Probably hipster turntable devotees.

That made me smile!


Imagine how they would react to an old, 70's/early 80's home stereo system, with furniture sized speakers!

Here ya go, kid. Make some music come out of THIS!

Today, most people only have small built-in speakers in their flat screen TV's. CRT TV's at least had enough room for big speakers.

My dad bought a Sansui system, with two of those speakers and two like this;


Basically as big as end tables and that's exactly what we used them for!

I'll tell you what though.....they could put out some sound. Oh yeah.

The ones on the bottom were omni-directional. The main speaker was mounted facing up and there was a cone shaped structure above them to distribute the sound.

The components were something like this;


Pretty much state of the art in 1975, though there were certainly better and more complex systems. We didn't have the reel-to-reel tape player (cassettes were in vogue by then) and he never bought a graphic equalizer, but still, it kicked ass!

You could just about shake the plaster off the ceiling with them.

He'd play "Rite of Spring" so loud your ears would almost bleed.

The only time he would crank it up was to impress some guests!

Had to wait till mom and dad were gone to put on a good, loud, rock and roll record.

I think they were first sold in the U.S. in 1980.

Here's your shawl and your rocking chair. Now, just relax and enjoy your tea.

It looked like this:



And still works.

Found a "Top 40" station on AM, the two of us were laughing our asses off, her with her iPod, me with my Coby mp3 player.

much and how often technology has changed since the 90s when I was growing up. I remember watching my big bro listening to his walkman at home and on the bus, and I wanted one, too. But when I got one, I always hated how the cassettes skipped sometimes whenever I walked or ran around. Even with a CD player, that problem didn't go away.

is now mostly a personal thing and not shared with others. Boomboxes became popular in the 1980s. The music was shared, sometimes the music was not appreciated. I remember some TV shows and movies where there is a teen with a boombox on a bus or something and somebody either breaks the boombox or, in one of the Star Trek movies, Spock (they had gone back in time) uses his hand to knock the kid out and shut off the boombox to the cheers of the other bus riders.

My father actually invented the earbud in about 1968. The problem is, he didn't patent it or pursue it's manufacture. He basically took a couple of earphones, as they were called back then, and wired two of them together. They were mono of course.

We talked about music a few weeks ago. This will be an interesting follow-up item. They are in their early 20's so I doubt they have any idea what a Walkman is.

Cars are pretty much the same as they were 10 years ago. Why is that?