That branch of consumption has helped lead to the home theater. Suddenly, the concert hall in your living room – or the audio imaging in your head – was gone, replaced by surrealist pictures overwhelming the television’s tiny speaker. Penchansky traces the decline of the stereo system to the early ’80s rise of the music video, which brought visuals to the fore. However, we also started focusing more on visuals. Some was for the sake of convenience: Cassettes had more hiss and less range than LPs, but were more portable – especially when listening on your handy Walkman or boombox. There were whole mass-market stores devoted to audio gear – Sound Trek, Hi-Fi Buys, Silo – and no issue of Rolling Stone was complete without several ads for turntables, cassette decks and equalizers.īut technology marched on, and so did change. At the same time, grown-up baby boomers, now working adults, invested in better audio equipment, all the better to listen to Steely Dan’s “Aja.” Rock and pop music production techniques improved. In the ’70s and ‘80s, the twain did meet, for a time. “As rock ‘n’ roll starts to become more of a thing, a lot of that stuff is produced so it’s meant to be heard on AM radios.”Ī Phil Spector Wall of Sound production – in glorious mono! – would probably have driven a hi-fi enthusiast up a wall, says Milner. “The seeds of the decline of what it meant to own a stereo were planted way back then, because the original audiophiles were people who were baby boomers’ fathers and mothers,” he says. The kids, on the other hand, listened to cruder rock ‘n’ roll. On a good system, you could hear every pluck of a violin pizzicato, every inflection of a jazz singer’s vocal, recreated in your living room. Audiophiles listened to classical and jazz, music from clubs and concert halls. Indeed, music styles had a lot to do with music consumption, he points out. However, he observes that the history of audio technology has often been one of convenience.Įven in the ’50s and ‘60s, when stereo sound first became widespread, the audiophiles had their hi-fis – and the younger generation listened to tinny AM radios and cheap phonographs. “There was this thing that, looking back on it, took up a ridiculous amount of psychic energy.” “I remember agonizing, what do I do? I can’t take my stereo,” he recalls. Whole stores were once devoted to stereo components. Milner, for example, grew up in Hawaii, and when he went away to school in Minnesota, he had to figure out what he was going to do with his system. It was an effort just to break down and set up the stuff, never mind moving it. There were all those wires, plugs and jacks – Line In, Line Out, Aux, Phono, CD, keeping track of the positive and negative strands of speaker wire. Greg Milner, the author of the audio recording history “Perfecting Sound Forever,” remembers the process. Still, for a long time – and for a certain, often youthful, audience – the stereo system was a point of pride. When was the last time you bought a roll of film for your camera? Of course, new technology changes things all the time. At its best, he says, audio reproduction has “a religious aspect.” He wishes more people knew what they were missing. “You have this high-end market that’s getting smaller all the time, and then you’ve got the convenience market, which has taken over – the MP3s, the Bluetooth devices, playing on laptops.” “What’s happened in the marketplace, the midmarket for audio has completely been obliterated,” he says. Indeed, the days of the old-fashioned component stereo system are pretty much over, says Alan Penchansky, an audiophile and former columnist for the music trade publication Billboard. “Get the job done”? That sounds like the white flag for an era that used to be measured in woofers and tweeters, watts per channel and the size of your record collection. That’s pretty much what everyone had,” says Rubio, who attended Emory University in Atlanta and now works for a local marketing and communications firm. To the 23-year-old, new dorm rooms and new apartments have meant computers, iTunes, Pandora and miniature speakers. But only when the music was playing on those handpicked CDs, mix tapes or (geezer alert!) vinyl records did you move in the rest of your stuff. The wires could get tangled, and sometimes you had to make shelving out of a stack of milk crates. And the first thing you set up in your new place was the stereo system: receiver, turntable or CD player, tape deck and speakers. You moved into your dorm room or new apartment.
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