustn't let the imitator color our impression of the real thing. Anyway... turn to page 74, and there was this:

Super cool spacey 1970s futureclockradios. I would buy the hell out of the one in the middle, closely followed by the one on the right. How could RCA design fun stuff like this at the same time they were producing ho-hum rectangles like the one above? Maybe RCA demanded people take their audio gear more seriously? I don't know. Does serious have to mean "dull and forgettable"? There were some cool looking audio systems designed in The Seventies. See?

 

I wonder what made RCA keep the designer on such a short leash with the audio components? The world may never know, no matter how many times you lick that lolly. I must confess to being curious how 100 watts of 1970 match-blowing music sounds, though.

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Gray Audograph - Turn up, the ray-dee-oh.

Obsolete technology news now, from 1949. Audograph wants to save your secretary's time for other secretary duties, like filing or making coffee, probably!

The Audograph was basically a vinyl record recorder for the office, replacing personal dictation sessions between the executive (A man, obviously) and the secretary (A dame, natch!). The ad copy reads quite innocently, assuming that every executive assistant was, of course, a woman. This was very likely the case in the vast majority of offices in 1949.

By gaining all the time your secretary now devotes to "taking dictation"... instead of spending a third of her time at your desk, notebook in hand, she would save hours in which to give you constructive, far more valuable assistance... junior executive assistance... if you would only make it possible.

One of the things the female secretary could be relied upon to do would be to transcribe a rambling mess like that into a properly structured sentence. Correction and reinterpretation is something she'll still have to do when taking dictation from the stupid record instead of the boss himself. Her job is safe, even with the Audograph. She'll spend the same amount of time taking dictation from the record instead of Mr. Mooney, there. This situation makes it clear that her time is not valuable. The bosses time is. The illustration doesn't even give her a face. She's just a silhouette with a gray gradient in place of an identity. Well done, 1949. There's a reason you're the past.

Interestingly, the Audograph recorded sound from the center outwards to the edge of the disc. This is unlike conventional records and exactly like Compact Discs. My guess is the purpose of this was to allow the manufacture of different sized discs without mechanical complication of the machine. See, no matter what size the disc is, if you start in the center, the needle begins in the same place. It just stops when it reaches the edge of the disc. If it recorded starting from the outside, the machine would have to either A) detect the diameter of the disc and choose the start position for the needle or B) have the user place the needle manually at the start of the recording. Doing it from the center outwards is clever.

CDs record from the center because, while the Compact Disc format was being devised and negotiated between a consortium of companies and manufacturers, the diameter of the discs was up in the air for a while. The engineers chose to design the standard to record from the center so that the disc diameter guys could fight it out as long as they wanted without forcing the mechanism to be redesigned. Clever.

Sign me up for some cleverness like that, please.

In the picture, Mister Mooney seems to be recording the sound of himself holding up two fingers. It looks like he still needs his (younger and hipper) secretary to explain how the thing works. Or better yet, just operate it for him.

And now, please enjoy these fine lads from 1984 who called themselves Autograph and probably shared similarly forward-thinking opinions on the role of women in society as the Gray Audograph company. Turn up the ray-dee-oh. I need the myoo-zik. Gimme some moe. Right you are, Autograph. Some Moe, coming right up.

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Zenith Pop-Up Portables - Pop-up ray-dee-oh.

Today, we have some eye candy courtesy of Zenith and their Pop-Up line of portable radios from 1949.

These are pretty slick radios. People like gizmoey things like this. Plus, having just the one button to open the radio up and turn it on was not a bad idea. One thing I do not miss, however, is analog tuners.

You know... a tuner with a knob and a needle that has only a vague relationship to the numbers silkscreened on the dial? You may remember endlessly adjusting the tuner's knob, trying to feel around for a decent signal on your radios back in the 70s. Until the day, that is, when the nylon string inside the radio comes off the spool somehow and the tuner then becomes unusable, with the radio forever stuck on a local station playing ranchero music. That's funny. I don't remember ever tuning in a ranchero station, but every time one of my radios broke, there was Radio Domingo 475.3 FM, ready to entertain. Ug. Good-bye analog tuners.

