Scanning Around with Gene: My Woofer is Bigger than Your Woofer

Aside from my sister and me, the possession my mother has held on to the longest is a massive monaural Packard Bell console record player/radio and the four record albums that have been in it for close to 50 years. This isn’t because of a fondness for music, but because this piece of furniture makes a great place to put the mail. I’m guessing you could fit several thousand iPods in the same space, but they can’t hold the latest issues of Reader’s Digest or National Geographic.
So you wouldn’t exactly say my childhood was filled with music. My family owned four record albums: a Johnny Mathis Christmas album, a “Sing Along With Mitch” (Miller) album of corny standards, the comedy album “The First Family” spoofing the Kennedy White House, and a slightly jazzy contemporary album from a group named Bent Fabric that included one of the popular piano hits of the time, “Alley Cat.” This last album was a gift, I’m sure.
We kids were allowed to buy 45 rpm singles but were advised to play them “softly,” which my mother claimed made them sound better. As I recall, the first record I purchased with my spare fifty cents was a comedy single called “Leader of the Laundromat” by the Detergents, a really stupid parody of “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-las. And at some point I ended up with Alan Sherman’s hit “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.” You can see that I was headed in a dangerous direction, musically. (I recently discovered that “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” went on to become a massive hit in Sweden, perhaps explaining why they re-paid us with Abba.)
Thankfully, rock and roll came around. Stereo manufacturers switched their marketing efforts from classical-music audiophiles to young college students, who could appreciate that the volume dial went up to 10. Whether in dorm rooms or rentals, the first piece of furniture young adults set up were their stereo component systems. You couldn’t move in the rest of your stuff without musical accompaniment.


Sony played up the idea that volume was a critical component of good music with this simple photo of someone cranking the volume knob. Stereo you can feel!



When I packed myself off to college in the 1970s, one of the first major purchases I made was a stereo system.


Pioneer ads got a little racy during the ’70s with this series using photo cartoons to imply lots of sexual activity if you had a good stereo system. Most of these ads ran in magazines for young adults, like the National Lampoon.

And there was no better way to learn about consumerism and the concept of “buyer beware” and “buyer’s remorse” than to step into one of the electronic stores of the era with a freshly minted credit card in hand.



Marantz used highly stylized illustrations in its ads for stereo components, all of which emphasized ’70s hair styles.



Bigger Speakers Meant Bigger Sound
Young people have always had a high tolerance for volume. So in those days the most-important feature in stereo equipment was how loud it could play before sounding like that Packard Bell system in my mother’s house.


Forget ear buds. These Altec Lansing speakers were 54 inches high and 9 feet around!



Never mind that most people never play music that loud. Like having a car that can do 120 MPH, it’s reassuring to know the power is there should you need it. And though I have no idea if it’s true, the common theory was that if a stereo could play louder, it sounded better at lower volumes, as well.



Big sound comes from big speakers, as these ads emphasized.



The best way to say “loud” was with big components, especially big speakers. In the ads for stereo equipment, size was often exaggerated by the same sort of photography tricks the auto industry uses to make interiors look roomier than they are. I suspect there was a lot of unnecessary empty space in some of that gear — the exact opposite of today’s smaller-is-better mentality. And the more buttons and dials something had, the better it must be.


This was the ’70s, after all, so many stereo ads featured either psychedelic or other drug-induced imagery. This ad for Sansui emphasized quadraphonic stereo and tried to imply that not only could you now hear the music, but see it, as well.



Shopping for a stereo usually took place in a specialty store, where massive amounts of equipment could be compared side-by-side, and the buyer could be bombarded by a battery of fast-paced demonstrations. Most of these were designed to confuse you and to make you feel inadequate when you couldn’t discern the subtle differences the salesman insisted were obvious.


More was better. In this ad for Audiophase, the perfect stereo system filled up a room. But did it sound any better than an iPod? Not likely.



In my case, I didn’t buy any of the original components I went in for, and I spent the next few years trying to convince myself and anyone who came over that I had, indeed, made a better choice. The fact that the brands I purchased paid higher commissions to the salesperson was of no relevance in my mind.


Jensen used four cliché images to indicate different musical styles — hip black people listen to jazz, guys with beards listen to rock, classical music lovers dress well, and some couples are so versatile they’ll listen to anything.



