MoPR Mobility Minute: Highway Hi-Fi
Because of the show Rock Star: INXS (soon to be a subject of another post), I started uploading lots of 80s music to my iPod. A friend asked me if I liked INXS back in the 80s, and I responded, “You bet I did! I had all their cassettes!”Cassettes were awesome! You weren’t just restricted to listening to albums, but you could easily record your own playlists, like a real disk jockey! Most of these custom cassettes were recorded one at a time, painstakingly in the order of how we wanted to hear them – at least at the time we made the recording. Remember how cool it was when someone invented the fast-forward feature that could stop in the silence between the end of one song and the beginning of the next? That allowed us to fast-forward over the song we regretted accidentally putting on the tape.
But to enjoy my music collection in my car meant bringing with me something that resembled a suitcase, which I had keep stashed underneath the passenger seat whenever I parked the car. If you had a car in the 1980s, you also had that suitcase – don’t lie, of course you did. We all did. Anything smaller than that suitcase would limit you to some unsatisfyingly small number of cassettes (some older folks remember the steamer trunk sized container of 8-tracks they had to lug around to enjoy their music collection in their vans back in the 70s).
The advent of CDs reduced the suitcase to a “wallet” or even a smaller collection fanned across the back of a sun visor. When CDs became recordable, man that was revolutionary! We still painstakingly recorded songs one at a time to create our own playlists, but at least the music was digital.
The thing is, people have always wanted to bring the entertainment media they enjoy along for the ride. It’s all about having anything you want, anytime you want it, anyplace you are.
Chrysler Motors knew this, even way back when. In 1956 they teamed with CBS to create the “Highway Hi-Fi” – an under-dash phonograph that played vinyl records at a super-slow 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. The slow speed allowed a small disc to pack up to an hour of entertainment on each side. Special mechanical engineering reduced the number of times and distance the needle would skip across the disc as the car drove over bumps in the road.
Technology really didn’t catch up with Chrysler’s vision until the invention of the iPod. The iPod lets you carry with you virtually your entire multimedia library wherever you go.
Now cars come equipped with iPod-ready sound systems. You can control your iPod from the steering wheel as the device sits in the cradle getting charged. Of course satellite radio is there for those times when you grow tired of the 60 megabytes of music you have stored on your iPod. And just in case, the theater-quality surround sound works great with the built-in DVD player (with a cartridge to keep multiple DVDs ready to play).
If only there was a way to listen to INXS in the front while the kids watch Sponge Bob in the back…
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