The downside of digital tuners is that almost every affordable radio with a digital tuner is now equipped with a one-inch LCD display made in the same Nanjing factory as the one in your magnetic kitchen timer. LCDs are pretty bulletproof, but man, it's hard to hide their ugliness or work them elegantly into a highly designed case, like the ones in this Zenith ad.

Holy crap. $59.70! That seems pretty steep for 1949. What's the equivalent in current Future-Bucks? Holy jeez! $567.36! The cheaper model at the bottom would just be $379.67. Man, you'd better like your Glenn Miller. Zenith must have been using every bit of available technology to make these radios work. Imagine cool-looking portable radio made of carbon fiber with bluetooth, every kind of USB port, an incredible speaker, and a lithium-polymer battery. Something like Bang & Olufsen would make. That would be your modern equivalent. Man, you'd better like your Michael Buble'.

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Sony U-Matic - A little relative.

Behold, readers, the machine that, perhaps more than any other enjoyed the highest heights of consumer wantingess, before suffering the lowest humiliation of total obsolescence. The VCR. You may need to install your largest eyes just to see the entire "little machine" all at once. The U-Matic was the size of four standard-sized babies (two, if they're from Mississippi).

In 1972, Sony's U-Matic was still a relative newcomer to the commercial VCR market. Few people who weren't a TV studio could justify the expense, so consumer adoption was slow. So, Sony courted the institutional / industrial market, by suggesting that their "little" machine could help cure cancer and basically save the world (see complete ad copy below). This is the same company that demanded $700 for the Playstation 3 and generally lost out on the current round of console wars when the price of their game machine dropped just slightly slower than the public's desire to own it. Sony BMG was the record company behind the Rootkit debacle a few years ago. Remember that? When overactive copy protection software on pre-recorded audio CDs infected the computers of millions of people? That's our Sony. Always humble. Never a misstep.

Sony's argument for the cancer curing potential of the U-Matic is that a doctor with a new treatment can doesn't need to wait to prepare a paper and present it at some stupid medical convention. That's the peer review process, and it's dumb! No, the doctor (assuming he's a super genius and that he's made not a single mistake in his theory and the scientific process is an annoying burden to him anyway), can just make a video tape demonstration and mail it directly to other doctors with possibly less experience than him who may be unable to spot flaws in his new treatment. In a perfect world, instant communication would allow absolutely anybody to spew their ideas and opinions throughout the world, possibly via some kind of web that is world wide. Only then would the very best ideas and knowledge be heard.

Aaaanyway, eventually the VCR became cheaper and as it found it's way into American homes, the film industry threw a fit. The new technology was horrifying to the entertainment industry, and they hoped to sue the VCR out of existence. This is because at the time, there was no room in the MPAA's philosophy for the idea of recording programs or movies. They couldn't imagine a world in which giving control to the consumer could possibly be good for business. Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA in 1982, testified that the VCR would destroy Hollywood and kill creativity, the seas would boil and the moon shall be as blood.

As it turned out, rentals and sales of videotapes became a gold mine for the entertainment industry. So, Valenti was either a liar or stupid. Previous to the VCR issue, the RIAA freaked out when people were recording albums onto cassette tapes at home. They said it would destroy the industry. It didn't. The RIAA came back in The Eighties to rage about home recording on digital media. The government told them to shut up. Now, the MPAA is throwing another tantrum about online file sharing. It will be interesting to see how history views the present disagreement. Odds are that the entertainment industry won't be destroyed by online piracy, and a new market will be born with someone other than the studios cashing the checks... again.

In my opinion, if a movie is good enough, people will want to see it in a theater, and own a real commercial copy on disc. If a movie or album is not great but just interesting, I'll record it from TV onto a DVD and call it a day. Most people have enough disposable income to buy or rent a movie they think is worth it, as long as it's good enough. Hollywood should concentrate on not making so much shitty content and make it worth our time and money to do things their way. A compressed MP3 file isn't worth money, to me. I buy the disc and then rip and re-rip it in whatever format I want, or at higher and higher bitrates as file storage becomes ever cheaper. This is my gold standard of music collecting. My CDs are my Fort Knox of music. I find it odd that the RIAA is losing their hair over people trading music online, while still bemoaning declining CD sales, which is a format that basically has no copy protection at all.

