This presentation places the portable audio equipment of the 80s into the larger context of consumer electronics and music listening practices. In the late 70s and 80s, two technological changes occurred: miniaturization, and the transformation of cassettes into a high fidelity medium -- changes exemplified in the Sony Walkman of 1979/80. However, it was not technological breakthroughs, but rather marketing considerations which led to diverse “product families” centered around three types of audio designs: the cassette recorder, the combination unit (“boom box”), and the personal stereo. Both the producers of audio equipment, and audio equipment users assigned new meanings to these sound machines and to the practice of listening to music. To elucidate this reshaping of audio electronics, the paper brings out the ways in which consumers were conceptualized by producers, and the ways that consumers themselves embedded various audio equipment into their lives. My main sources are German and American consumer and technical journals, advertising, marketing studies, and media coverage.
In the 1970s, home theaters were expensive, custom-built, cinema-style installations found primarily in the homes of wealthy movie moguls. In a very literal sense, they were small cinemas built into one dedicated room of a house. The widespread adoption of home videocassette players during the 1980s extended to less privileged movie-viewers the choice of whether to see a film in the cinema or at home. Home viewing provided some distinct advantages over the cinema – most notably the ability to pause and review missed scenes – but suffered from much lower sound and picture quality. Picture quality improved only slowly, but multi-channel audio reproduction from videotape was technically simple and commercially marketable.
During the 1980s, the American electronics industry re-defined the term “home theater” to denote a variety of integrated audio-video reproduction systems specially created for the home. This democratized home theater sought to temporarily transform the family living room into a cinema-like space. One leader in this area was THX Ltd, founded in 1983 by George Lucas, the technologically enthusiastic and eternally juvenile creator of the Star Wars films. THX offered a certification program for products and dealers which ostensibly guaranteed a completely faithful recreation of professional quality cinema sound using technologies specially tailored to the domestic setting. The key underlying technology was introduced in 1982 by Dolby Laboratories, developer both of a noise-reduction system for consumer cassette-tape playback and of a system for encoding multiple channels into the sound tracks of feature films. These fields came together when introduced a home version of its 4-channel cinema playback system, called Dolby Surround. Technically, Dolby’s initial system differed little from quadraphonic sound, a technology that had already failed to woo the music lovers of the 1970s. But where quadraphony had failed as a simple technical upgrade to the home stereo, the new system promised not just improved fidelity but an entirely new kind of experience. Its social meaning was dramatically, and successfully, reconstructed. It now promised, in the words of one Wall Street Journal article, “Everything but the Popcorn” (which could of course be purchased separately and microwaved).
This new type of home theater seemed to perfectly wed the previously distinct technologies of home audio and home video. In practice, home theater more often imposed the masculine, performance and technology obsessed, culture of hi-fi audio onto the gender-neutral technology of home video and what was (according to some researchers) the formerly feminine technology of the television. Television and stereo were subsumed into a multi-purpose, audio-visual home entertainment system. With home theater, men obsessed with technical toys could trade in their hi-fi stereos for audio-visual surround sound systems – which provided even more options for the adventurous tinker. By the late-1990s (and with the aid of other new technologies), home theatre reached the mainstream of middle-class America. With it came a shift toward loud, action-packed films with pulsing soundtracks and spectacular explosions able to show off the new capabilities.
Home theatre promised to bring the cinema experience home. While on a technological level it fulfilled much of this promise, the experience of configuring, tweaking and watching a home system was quite different from that of buying a movie ticket and sitting in a public space. Home theatre served to surround the once-simple process of movie consumption with social practices, new enthusiast cultures and communities, and even new kinds of film. Thus a culture of technical fidelity obscured a more profound social infidelity.