That ’70s Showmanship
This was the era of discos, gas shortages, and men who wore perms and snorted too much cocaine. And it seemed all those men worked at stereo stores. The worst ones were indifferent and annoyed at your questions; the best ones quickly became your friend and confidant. “My manager would kill me if he heard me telling you this,” they’d say, “but you really don’t want that piece of junk in the ad. If it was me, I’d look at this (fill in some obscure brand) instead.”
Then they would reel off a litany of specifications, acting as if you understood each and every one. And of course you wouldn’t want to show your ignorance, so you played along as if they meant something. Things like total harmonic distortion, frequency response, RMS power output, and signal-to-noise ratios became more important than how something actually sounded. This in part because we were told things such as, “the human ear can’t actually hear this level of quality.”


Celebrity endorsements were somewhat rare for stereo systems and were almost always from musicians. This Pioneer ad went out a little on a limb by featuring artist Andy Warhol as its spokesperson.



By the time you left the store, you were convinced you were an expert in sound reproduction, even if you had to convince yourself that what originally sounded bad now sounded good, and vice versa.


Drug innuendo was pretty common in ’70s stereo ads, as shown in this Aiwa effort.



And just like with computers today, it was always the extras that killed your budget. Of course you had to upgrade the phono cartridge and add on a graphic equalizer. And you really did need that special anti-static record brush. And what listening experience would be complete without a good set of headphones?


Empire phono cartridges played off the Grateful Dead tune “Keep On Truckin'” in this 1974 ad.



Headphones were almost always promoted as a way to gain privacy, not as a superior way to listen. But how these Suprex headphones are “romantic,” I’m not sure.



They Were Crazy for Good Deals
It wasn’t just the salesmen who exhibited unique characteristics. Stereo-store spokesmen and store owners were often famous for their odd personalities. In New York, Crazy Eddie established the standard for wacky sales techniques. In Los Angeles, Tom Campbell, the spokesperson for Cal Stereo, talked so fast it became a game to understand him. Someone was always excited about one sale or another, and every day was the last day for the best-possible deal of a lifetime.


Crazy Eddie dominated the East Coast airways until he experienced financial and legal troubles.



When I had a small type shop in Monterey, California, one of my customers was a local discount electronics store. Each week we dutifully prepared the newspaper insert, and each week there was a different theme for the sale: President’s Day, Gifts for Mom, Spring Cleaning, Tax Inventory, and other excuses designed to make everyone feel that now was the time to buy. As time went on, it was harder and harder for the ad manager to find new sale themes.
One day he came in with train clip art for that week’s “Trainload Sale.” When I pointed out that there hadn’t been train service to the Monterey Peninsula in more than two decades, he replied, “Nobody cares if you tell the truth as long as they think they got a good deal.” I suppose he was right.


This ad for TEAC cassette recorders nicely captures that ’70s rock-and-roll attitude — long hair, cigarettes, and a blond groupie.



The More Things Change…
Today, of course, smaller is better when it comes to music equipment, and the holy mantra at Apple is to keep things as simple as possible. An iPod has no more buttons than absolutely necessary, and models get smaller and smaller.


Sony put together a fake rock band photo to promote its products. No, it isn’t Spinal Tap. Nowadays, Apple uses real bands.



But walk into an Apple store and I can just about guarantee that you’ll leave spending slightly more (or a lot more) than you expected. The sales people no longer have perms and probably don’t snort much cocaine. But they still spout off a lot of stats, and there are plenty of accessories they’ll convince you that you can’t possibly live without.


There was a brief phase where companies came out with round speakers, though the gimmick never really took off.



Internet shopping does make it possible to bypass electronics stores and the breed of salespeople that inhabit them. But then you end up with exactly what you wanted, and what’s the fun of that?
Read more by Gene Gable.

Gene Gable has spent a lifetime in publishing, editing and the graphic arts and is currently a technology consultant and writer. He has spoken at events around the world and has written extensively on graphic design, intellectual-property rights, and publishing production in books and for magazines such as Print, U&lc, ID, Macworld, Graphic Exchange, AGI, and The Seybold Report. Gene's interest in graphic design history and letterpress printing resulted in his popular columns "Heavy Metal Madness" and "Scanning Around with Gene" here on CreativePro.com.
  • Anonymous says:

    Two – the Totem ad, which is from the 80’s. And the guy in the lab coat – 1986. Lab coat is MAtthew Polk who got rich selling bad loudspeakers, though Polk makes much better speakers these days.

    Except for those pics, the whole piece is right on the money.

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