By the way, the very best way to rip bit-perfect duplicates of your CDs is by using Exact Audio Copy, available here. Rip to WAVs and then burn with the software of your choice. Enjoy. That way, you can have one copy for your three year old to scratch all to hell, and the "master" can be safe and sound in your musical panic room.

When the anti-VCR thing was happening, the movie studios could have immediately responded by embracing rentals or aftermarket videocassette sales, but it's always easier to just try and sue all your problems away. It would be refreshing, just once, to see the a group like the RIAA or MPAA find a way to work with the new technology as soon as it develops. There's always money to be made if someone with a little vision thinks of it.

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Altec Lansing - Fidelity so good, you won't notice your bones.

Believe it or not, there was a time when spending more money on your audio system bought you better fidelity, not just more massive bass at the expense of all other concerns. This 1957 ad from Altec Lansing shows us a woman so enraptured with the music she's hearing that she doesn't mind the ridiculous pose that the art director has asked her to contort herself into.

My smartyphone has a "feature" that I can't hide or disable completely. It's "Beats Audio" by a famous hip-hopper who wants us to call him "Dr. Dre". "Beats" is basically some shielding for the audio components in the phone, coupled with a one-button equalizer that cranks up the bass,  tailored for certain kinds of music. If your phone was designed right in the first place, you shouldn't be hearing any buzzing or hum in the phone jack anyway. So, it's pretty much a non-adjustible EQ for people who don't know what an equalizer is, don't know how to use one, and don't want to know. Heroically, Mr. Dre has decided what equalization setting all people should like, patented it, and marketed it. If you like jazz or classical or anything other than hip hop, fuck you.

Sure, you can turn off the Beats feature, but any time you start playing any audio, the grayed-out Beats icon appears in the notification bar, letting you know that your beats feature is disabled, just in case you come to your senses and want to turn it back on. Thanks, "doctor".

The demand for such a feature stems from the fact that an entire generation of kids have grown up listening to super-compressed music played on horrible computer speakers or in clapped-out Hondas with subwoofers that rattle the trunk lid. Fidelity is a closed book. Preferably, fidelity is also a burned and buried book. You can no longer go into a store and listen to a pair of headphones before you buy them. When I asked one sales drone if I could try out a particular pair, he looked at me like I asked him for a moist hug. I went to a store that grudgingly let me open the box and gingerly place the ear cups on my head, with tissues protecting the earpads, predicated on the fact that I would buy them if I liked the way they sounded. I really enjoy being made to feel like a jerk for wanting to sample the basic functionality of a product before committing to buying it. I guess there are also some people who buy a car after just looking at it, but I tend to drive one before I decide to take it home... especially in a marketplace crowded with so many wretched cars and garbage headphones.

This Altec Lansing ad comes from a time when words like "clarity" and "transparency" could draw customers to your brand. Good times. Apparently also at this time, or at least in the fantasy world of advertising, if your stereo was good enough, it could make a hot woman in a black cocktail dress do that with her spine. What the hell is wrong with her skeleton?

I know she's supposed to look rhapsodic, but it looks painful. Look at her feet, her spine, and her right arm. These otherwise crippling injuries have been totally mitigated by quality audio.  She's positively noodley with pleasure. Man, that must be some sound system. It better be, for $1600, which is about $12000 in modern money. Holy hell.

Note to self: have an intern trademark "noodley with pleasure". I may start my own brand of cigarette... or equalization. Unlike beats, my equalization technology will have settings for many types of music, not just one. Turn it to "hip hop", and the unit switches off. I figure that market segment is already being well-serviced.

Sony tape recorder - Heyyyyy. My summer girrrl.

Some "we are spoiled babies" news now, from 1968, home of this Sony ad. Buy a Sony tape recorder, to have loads of music with you at all times!

