Stereotypes

The RCA trademark:
"Nipper" hearing "his master's voice"

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What with all the options we have these days for hearing music pretty much everywhere and any time we want, it's easy to lose track of how very unusual this is.  When I was growing up, a portable music system was a small transistor radio with a tiny speaker that played the local AM radio stations.  If you wanted to listen in stereo, you had to put an LP record on your home stereo system—assuming you had one.  We lived in a comfortably middle class household, yet we didn't own a stereo system until I was in 8th grade in the early 1960s.  The sound it produced is laughably primitive by today's standards, but back then it was something of a revelation to hear an actual symphony orchestra played back in multi-channel sound.

All this electronic nostalgia was brought on by a YouTube video (there's another entire set of memories.....) of a pair of promotional films produced by RCA Victor back in 1958.

The first one, about the revolutionary "living stereo" records and sound systems, explains the then-innovative concept of stereo recording and playback.  The second, though, is even more interesting.  It's a promo for a sound reproduction technology that didn't initially take off the way RCA hoped it would: the cassette tape.  These weren't the small cassettes that would come to dominate the market in the 1970s but rather a bulky unit about the size of a hardback book.  It ran and 3 and 3/4 ips (inches per second); half the speed of the conventional open reel tapes but twice the speed of the cassettes that would finally achieve commercial success and finally make portable audio a reality.

When I see someone nostalgically opine that music sounded better on LPs, I think back to what a pain it was to get decent sound out of that format in those days.  You needed a good pressing on high quality vinyl (surface noise was a killer), a high-end cartridge with a good needle (which needed to be cleaned regularly, as did the LP) and, of course, something to discharge the static that built up on LPs and attracted dust.  Entire support industries sprang up to deal with the shortcomings of LPs.  And even then the sound being enjoyed by the happy families in these films would be noticeably inferior to what you can get today from a moderately priced soundbar and your iPhone.

Being a classical music lover, of course, I was always more sensitive to sound quality, but even so I find it hard to wax nostalgic over the Good Old Days of stereo.  Some things really are better today.