Retro Ad of the Week
January 23rd, 2008 | 12:30 pm est |
Ah, the good ol’ days. Remember when portable music meant a 12-pound boom box and a carrying case of cassettes? Remember when Steve Stevens was a hot guitar-slinging icon who promoted guitar strings, axes, and amps (but, strangely, not hairspray)? Remember when Casio sampling keyboards were state of the art? Remember when Columbia House sold 8-tracks? No? Well, the friendly neighborhood editors at AMG have been scouring 40 years of music mag back issues to find proof, and while leafing through the Rolling Stone Cover-to-Cover DVD-ROM set, some seriously dated and totally absurd music ads have been discovered. Look for a classic blast from the past posted every Wednesday in this section, starting today with this gem.
This reminds me of something I saw in an issue of the Onion: “Panasonic Introduces Portable 500-Disc Changer To Compete Against iPod”
http://www.theonion.com/content/index/4249
those must be collectors items. Remember when record players were options in cars? looking forward to the Wednesday articles.
I had one of these “collector items” when I was ten-years old, and you better believe it made me the coolest kid in the Atlanta suburbs. I loved it too….until it was broken in a kickball accident.
I remember the sound quality being decent but you had to prop up the turntable with some sort of ‘kickstand’ device which was easily dislodged.
I like how the football player in the background has Lou Ferrigno arms because you can bet this thing wasn’t light…
And if you turned that around, the sun would warp your records. Boy, did that suck, running out, and paying a 1.20 for OOh Child, playing it 5 times, and having the needle start jumping on a sun-warped record. We should all sue RIAA for that nonsense.
I recall several funky record players - the aforementioned Chrysler Highway Hi-Fi (required special disks and still - duh! was prone to skipping over bumps). I had a Sharp phono that had two tonearms, one on top and one on the bottom, so you could listen to both sides of an LP without getting up to turn the record over. Optonica (Sharp’s upscale brand) and others tried a remote-controlled skip-to-next-track feature that looked for the shiny area between tracks, with inconsistent results.
I own a BIC T-4M cassette deck, from circa late 1970s/early 1980s just before CDs took over, when interest in cassettes was at its zenith. It was advertised as sounding as good as a reel-to-reel tape deck, which was the gold standard back then. To achieve this quality, it could record at double speed, which also assured your recordings couldn’t be played in any other cassette player. The machine looks absurd today, far too complex and elaborate for a lowly cassette player. There are still a few cassette decks on the market today, but none with 33 knobs, buttons, or switches on the front panel, for items such as “400Hz calibration” (separate adjustment for each stereo channel), bias trim adjustment, choice of 100hz or 400hz record calibration, or other arcana.
And let’s not forget the Sony Elcaset, perhaps the first of several failed proprietary formats Sony tried to foist on us over the years, again from the mid-’70s. Although it offered improved sound quality and extra features, it was completely incompatible with regular cassettes, and quickly flopped in the marketplace.