This marvel of technology only cost $69.50 in 1968 - a bargain price for a constant soundtrack to your life, right? In today's Future Bucks, that's $430. "Budget price" it says. Well, at least it's only the size of a small suitcase. Then there's all the cassettes you'll want to carry around. Oh, and the batteries it will devour, because rechargeable battery technology was sucky in '68 and generally didn't exist in the consumer market, apart from car batteries. Yikes. You'd better enjoy Van Morrison's Astral Weeks at a gradually decreasing speed and volume. I kind of suspect that's how he intended for it to be heard.

And only a few weeks ago I was annoyed that my new smarty phone only had 16Gb of onboard storage, plus the 32Gb micro SD I stuck into it. That's just 48 gigs of storage. My complete music collection is 80 gigs minimum. Boo hoo. I want to punch myself for being disappointed.

Hey, I think there's  a
tape recorder over there!

The fiction presented by the ad copy suggests that a girl would want this tape recorder so that guys will be attracted to her company. I don't think anybody working on this ad campaign were men, or ever met a man, or heard of men, or had one described for them... or were from Earth. The guys in the photo are ogling her from behind, where they can't see the tape recorder. The Sony product is not part of the equation in this picture. Way to misunderstand a simple eternal truth of human existence, Sony.

Anyway, this photograph was taken in 1968, when I was far too young to appreciate the model. I'm glad she waited for me to see her picture 44 years later. She's nice like that.

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Magnavox True High-Fidelity - Life in the rainbow.

Back in Yore, what we call a "stereo" was called a "Hi-Fi". That's because equipment capable of accurate tonal reproduction was kind of a new idea, having been introduced to the audio market in the Fifties, to distinguish snooty products that try to sound good from cheapo products that satisfy themselves with just trying to make sound.

Do we even call our audio setup a "stereo" anymore? It seems we're overdue to replace the term with something else, since stereo audio isn't exactly front page news any more. What's the new term? "Music thing"? "Audio system"? That sounds a bit douchey. Consider the P.A.G. staff on watch to identify the new word for whatever people use to listen to music... whenever they're not listening to it on crappy ear buds or crappier computer speakers.

Anyway, Magnavox promises you will live in a "rainbow of music". Where do the people in the picture live? Judging by the weather and vegetation, it kid of looks like one of the pinkish-violet regions of Planet Purple.

I hope the rapturous couple is either heading out or just came back from a gala dinner. They didn't get all dressed up just to listen to their Magnavox Brittany while staring out at the blue fog, did they? Who knows? I guess that's life inside the rainbow. Are jobs easy to find there? It looks like the real estate market is doing pretty well in the rainbow, so whatever Mr. Overposed does for a living, it must be paying pretty well.

The car's running. Are you guys coming or what?

So how do you photograph a fantasy in the days before Photoshop's blur filters? Lots of Vaseline on the lens. But you can't just smear it everywhere. You have to smush it around artistically, so you don't obscure the talent or product. The P.A.G. Image Analysis Squadron has detected the areas of the picture effected by the magical Vaseline smudge, which we now present to you for your interest:

So how much did Mr. and Mrs. Overposed pay for their Magnavox? $650 in 1957 dollars is the modern equivalent of $4975.70! Holy jeez! There isn't enough Vaseline in the world to make that look good.

Big one is in here.

G.E. Musaphonic - Trying to out-Panduit the Zenith.

A few pages away from Monday's Zenith table radio ad, we find this G.E. radio ad of identical size and placement on the page. Coincidence??? Possibly! Is it also pretty??? Definitely!

Whereas the Zenith radio had the non-catchy name of "Model H511", the G.E. wins the silly name category with the hilarious moniker "Musaphonic"! Zenith's alphabet soup system of nomenclature implies thorough engineering, as if the model were named for the serial number in the corner of the blueprint. "Musaphonic" sounds like it was voted on by a committee of jackoffs gathered around a long mahogany table. It implies nothing but marketing based on the assumption that the consumer (you) is an ignorant troglodyte easily dazzled by long words that have no meaning but earn big bonuses for the jagoffs that come up with them. Such is the long, rich heritage of the advertising industry.

Does the G.E. sound good? Well you wouldn't ask if you had bothered to study the wigglyness of the plexiglass cutout, you idiot. See? It's wiggly fidelity that your eyes can hear.

