Mobile tunes

Man I really love modern technology! 


Let's talk about listening to music in cars for a moment, because as long as I've been alive, that's been a thing.  Radios have been in cars forever - since 1930.

As I was growing up, cars ALWAYS had crappy AM monophonic radios that would lose the signal whenever you went under an overpass.  The image below is the stock radio for a 1980 Ford Fairmont.  You would think that by 1980, even a base model car would have FM and a cassette tape player, but no. 

High-quality audio systems in vehicles were apparently not something adults were interested in purchasing back then.  Only us teenagers cared about actual stereo sound and decent quality audio, apparently.   It's interesting to see how much OEM car audio has improved over the course of a generation.

The next era of vehicles came with crappy AM/FM analog stereos as well, usually made by Delco or Motorola.  My peer group would quickly throw these in the trash where they belonged.  These OEM radios would immediately be replaced with a quality digital after-market AM/FM Cassette player made by one of the Japanese companies - Clarion, Pioneer, Kenwood, Alpine, Sony, etc.  This situation went on for about a decade, and ended when audio moved to the digital recording format.

Compact disks were the next big thing.  Gone was tape hiss, timing the fast-forward to catch the start of the next song, and most of the mechanical issues with transporting a magnetic tape across a read head.  Now all you had to worry about was scratching the disk, and driving across something so bumpy that the buffer couldn't mask all the read errors.

Today we have bluetooth-enabled players that can receive signals from your cellphone's music player, or off a streaming service, pick up satellite music, and some have USB ported players that can play your library of music from a thumb drive.  We are now completely independent of clunky mechanical systems to play music on the go!  Most car audio systems today contain a large complex display screen, which I find very distracting from the act of driving.  Nevertheless, mobile audio life is pretty darn good.

Now... as far as listening to music by yourself, without having to be inside a vehicle - that idea exploded onto the scene in 1979, when the Sony Walkman hit the market.  Personal players had been around, but they were bulky and heavy.  The Walkman ended that, with high-quality sound, light (for the era) weight, and at an attractive price.  Furthermore, the Walkman could be worn on a belt, providing excellent frequency response, and apparently without objectionable wow and flutter.

This of course was eventually superseded (briefly) by the various technologies of mini-disk, digital audio tape (DAT), full size CD, and most recently, by digital memory chips that are formatted in compressed MP3 format.  Once again, we are free of mechanical transport systems to play music, and so running or jogging isn't going to cause sloppy music reproduction.

Apple's iPod is the leading example of this modern technology.  It has a built-in lithium-ion battery, so now you don't even have to replace AAA cells, as was the case with earlier devices.

I'm not a fan of Apple, and also I detest the push-button interface, so instead I have a couple of touch screen activated players.

And once again, life is pretty darn good.  No complaints!