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In Reply to: RE: Stereos are not cool anymore posted by sudz1234@yahoo.com on October 09, 2014 at 14:24:10
The coolness of stereos from 1956 to 1986 was a one-shot deal--a "perfect storm" of developments in societal structures, social mores, cultural developments, and advances in material culture and technology.
Here's the recipe that cannot and will not be repeated:
Start with a World War that followed a Depression.
Get to the point where there is a huge population of young men who are not only ready to settle down, they have had technical training and in some way usually some exposure to cultures other than their home town or farm, who qualify for free education under the GI Bill, and who in many cases yearn to be "Blue-Collar Intellectuals."
The development of the Long-Playing phonograph record coincided with the high point of the popularity of symphony music and with the revolution in small-combo jazz that had been fueled by the stupid wartime "Cabaret Tax," that priced big bands out of business. Toscanini and Charlie Parker could both be cool at the same time.
The advent of stereo coincided with the rediscover of Blues and the Folk Revival, followed by the Singer-Songwriter revolution in pop music, wherein artists like Joni Mitchell could actually lay claim to some sort of mainstream career. Ambitious artists made the "concept [LP] album" an art form.
MOST OF ALL: The only music-media competition for most of that time consisted of radio, where someone else picked the music, and TV, where music was featured only a few hours a week.
So, seeing as NONE of the factors that made stereo cool 1956-1986 exist today, why are you unbearably surprised and uncomprehending that between Twittering and Facebooking and texting and sexting and porning and selfieing, young people today do indeed regard LPs as our younger selves would have regarded illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages?
It's really really simple. Things change. Nothing lasts forever. You can't un-ring a bell.
JM
Follow Ups:
But you have to admit, there are advantages to the current state of musical affairs. My teen-aged daughter is a huge fan of Joe Cocker (we brought her to see him live) and Jimmi Hendrix (we couldn't arrange that) as well as all sorts of current stuff I've never heard of. Every now and then she texts me about an exciting "new" discovery (the other day it was The Red Hot Chili Peppers). She can get all of this and almost anything else on her iPhone in a matter of seconds.
Some day she may become interested in the music of Coltrane. Or Scarlatti. And she may even figure out that better-than-iPhone sound quality is possible.
JM ,
Really well said. Every person who sings that lament, or people have no appreciation of sound quality today, or the demise of brick and mortar, or outrageous cost of decent gear should be sent a copy of your original response.And you are dead on about Playboy.
Best,
Dave
Edits: 10/11/14
Agreed John;
I graduated high school in '86 and would agree with you that it was the tail end, if not the end of the stereo era.
When college came along, so did the GSL (guaranteed student loan) loans.
We all jokingly referred to them as "guaranteed stereo loans".
When my GSL arrived I did the prudent thing and spent a good chunk of it on some Adcom separates and a pair of Kef speakers.
I can still recall my excitement as I hauled the gear back to my off campus apartment to set it all up. My roommates and other friends had a lot of good times listening to that system.
Do young men do the same today? No.
Do I worry about and lament the passing of the era? No.
It is what it is.
300 years ago young men gathered in a similar manner to shoot their long bows. Time marches on.........
Great post - you nailed it.
I was a vegetarian for 15 minutes, until the main course.......Meat; It's the right thing to do. Romans 14:2
Agreed- In Ontario Canada, we had "O.S.A.P."- the Ontario Student Assistance Program, which we all half jokingly refered to as the Ontario Stereo Acquisition Program. This was in the mid 1990's!
Dman
Analog Junkie
Whether anything worthwhile is left afterwards is another story. Maybe the surviors will learn how to play records with wheel hub and pine needles attached to a rolled up sheet metal horn or something.
Mad Max movie, the last with Gibson (Thunderdome), had the stranded kids, sans adults, with the "sonic"...an LP, but without the engineering/scientific/cultural transmission of knowledge adequate to make it play.
BTW, when I was a kid, I read how to stick a needle into the narrow end of a paper cone and play a record w/ 0 watts, electrical. Of course, I did it. (Recapitulation of scientific discovery is a wonderful way of learning.) Would younger age cohorts know that? Not judgement,here; just observation.
"The coolness of stereos from 1956 to 1986 was a one-shot deal--a 'perfect storm' of developments in societal structures, social mores, cultural developments, and advances in material culture and technology."
Interesting you chose "1986".... Of course it was around the time digitized audio became the mainstream medium of choice.....
I think from the music angle, enough great acts from the 1960s have faded away..... And the pop culture has seeded the notion in our youth that classical music and old-school jazz were "uncool"...... (I fought this personally in school. Fellow kids in my classes thought it was "strange" that I was interested in Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff. And in retrospect, I've been troubled over what may have motivated young people to think this way. And I'm certain it's worse now than when I was in grade school.)
"Here's the recipe that cannot and will not be repeated:
"Start with a World War that followed a Depression."
I don't think that would be requisite for the enjoyment of music and audio......
"Get to the point where there is a huge population of young men who are not only ready to settle down, they have had technical training and in some way usually some exposure to cultures other than their home town or farm, who qualify for free education under the GI Bill, and who in many cases yearn to be 'Blue-Collar Intellectuals.'"
