Evolution of Audio Devices in My Short Life

 

    I'm a child of the 80s.  But growing up in The Village, before the internet, it might have still been the 70s there when I was born.  Trucks, the few there were out there, had 8 tracks, the newer ones, the two of them, had radios with cassette players.  Portable radios were the size of five gallons buckets, and took at least a half dozen C batteries.  Today, as I write this, I'm listening to Pandora streamed from the internet to my smart phone, "piped" into my wireless Bluetooth headphones, on which I can also take phone calls, and village kids share their adventures on Tiktok.  At least I hope they're doing that, and not wasting time doing the Tiktok dances when they could be having adventures.  Who am I to talk though?  I spend too much time on The 'Gram and 'Book myself. 

 

You young'uns in the class may not remember camcorders and those big boomboxes.  But cameras used to be that big, and stereos had carrying handles so you could lug them around like a suitcase, and AC plugs for when you kilt the batteries near an outlet.  Not the USB/Micro USB thing either, but a circular hole with a pin inside.  

Boombox of the '80s

 

Though the Walkman came out in 1980 (Brownfield, Slon, 2020) it was still the main mode of personal music enjoyment when I started paying attention in the early '90s.  We thought were were high speed/low drag when the Discman finally made it to the village.  Course, there wasn't a pants or jacket pocket that would accommodate them.  According to Brownfield and Slon, the Discman came out in 1984, but it took at least a decade for them to become prevalent in Rural Alaska. 

  

 

 

 

 

Though the MP3 player may have been released in 1997 (Brownfield, Slon, 2020) I didn't see them among my contemporaries until later in my high school years...I graduated in 2005.  By that time I was just finally getting comfortable with a CD player.  I was an old fogey, even in my teens.  I never did actually own an MP3 player, though in college I used my wife's (we were dating at the time) a couple times.  I remember it being a hassle because I had the music I wanted already on CDs, but on my jogs (I was a jogger then) and dog walks I had to listen to her music on her MP3 then iPod, then iPod Nano because my Discman was dying and I couldn't find a replacement...I also struggled with eBay, and Amazon was just for books at the time.  I'm still not sure where the music came from to be put on those devices.  I just know that now, in cell service and if I feel like burning Data, I can listen to Pandora through my phone.  I'm thinking of getting the iHeart radio app.  

 

 Today's ear buds below.  Bluetooth, sound cancelling, and for $200 bucks they're "mid range."  You can spend as much as $400, and they'll even charge wirelessly!

 

 

Check out this vintage truck above.  Dials and levers.  Even an a layman like myself could work on this machine, and the book would probably tell you how to adjust the valves.

The first automotive CD player came out in 1984 (Mobile One Auto Sound, 2021) and boomed (pun intended) throughout the automotive industry.  I didn't notice them until the 2000s.  The 1976 Toyota Landcruiser my dad had barged out there only had radio, an analog contraption that didn't operate with dials, it was all levers.  It was a manual transmission with hubs that locked by turning the dial on the hub itself.  It was a monster.  The first vehicle my wife and I bought in 2006, before we were married, was a 1997 Isuzu rodeo, stick shift, with a cassette player.  We kept a book of CDs in there to use with a dedicated CD player and cassette adapter, the cutting edge 10 years prior.  We did purchase Sirius Radio for driving through Canada, where it didn't work.  Today, Sirius still has deals with many manufacturers to wrap their service into the exorbitant cost of modern vehicles.  

In 2009 my wife and I purchased a 2006 Chevy Equinox, with a CD player.  The CD player has long since failed, and now sports a micro USB in the 12 volt power plug...they used to be cigarette lighters...remember when cars came with ash trays?  Now I want cigar.  Anyway, it's a micro USB attached to a little Bluetooth speaker, where I mostly listen to podcasts.  Since my 2009 truck doesn't have Bluetooth, just another failed CD player, I use a Bluetooth adapter that plugs into the auxiliary port powered by the cigarette lighter.  

Now there's a nearly unlimited...nah, it's limited by how much you wanna spend.  But there's many, many ways to listen to music or whatever you want on your commute, or road trip.

 

I reckon my next vehicle will have built in Bluetooth.  If I can avoid it it won't have Sirius, don't care.  Many of them can even stream if you care to pay for the Data.  

 

 

 

 

Sound, Mobile One Auto. “The Fascinating History of Car Audio.” Mobile One, Mobile One, 29 Sept. 2021, https://www.complex.com/music/a/meaghan-garvey/the-evolution-of-playing-music-in-your-car

Brownfield, Troy, and Steven Slon. “From Walkman to Your Phone: 40 Years of Portable Music.” The Saturday Evening Post, 28 July 2020, https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/06/from-walkman-to-your-phone-40-years-of-portable-music/