11/23/2023 0 Comments 8 track tape musicIt quickly became obsolete at the hands of something far superior in all ways: the compact cassette, which was rapidly adopted by motorists, making 8-track players redundant overnight – until the electronics industry came up with a cassette-to-8-track conversion device. Today few have good memories of the 8-track. With four channels of stereo tracks pre-recorded on an endless loop of magnetic tape inside a sturdy plastic case, it promised unheard-of in-car user-friendliness. In the sixties, no rock ’n’ roll god’s Rolls-Royce or Bentley was complete without an Auto-Mignon, most famously John Lennon’s Phantom. Philips thought it had the skipping needle problem sorted with its Auto-Mignon ‘floating’ record player. ![]() Called the Highway Hi-Fi, the firm promised that “It’s almost impossible to jar the arm off the record.” That wasn’t quite true. Chrysler offered the first in its top models in 1955. ‘Music on demand’ first arrived in the fifties in the unlikely form of the in-car record player. With a boot packed full of amplifiers and massive subwoofers, even a small car like the custom favourite Vauxhall Nova could become a mobile boom-box.Īll this was not just to play what came out of the radio, of course. Upgrading your audio became a rite of passage for young drivers in the eighties and nineties. Other radio makers quickly changed to solid state and global sales hit 50 million.Īnd since then? Stereo arrived in 1969 with the Becker Europa push-button presets made finding your favourite station easier, features proliferated, power outputs shot up and speakers went hi-tech and multiplied.īig-power ICE also found a ready home in the aftermarket, where a whole automotive sub-culture grew up around it. It replaced vacuum tubes with transistors, making radios much smaller and less expensive. In 1947, 24,000 car radio licences were issued by 1969 the number was a million.Īdvances that drove the growth included the first FM car radio (from Blaupunkt) in 1953, while the innovative Becker Mexico arrived a year later – it had a novel feature: it could automatically search for stations.īut the tipping point came in 1963 when Becker launched the Monte Carlo. For one thing, you needed a radio licence until 1971!Īs Patrick Collins, research officer at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu tells us, licence records provide a stark indication of how car radios took off in this country. Despite efforts of cars like the Melody Minx, uptake in the UK was slower. Uptake was rapid one estimate is that just 16 years after the first Motorola nine million cars around the world had radios in them. Other advantages of car radio were said to be entertaining the children on long journeys and helping keep the driver awake. The New York Radio Times reported: “With a car equipped in this fashion, it is possible for a family to drive anywhere within 100 miles or so of a broadcasting station and picnic while the radio in their car amuses or instructs them with music, sermons or wireless telegraphy.”īeing able to listen to a Sunday sermon while far from your local church was a selling point in America in the twenties. ![]() ![]() With huge batteries under the seat, loudspeakers taking up the back seat and an aerial that covered the roof, it was impractical and cost thousands of pounds in today’s terms.īut the potential of it was not lost. Radio ‘hams’ experimented with home-built radios in cars in the very early years of the 20th century, but the first one offered by a car manufacturer and designed to work reliably was sold by Chevrolet in the US exactly a century ago. The one constant in it all has been the wireless receiver, and in automotive terms that goes back to well before the Minx, to 1922. ![]() Through it all emerged a booming new industry devoted to ICE – in-car entertainment.
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