I'm not such an individual..... About three-fourths of my audiophile friends over the years weren't such individuals......
"The development of the Long-Playing phonograph record coincided with the high point of the popularity of symphony music and with the revolution in small-combo jazz that had been fueled by the stupid wartime 'Cabaret Tax,' that priced big bands out of business. Toscanini and Charlie Parker could both be cool at the same time."
But people like the music because it was music.... The tastes in music at the time was eclectic..... The media reflected those tastes.... Where today, the media shapes those tastes.... (By first giving people a false impression of popularity, then the masses going for the music because it's perceived as "popular".) The eclectic interests in music died because the mainstream media only fed its audience what the media execs wanted them to hear.
"The advent of stereo coincided with the rediscover of Blues and the Folk Revival, followed by the Singer-Songwriter revolution in pop music, wherein artists like Joni Mitchell could actually lay claim to some sort of mainstream career. Ambitious artists made the 'concept [LP] album' an art form."
Just a few parts.... The variety of music choices in the mainstream at the time was endless...........
"MOST OF ALL: The only music-media competition for most of that time consisted of radio, where someone else picked the music, and TV, where music was featured only a few hours a week.
"So, seeing as NONE of the factors that made stereo cool 1956-1986 exist today, why are you unbearably surprised and uncomprehending that between Twittering and Facebooking and texting and sexting and porning and selfieing, young people today do indeed regard LPs as our younger selves would have regarded illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages?"
I'm not surprised, but my contention is that the prefabricated music that dominates the modern mainstream is not exactly material that makes people strive for high-fidelity sound reproduction.... Not to mention the audiophile community viewing such music with disdain, it lacks the artistic depth that makes those people want to enjoy it on a good audio system.
"It's really really simple. Things change. Nothing lasts forever. You can't un-ring a bell."
I think if that were true, there wouldn't have been a vinyl revival.... There are young people out there going for music beyond the mainstream, and some of those people have the same passion for quality sound reproduction that we had.
... the penetration of the VCR was the start of the era of "on demand entertainment" with video stores and recording TV shows.
By the 1980's the price of VCR's had fallen enough that nearly anyone who wanted one could have one, and the stereo was relegated to the background.
The number of entertainment options really proliferated starting then, where now, there won't be any one dominant media, for very long anyway.
I suppose streaming media is the likely end game for passive, but who knows what the next decade will bring?
============================
As audiophiles, we take what's obsolete, make it beautiful, and keep it forever.
Hey! I have a blog now: http://mancave-stereo.blogspot.com or "like" us at https://www.facebook.com/mancave.stereo
and
In my book both Toscanini and Parker are still cool. :)
I see you keep referencing 1986 as the day the music died. What happened in 1986 that caused this change?
Very few people remember (or have learned) that Henry Kloss, formerly of AR, KLH, and Advent, in 1976 had staked all his chips on projection TV.
His business venture failed because the technology was unproved and very expensive. And hard to set up.
However, 10 years later, companies with sufficient backing and clout had established high-quality and relatively affordable video playback and projection. The first LaserDisc player with a solid-state laser was Pioneer's LD-700 of 1984.
For not insane money, a yuppie in the mid-1980s could see operas, music videos, or soft-core porn on a 10-foot diagonal screen from an Ottoman-sized three-gun projector, and all the "aspirational" magazines like Playboy and Esquire abruptly stopped pushing audio and began pushing Home Theater.
End of story.
JM
Are you saying that back in the 60's and early 70's playboy had an influence on stereo buyers? If that is the case I have never heard that before.
Yes, that is what I have been saying for more than 6 years, and you have not been paying attention.
In the 1960s and 1970s Playboy's circulation was 5 MILLION copies a month; Playboy was read by appx. 25% the college-age men in the US (on the assumption that most copies were read by the subscriber and from 2 to 4 friends--and barbershop copies were probably read by 50 customers a month).
I wrote about this phenomenon in Stereophile's August 2008 "As We See It."
JM
JM,
It would help my understanding of your post and your hypothesis if you would cite any peer reviewed research that studied the effect of 'reading' Playboy on the college age demographic and purchasing audio equipment during the "baby boomer' years of the 1960s-70s.
Thanks.
And I don't need peer-reviewed research because the fact of the matter is that hi-fi companies were frequent advertisers in Playboy from 1956 on through the time I cite as the changeover from stereo to home theater. Companies that buy ads in the wrong media often don't stay in business.
But there actually is some peer-reviewed research I am aware of that indeed does cite chapter and verse for the strong linkage between the urban/indoors ethos of Playboy (versus the suburban/outdoors ethos of Esquire), hi-fi, and Hefner's particular vision of "the life well lived."
From JSTOR:
“ 'Turn it down!' she shrieked: gender, domestic space, and high fidelity, 1948-59”
Keir Keightley
“Popular Music,” Vol. 15, No. 2. (May, 1996), pp. 149-177.
“Popular Music” is currently published by Cambridge University Press.
