In the summer of 1965, everyone had AM transistor radios. You could listen to the tinny sound pumping through that tiny paper speaker or stick the mono ear plug into your ear for discreet listening. The Rolling Stones had just released Satisfaction and that driving fuzz guitar sound was on every pop station and pounding into America's youthful heads. The only thing on FM radio was classical music from USC. Mom and dad's console stereos were the state of the art. I bought a turntable with tiny speakers that I took to The Citadel in 1968 and I remember playing my "Dylan's greatest hits" album as loud as she would go. An upperclassman from Thailand bought a receiver "kit" and assembled it himself. I bought it from him when he graduated. My first component of a real stereo. It looked cool...blue lights...lots of power. I bought a funky little turntable with a ceramic cartridge and "book shelf" speakers. I was in business. I soon discovered the beautiful sound of a magnetic cartridge and procured a Garrard SL 95B turntable and, finally, floor speakers by Magnavox. Ahhhhh. Beautiful music.
Obviously, I was hooked and I am still buying newer and bigger and better stereo components. The search for the perfect sound always involved buying bigger speakers...until Bose, who made a fortune on their Bose 901 floor speakers, invented the "satellite speaker system". Whoa. Overnight America's thinking changed. Wives across the nation were bugging their husbands to get rid of those ugly monstrous speakers and buy the new ones that you could not see.
Men had been bringing home component stereos by Marantz and Sansui and Pioneer from Viet Nam for years. We later paid big money for magnificent works of art...JBL, Phase Linear, Klipsch, Acoustic Research, Paradigm, Bang & Olufsen, Altec Lansing, KEF...on and on. There was always that one guy's house where the ladies remarked that they just could not tell where the music was coming from because the speakers were hidden behind a book somewhere. So what. I did not like it. Somewhere, we had gone wrong. There was a conspiracy afoot. Sony released the Walkman, then the Discman and gave us earphones in stereo. Very impressive.
When the MP3 was invented, the real move to "smaller" began. Thousands of songs could fit on this tiny device. Bam! The downsizing was fast. All the kids had white earphones stuffed into their ears while they walked around the mall. I noticed that younger folks did not care about building a sound system. The sound that came from computer speakers...smaller than the old book shelf speakers...was fine with them. Most of the time, they were listening to earphones anyway. No one owned a cool, expensive set of headphones either. These little ones were fine.
So now, 47 years after sitting on the beach with a tiny AM transistor radio and an earphone, we have come full circle. America's youth sits on the beach with tiny Apple IPod Nanos hooked to their t- shirts and tiny white earphones in their ears.
I loved going into a stereo shop and hearing truly stupendous stereos. Those stores, for the most part, have gone the way of record stores. Another defunct experience. How about those Rolling Stones though? Keith has outlived Michael Jackson, Keith Moon, Hendrix, Morrison, Lennon and Kurt Cobain. But that is another discussion entirely.
