Panasonic RE8080 - Mechless car audio, 1972 style.

I hate my car's head unit (radio). There's a USB plug in the armrest, so you can listen to MP3s stored on a flash drive. Fantastic. However, the radio's software randomly chooses to be unable to read the flash drive. Repeated attempts are generally fruitless until I power cycle the radio (turn the power off and on) by turning the whole car on and off. Then, chances are better it will read the MP3s. Having these arguments with my car's stereo is not handy while driving. How spoiled am I? Look what was new and exciting back in 1972.

We've reported on Panasonic's clunky, modular audio systems before. But this ad's in color! Presumably with the intent of saving you the expense of buying a tape transport mechanism for your car AND house, Panasonic hit upon the complicated idea of pulling your 8-track player out of your home stereo and shoving it into your car's dash. The amazing convenience being that you can continue listening to the tape from where you left off.

As with the other Panasonic stereo linked above in our older post, there was a separate adapter to carry around in case you wanted to listen to a cassette. Then there were the many cassettes to lug around. Good times.

In the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, car stereos were big ticket items, likely to be stolen if you left your car without an armed guard for a few minutes. Those days are kind of gone now. For one thing, factory radios have gotten better. Most people don't really have a great need to replace their car's original stereo. Good thing, too, because stereos are routinely combined with heating and ventilation controls, and buried behind stylized dashboard panels. Replacing a radio is not as simple as it once was. All of this makes radio theft not only harder, but also less worthwhile.

This will look great in my spaceship.

Even if you do choose to replace your car's head unit, you're likely to wind up with an overstyled thing that matches the rest of your car's interior about as well as a tennis shoe stuffed into the dash. Electronics manufacturers seem bent on capturing the snapperhead "fast & furious" segment of the market, to the exclusion of all those who want something that blends in with the rest of the instrumentation. There doesn't seem to be any company losing sleep over the problem of "stealthy" aftermarket car stereos. If they were really thinking, manufacturers would offer each model in your choice of face color and backlight color. Some stereos do allow you to adjust the backlighting color in infinite variety. However, there aren't many silver stereos, and that's a very common color found in cars. I don't know anybody with a shiny black dash board.

If I do replace my stereo, it'll probably be one of the "mechless" designs. These are basically a radio with no moving parts inside. It's an amplifier and tuner, into which you plug your various portable devices for content. This Panasonic stereo from 1972 is sort of mechless... when you pull the mechanism out to take it in the house to finish listening to The Captain & Tenille.

So, even with my intermittent USB problem, my car's iPod connector works just fine. I rarely use it, partly because my commute is often filled with podcasts played from a non-Apple device, but also because I don't like the hassle of fumbling around with the iPod cable in my arm rest. And yet, the fun of connecting and reconnecting stereo components is exactly what Panasonic is showcasing in this ad. I have something a million times better than this Panasonic stereo but I can't be bothered to plug in a cable. What a jerk.

My old car had an aftermarket stereo with Bluetooth streaming, so I could listen to music or podcasts magically sent through thin air from my phone to the car's head unit. I miss that. In a few years I'll probably look back on Bluetooth streaming as barbaric, because of the drudgery of pairing the phone with the stereo. "Ow, my pairing finger is all worn out!" I'll moan. What a baby. I already hate my spoiled, lazy future self.

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Panasonic Car Audio - The fun of building it, every time you listen!

Every time I get in my car for more than ten minutes or so, I plug in the iPod. There's a cable that goes in the back of my car's radio, and that goes into the bottom of the iPod. I used to use one of those radio transmitters to listen to the iPod, which looked slicker, but sounded like a musical respiratory infection. So, yeah, there's a certain amount of assembly to be done, with my little wire and stuff. Stereo Bluetooth exists, but my iPod doesn't play that game. Maybe my next one will.
I like obsolete hardware, so I'm generally hip to the jive when it comes to clunky old junk that never worked very well. But I had no idea car stereos were ever this clunky until I saw this ad.

Apparently, in 1968, the coolest guy in your town was already onto 8-tracks. Yeah, those things were ridiculous, because you could never be sure what song you'd get when you switched from one of the four parallel "tracks" to the next, and you couldn't rewind, only fast forward. The only clever thing about them was that the tape was an infinite loop. By some pretty serious Escher-warping of spacetime, the thing pulled tape off the inside of the spool for listening, while rolling it back onto the outside of the spool after you'd heard it. Some of the tapes had clear shells, so watching the thing work was pretty impressive.

I knew all that stuff before this morning. But just for one extra point of how-spoiled-are-we power, get this: you had to swap out one of two radio tuners to listen to the radio! Each was the size of an 8-track tape, and there was one for FM and one for AM.

Yes, this was 1968, and most people reading this probably weren't even born yet. Tape was just taking off, so the idea of choosing what you want to listen to in the car was a crazy and freaky idea. Yeah yeah, it was new technology, whatever... you had to put the radio receiver in your dash when you want to listen to the radio!!! Today, an AM-FM radio receiver could fit on a chip small enough to fall into your eyeball without too much discomfort. In '68, cramming a radio into a box smaller than a sandwich was crazy talk. So, if you were the coolest guy in town, you not only had a glove box full of sandwich-albums. You also had two metal sandwiches that were your AM and FM tuners, in case you needed to hear the traffic report. Also, you probably paid half the value of the car itself for the privilege of being an early adopter. Coolness ain't cheap.

Oh wait, where is my head? This was 1968. Cars were a hundred yards long and had glove boxes that could hold a medium sized dog. This tehcnology was perfectly acceptible. Never mind.