# # #
I attach only two pages, in the spirit of Fair Use. Yes, that study ends at 1959 but by then the die was cast as far as Playboy's embrace of both hi-fi and jazz as signifiers of Hefner's ideals of modern male life.
Perhaps there is more research that is on point but I am more than satisfied that my thesis holds water, and more to the point so is JA, and he matters a lot more than you do. And I have discussed my thesis with academics in American Civilization and Musicology, and nobody has ever said, "You are barking up the wrong tree."
The book that someone has to write is about how Hefner, I believe, did more than anyone else during the years when Rock was in its ascendency to keep Jazz on life support, so to speak--one of the few instances in which Hefner consciously took a position that was uncool by the prevailing standards of the time. And perhaps it was Hef's continued showcasing of relics like Mel Tormé that was the chink in Playboy's armor that let Guccione's Penthouse come into the cafeteria and eat Hef's lunch... .
Have a nice day.
jm
JM,
It is an easy call to agree that Playboy played a not insignificant role in shaping the aspirational ethos of post WWII, white middle class males during the 1950s.
I specifically refer to the generation of white middle class,'Baby-Boomer kids who came of age in the early 1960s to the mid 1970s.
I would suggest that the Playboy aspirational life style ethos and view of the world was, in any practical sense, absent, if not anathema, to the life style of the aforementioned kids. They were, in fact, the adolescents and young adults who were in active revolt against their parents and who formed the core soldiers of the political and cultural struggles of those times. I remember the struggles of those times quite well. Music propelled the struggle. We bought audio equipment. Playboy was as dead as the proverbial door nail, just, as we thought, was our parents way of life; the former was a solid truth; the latter, well, we learned a lot about ourselves and attempted to pick and choose among the bones of what we rejected and arrived at our middle age a wiser lot.
I distinctly remember that not all Baby Boomer kids were the same. Indeed there were the rebels or the *progressive* kids, but there just as many who were traditional consumerists happy doing whatever it took to keep the finances and the flow of goods rolling. For every kid who struggled against the legacy of former generations, there was at least one other who carried the torch onward - even though it may have been "uncool" to admit doing so.Soon, the yuppie wasps would arrive (L.L. Bean catalogs in tow) in swarms, stinging and biting all in their path. The internet was ready to explode, and explode it did.
Today, we see that almost everyone is the same.
Edits: 10/12/14
To better understand the people involved in this topic it would help to know there age, where they resided between 1960-1969, their educational and draft/military status at the time. While many of us were united socially and politically the transformation (or when one may have dropped acid) occurred at different times.
In very broad terms the social changes between 1960-65 were different from those between 1964-69. Ones opinion of when the 'Summer of Love' actually took place and was that the West Coast or the East? Beat or Hip? Elvis or the Beatles and on and on? Regardless, it seems everybody at least flipped through Playboy regularly.
During that decade there was very little in the way of commonly available audio orientated periodicals and Playboy, regardless of its other lifestyle content, was providing the Jazz Poll and a usually interesting photographic look at the rapidly growing High Fidelity industries offerings beyond Heathkit.
Look at age breakdowns in the 1968 and 1972 national elections. Nixon got lots of young voters. Arguably, they were his margins.
You are lapsing (I think) into the mindset that when a year ending in "9" ends and a year beginning with "0" starts, it is like flipping a light switch. In most cases, not so.
All one has to do is look at Playboy's still-astonishing circulation and ad revenue figures from the 1960s through the mid-1970s, when Penthouse began spanking Playboy's rear for its complacency.
Indeed, the "real" Playboy died with the early death of Auguste Comte Spectorsky, the guy who was able to get world-class writers to swallow their pride while pocketing their check. Hef wandered around in his satin bathrobe while Specs put out a world-class general-interest magazine that also featured bare boobs.
Anyone who lived through that era (I still can hardly believe with the bad lottery number I got, I was not sent to Vietnam) can remember (selectively) what they wish to, in however self-congratulatory a way.
I not only lived through it, I studied it at the college level and have continued my studies in History and Material Culture and Technology as academic subjects, life-long. I am currently reading a Niall Ferguson essay on chaos and determinancy in History, and, frankly, it's hard work.
Indeed, later in life I met and was influenced by an important member of Shure Brothers' outside ad agency in the 1960s and 1970s, and for them, Playboy was a supremely important "get." And I don't think they were living in the past, they were reading the sales reports. Playboy's circulation in that time frame was more than TEN TIMES Stereo Review's!!!
Let us not forget that counter-cultural as they were, The Grateful Dead splurged on McIntosh amplification for their PA system. The revolution might not have been televised, but they like them their nice stereos.
JM
nt
Altho, GQ just ran an article about Return to HIFI. Sadly, not enough momentum reversing the pendulum but apparently it's COOL to have a hifi again.
The latest trend for metro sexuals: drink micro brew whisky or burbon with wagyu beef and spin vinyl records.
Edits: 10/09/14 10/10/14 10/10/14
...what sort of man reads
Way before Holt (much less HP) held court in these parts, Playboy would feature articles about stereo gear. After all, if you wanted to get laid, a great stereo could help set the mood. (along with the round bed!)
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