It’s amazing to me how much the technology of music listening has changed just in my lifetime. From vacuum tubes all the way to Spotify, music has been a part of our travels. However, it wasn’t until I started looking at the history of the car radio that I noticed how much the auto industry has invested in the development of many of the listening options we have today. For example, I had mistakenly assumed that after AM/FM stereo radio, the next audio add-on to the luxury car ride experience was the tape deck. Nope. There was an effort back in the 50s to bring a record player into the car! CBS Laboratories had created a special turntable and record format that was called the “Highway HI-Fi.” Due to its price tag and the fact that it could only play the specially dedicated LPs, the effort didn’t last long and the industry stepped away. It wasn’t until the mid-60s that they started to throw their hats back into the ring with the various tape cassette decks. Since then we’ve seen the CD and DVD players, satellite radio, iPods, and built-in Bluetooth connectivity for our smart devices. Clearly, we like our road trip music for it completes the experience. I wonder what the next big thing will be… plain old singing?

Here is a visual collection of some of the things that were mentioned in this episode or what I call “The Ancient Ways.”

An example of the classic Volkswagon Woodie that Dan and his “hippie” buddies drove to Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. The Woodie was emblematic of the 60’s surfer and hippie culture of the West Coast
From Tubes to Transistors:
The transistor radio (at the right) was a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry instead of the old-fashioned (to the left) vacuum tubes as the amplifier elements. The device was much smaller, lighter, sturdier, and required far less power to operate than the “radio console” of the ’40s and ’50s. It was an ideal option for the automobile and hand-held options. In the mid-50s, the FM option was added making the AM/FM car radio the dominant sound system.
This is what Dan and his buddies were listening to in the Woodie: An 8-track tape player. The 8-track itself is a magnetic-tape sound recording technology that was popular from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, first introduced as a factory install in select Ford model cars (Mustang, Thunderbird and Lincoln models)

Cassette tapes and players: Originally designed for dictation, the cassette tape supplanted the 8-track tape and the reel-to-reel in popularity. Its size and portability of its players and recorders made it a versatile home studio option. Before the rise of MP3 players, Sony was the king of the hill with its Walkman series. The simple model (to the right) was designed for playing prerecorded music cassettes. If you could pay more, you could spring for the Walkman Pro (bottom left) which had a counter, leveling controls, and Dolby Noise Reduction for making high-quality recordings.

If you’d like to find out more about the history, here are some links: