What are your thoughts on the "Edsels" of the audio history?
The Nakamichi "stacker" type CD changer was a disaster. Discs would get stuck in them if not put in the horridly shallow tray correctly. Jam the entire thing. So, the genius of it is they then make the "shaker" version, where the drawer does a little shimmy to seat the disc properly. Worked - most of the time. Cool idea, but not ready for prime time. The sound was OK for the era. They kicked butt on cassette, and bit the dirt on CD changer. The single CD player was good. |
The Edsel was very much part of why people in this country started to buy cars from other countries. Edsel, Mercury of the sixties...et. al. were Fords with different sheet metal and bumpers. Olds, Pontiac and others are gone because taking a Chevy frame and chassis because different "looks" do not a different car make. Anti trust laws not being enforced created.,..the "big" three....too bad, Packard and others were great for their time...Packard was referred to as "The Car of Kings". Watch the film Tucker, and name the best cars in the world...yup, most are not made in this country. It is not because of bad workers or bad designers...it is corporations considering you to be an idiot, and yes, many companies base much of what they do because they think you're and idiot. Simple product, the bread you eat. The grain from wheat has bran and germ...and they can take those parts out and sell most Americans "white" bread with very little nutritional value.....kind of the Homer Simpson version of bread. Kind of like the person at the sandwich shop that says "would you like that on white or Wheat"?...well they are both made from Wheat...just one has had the best parts removed....dah... But P.T. Barnum realized you could get people to part with their money to see a woman with a beard or one under 2 foot tall.....boy, money well spent. Perhaps "white" bread was his idea? The early Pontiac and Olds I had as a youth had their own engine, by the time those brands were dead they all had Chevy frames and drive trains.....not very much a Pontiac or an Olds. |
mahlher: The first Quad LP's I listened to were by Jeff Beck and Santana. I was in Hawaii @ the time and they had LP's from the Japanese market (in stores) which were yet to be available on the mainland. One that I recall was an LP by "The Climax Blues Band" that a friend who owned a record store could not get until almost a year later. The best "not true Quadrophic" setup I heard was maybe 4 years later (75/76) using a B&O black box (tiny little thing) and a pair of cheap single driver speakers which were once "winged" to a vintage R2R deck. The B&O setup was much subtler/less distractive than the true Quad systems I'd heard (just added a sense of increased space to the sound). DeKay |
+1 mijostyn
I had the distinct displeasure of listening to a pair Plasmatronics at a "high-end" store. The salesman was so pleased with himself when the few people in the room slammed their hands over their ears. OMG like ice picks in your brain. Lobotomy anyone? Went to a personal residence to audition an amp I was considering, decided against it. The guy then tried to interest me in the Terk antenna, hey its only $50 says he. No thanks. OK OK $35. No thanks. $25 no thanks.........OK just please take this thing out of my house, I just need to tell my wife I sold it. I took it. And it worked for me! It was the one that was about 7 feet tall with spiked feet. |
The Edsel was a good car. I grew up in Detroit, many families worked for Ford and used employee discounts to purchase them new and most of them couldn’t understand why it didn’t succeed. Quad Decoders were the hot audio technology when I was in College. I worked part time in a record store (remember those?) in Ann Arbor and the manager bought one and had a speaker (Advent 2) in each corner of the store. No college kid could afford that set up, we sold zero Quad records. I listen to Classical now exclusively and I have many of those same recordings as they have been remixed and issued on the Pentatone label as multi channel SACDs. I am trying to remember what rock recordings were issued in Quad. I remember one (I think it was The Who, possibly Tommy) that was mixed with bass in one speaker, lead guitar in another, drums in another...awful. |
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antigrunge298 posts10-28-2020 3:56pmBose 901. I still shudder in horror! <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 901s weren't a bomb, they were the bomb! A LOT of folks had those things. If you bought Sony True ribbon Toppers, built a couple of good horn loaded subs, and used a good parametric/graphic EQ, you had a pretty serious way to make sound.. Type I and II were real popular, they could really be abused, 200-300 watts no problem. GREAT sound from 100 hz to 12k or so. There was the "hang one pair", "standmount one pair", and put the Ribbons on top of the lower ones, or hang them from the top ones.. Early 70s though good SS amps cost a LOT.. Regards |
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The Terk “pi”, fm antenna was such an Edsel IMO. It may have performed well right in the middle of big cities...I wouldn’t know as I lived 30-ish miles out and got much better use out of a big TV type aerial on my apartment ceiling. To the best of my memory, the little round disc was supposed to be “revolutionary” though and they certainly got this 20-something’s (at the time) eighty bucks... |
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Anyone remember this bomb? ELCASET was an analog cassette tape based audio format developed by SONY in cooperation with Matsushita (Panasonic) and TEAC in 1976. It was intended to offer a reel-to-reel system sound quality in a convenient cartridge format. The name comes from the expression "large cassette" or "L-cassette". Although the ELCASET used a 6 mm (0.25 in) wide tape running at 9.5 cm/s (3.75 ips), twice the width and twice the speed of a PHILIPS Compact Cassette it became a complete failure in the marketplace and by 1978 it completely faded-out from the market. This happened mainly because Compact Cassette had a more compact format and the dramatical improvement with the introduction of new tape formulations such as chromium dioxide and lower noise with the introduction of the Dolby B noise reduction circuit. |
8-track wasn’t a failure. It served it’s purpose during the time of AM radio. Homemade 8-tracks sounded better than high speed prerecords. Just like cassette mix tapes and CD burners CDR’s. The splice tape held together long enough for cassette to get established. If you had a lathe you could cut better sounding limited edition vinyl like that guy in London. |
