Books and Magazines With Audio Equipment

For all tape and boombox enthusiasts...

 

Here are some nice Sony portable audio catalogues from Germany from the mid 80's...

 

1986...Boodo

 

This is what the Soviets planned to produce in 1985: https://cccp.livejournal.com/18353.html?rfrom=my_ussr Feel free to click through, I will translate some stuff later. Most of these machines did not end up for purchase freely in stores. The quality and quantity were insufficient and the features were lagging behind. They planned to manufacture the Panasonic NV-2000 copy for ten years! No color video cameras. No camcorders whatsoever. No Dolby on tape decks (although they had their own system, plus there was a compatible system, which, I think was just an unlicensed copy).

On another hand, cassette decks, boomboxes, VCRs have ended up in garbage piles several decades later. Relentless progress and planned obsolescence is a flip side of the coin. Why releasing new iPhone every year? Why releasing a new car every three years? Actually, car manufacturing cycles became longer, 4-5 years now. Honda used to have 36 month cycle in 1990s. I am driving a 2009 car and it is totally fine with me.

I wish there was a middle ground, when high quality long lasting goods were produced at a slower pace, yet were available for anyone to buy if one wanted to. I am reading about the current chip shortage and car manufacturing woes, maybe it is a wake-up call? Slow down.

Is cassette and vinyl resurgence a reflection of people wanting longer production and usage cycles, wanting to latch onto something that was usable in the 1960s and is still perfectly usable? Something that their parents used. Something they could pass to their kids. Probably not, judging by Crosleys sales. In a way, I am happy that there are no new cassette decks produced, people should restore old ones and keep using them.

 

The problem is there is always a "race to the bottom", Then people complain that stuff isn't made as well as it used to be. The reason I originally joined this forum (on the old platform was to point out that my first boombox - the cheapest one Sony made at the time cost me about 1/6th of the cost of the new Honda motorbike I bought the same year. The equivalent of £500 today.

Having seen the way calculators went from a luxury item to something costing just a few £s in less than a decade, I am surprised that Apple have managed to keep their prices so high for so long.

I suppose the consolation is that sometimes products really do improve for the better. Last night I was researching the history of quartz clocks. In 1974 they weren't any in the Argos catalogue. By 1976 about half the clocks were quartz. In terms of accuracy somone from NIST tested a random sample of four quartz watches and found they were all more accurate than any mechanical watch, with a knock off Rolex bought on a street corner for $30 proving to be the most accurate of the lot !

 

Product life cycles are short when people have money and demand is high. In the 90s and 00s, Japanese sportbikes would get a complete redesign every 3 years or so. Even their frames were totally new. But the Great Recession of 2008 changed all that. Now most "new" bikes look 10-15 years old, because few components have been changed. The manufacturers couldn't afford to redesign everything, because consumer demand dried up and never completely recovered. The target age group for sportbikes (18-30) lost interest in not only motorcycles but motor vehicles in general, due to skyrocketing college tuition, rent, and healthcare.

 

These are not mine, just found them by chance. It is a product catalog from 1985, some of them were just prototypes.

Funny how YouTube suggested me this video, it is from 1988. You can turn auto-translate into English. For a non-Soviet person it sounds surreal: the Ministry of Communications is asking the Ministry of Trade whether people would like the exhibited goods. And the problems they have with the quality of plastics they will discuss with the Ministry of Chemical Industry. WTF? It is all upside down compared to market economy. I shall just drop it here, otherwise I will lose this link:

I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. If it works well, why re-inventing for the sake of re-invention? I am still running Windows 7 and I hate both Windows 10 and Windows 11. My car is from 2009. My Macbook is from 2013. I had to replace my smartphone because the old just died. My plasma TV is from 2007, and I don't plan to upgrade any time soon, although I really like true black of OLED.

In fact, TV is a good example of a drastic change in quality: TVs from, say, 1970s to 1990s were the same in principle, CRT, analog TV, small screens. Then flat screens and HD came along, and for the last 20 years nothing changed much, the progress has been incremental. I don't care for 4K anyway.