The ignorant troglodytes of 1954 would have been horrified by the use of the term "frequency spectrum", so they made an attempt to translate the concept of "clarity" and "detail" into something visual. Why not make a graph? Because most people don't like looking at graphs. A hundred years ago (1990-something) I can recall comparing frequency spectrum  graphs on the wrappers of competing audio cassettes, trying to figure which one to buy. That was hopeless. Instead, I just chose the tape that was the darkest. Rust colored tape meant "good enough for recording songs off the radio" and the shiniest black hi-bias tape meant "record from a CD with the shortest RCA cord possble because I'm an audiophile."

This G.E. radio reminds me of the new-ish Panduit building on I-80 near Tinley Park, which it turns out, is the world headquarters for the manufacturer of industrial geekdom. Here it is in Google maps, which seems to have cruised past early in the morning on a day when the place was still a skeleton.

Here's the finished structure. I'm not sure why this picture was flipped horizontally. The vertical section in the middle should be towards the left side of the building. Pretty nice, huh? I don't know how a design so clean and modern got through a committee. First time I drove past it, I said "jeez, that's a nice looking building. I bet it sounds really good."

Zenith Table Radio - Look at the sounds.

"Oh boo hoo. Waah waah. Everything was better then. Everything is terrible now". Well, as with basically everything, it's a non-simple mix of "yes" and "no". This ad for a gorgeous Zenith table radio makes you want to go all "waah waah".

It sure is pretty. Look how deco and geometric it is. Much of the consumer products landscape here in the future has been designed to look all swoopy and blobby, as if one left one's consumer product out on the driveway on that one day in July when the sun chose to go triple nova. Your poor radio/vacuum/microwave, all bendy with the blown-off quanta.

This Zenith cost thirty bucks in 1954. That sounds a little steep. The old inflation calculator says that's... OOF! $240! For that, you got a radio that looks great, stores no presets, connects to probably nothing via an "aux in" jack, and has an analog tuner of the "nylon string wrapped around a pulley" type that dissolves into sibilant noise as soon as you take your hand off the knob. Two weeks after buying the radio, the volume pot would get that corrosion on the copper contacts that makes adjusting the volume sound like "KSSHT! kh-kh-kh KUUH! KKKSSHHHHT!" Aah, the golden age of wireless.

For my money, the digital tuner is the single greatest development that radio has enjoyed since it's invention. Second greatest: digital volume control.

Let's say you walked into your local Best Buy's Noyze Zone and plunked down your $240 and said "give me your best". First off, the best thing you can do after walking into Best Buy's audio department is to walk right back out before the Corporately Mandated Hipness Demonstration Subwoofers loosen your bowel.  But, maybe your car broke down and you're stuck there.

Well, it won't be easy to spend $240 on a table radio. The first thing that your Eminem-looking associate will show you is probbaly something like this Sony XPLOD plastic aorta  for $129. It's been overdesigned with the exact same degree of effort as the Zenith in the old ad, but with rather a different sensibility. The chosen name of the XPLOD brand tells you everything you need to know about their idea of audio fidelity, regardless of your chosen price point. For $240, you can get two XPLODs and make them into a pair of headphones with some of those really long zip ties.




If you simply must spend $240 on a table radio, you'd do better to get this Boston Acoustics iObject dock in Stormtrooper White from Amazon for $249. Radio with more presets than there are decent stations in any one language. Solid build quality. Various in and out connectors. No CD mechanism. Sound quality that will make you take a few days off just to finish being impressed with it. The menu system is cryptic and frustrating, though, until you get it figured out. It could use Bluetooth audio streaming. Also, pity it looks like you paid $100. The Boston radio isn't especially clever or pretty (apart from the auto-dimming backlight on the display), but the ghetto dynamic of XPLOD's mouth-breathing troglodytic product developers makes the Boston look positively inspired. Too bad all the really good industrial designers work for Swedish companies whose point of entry is, shall we say, "prohibitive".

So, like it or not, you do get a lot for your money, thanks to science. If only the ghost of Zenith past would have come and worked some magic on the Boston Acoustics design department.

[I know this looks like a review or a promotion for Boaston Acoustics, but it's not. It's just a decent radio that costs about the same as the old Zenith.  -Mgmt.]