In 1978 I bought my first car, a bright red ’72 Dodge Colt GT with white racing stripes painted down either side. I was 18 and I chose the car because even with its puny engine, it could chirp the rear tires when hard-shifted into second gear. The very first accessory I bought for that car was a stereo. It was a Craig Powerplay in-dash player, with auto-reverse and AM/FM receiver - very state-of-the-art at the time – and 8 tracks sucked. The only trouble was that I could not afford, on my Dairy Queen wages, the amplifier or speakers needed to make the stereo really perform. I did, however, have a quality pair of headphones which I had received as a Christmas present, so I fitted a headphone jack into the dashboard of my Colt. Now I could cruise around and listen to my tunes in bliss. No road noise either!
It was an idea ahead of its time; the Sony Walkman was still two years away from its public debut. In ’78 you just didn’t see people in motion wearing headphones, and I got a lot of gaping looks as I drove around. My friends thought it was way-cool.
My point is that this was an age of “Dedicated Listening”. Combining music and an activity was a very new idea, and putting a hi-fi in a car is a good early example of a departure from dedicated listening. Pardon me for getting nostalgic, but the world of music was very different than it is today. Ripping the plastic off a new record album and reading the album cover was almost a religious experience, a feeling strangely absent when bringing home a new CD. I had audiophile friends who would save up and spend $800 just for a turntable; that would be a direct-drive model; belt drive models weren’t accurate enough. Anyone with a reel-to-reel was the envy of us all. One friend spent over $100 just for his speaker cables, which were as thick as my index finger. Oh, but the sound was good. We all would gather in somebody’s smoky basement, fight for that primo La-Z-Boy chair, which was carefully aligned to the speakers for the ideal listening position, then crank the volume and sit there with our eyes closed while the color and richness of the music penetrated to our very bones.
The only place you’d ever find headphones, they’d be attached to a serious hi-fi system, and the only activity you’d observe was the rolling of the next doobie.
Now headphones are everywhere. I recently read in the Globe and Mail that i-Pods and MP3 players have put stereo equipment production practically into extinction. According to the article, sales for individual audio components -- CD players, tuners, etc. - in 1999 exceeded 270,000 units. By the year 2003 that number was reduced to a mere 20,000 units. I guess it all started with Walkmans, but now with the ability to cram 10,000 songs into a something smaller than a pack of cards is just too compelling for most of us. We don’t seem to care that the audio quality isn’t as good (although it is surprisingly good), we are more concerned that we can take it with us. And the idea of “Dedicated Listening” is almost quaint. It seems that today’s listeners are all jogging, riding, skiing, riding the bus, cooking, reading (I’ve never been able to do that), or whatever, we seem to need to be in motion with our tunes.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of this, it’s just different than it was in the good old days. I have an MP3 player myself, and next week I’ll tell you all about it, with some tips for deciding which one to buy. And just in case you’re interested, I eventually blew that puny engine in my Dodge Colt, and I swapped in a mighty Chevy V8. My friends thought that was even cooler than the headphones.
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