CTA Centennial Part 5b: A Decade Of Disruption – Personal Audio Revolution

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CTA (Consumer Technology Association), which started out as the RMA (Radio Manufacturers Association). This is the fifth in a series of essays exploring and celebrating CTA’s and our industry’s first century of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, assembled from varying technology historical research and writings I have done over the course of 20-plus years, including from an annually updated industry history for CTA’s now-defunct Digital America, 20-plus years of CTA Hall of Fame inductee biographies, and numerous tech history articles for a variety of publications over the years.

Here are the previous chapters:

As I’ve previously postulated, the period between 1975-1985 produced the most technology innovation in all of human history. These innovations included revolutions in home video, which we covered last week, personal audio, which we’ll cover this week, personal computing, which we’ll cover next week, and other significant technologies and devices that would lay the foundation for the tech of the 21st century.

However, not all tech developments in the 1970s and early 1980s were profound or long-lasting, although three continue to act as totems of their times.

For instance, in Japan, a struggling drummer named Daisuke Inoue found another use for the audio cassette. Customers at lounges at which his singer-less band performed often requested songs to which they could get up and sing along.

One group of fans asked Inoue if he could provide tapes of his music so they could sing along with them on an upcoming vacation. Instead, Inoue jury-rigged a red-and-white painted wooden box with a microphone, an amplifier, and an 8-track tape machine built in that played a sing-along song when a 100-yen coin was dropped into it. His band recorded instrumental tracks and his new company, Crescent, leased his “8 Juke” – soon dubbed karaoke, or “empty orchestra” in Japanese – to bars and hotels.

The karaoke fad swept Japan and, by the mid-1970s, almost every bar in the Far East had a karaoke machine, followed by bars around the world.

Unfortunately, Inoue failed to patent his invention. By 1987, competition from large companies producing bigger and better karaoke machines forced Inoue’s small company out of business. But the popularity of karaoke prompted Time magazine to name Inoue one of Asia’s most influential people, along with Mohandas Gandhi and Mao Zedong. In 2004, Inoue was awarded an Ig Nobel Peace Prize for “providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”

Even more faddish than karaoke in the mid-1970s was the CB radio craze.

In 1937, Canadian-born Donald Hings created a portable radio signaling system for his employer, a system he dubbed the “Packset.” A year later, while still in high school, an 18-year-old amateur radio operator from Cleveland named Al Gross created his own version of Hings’ invention he called the “walkie-talkie.”

During WWII, Gross worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, to develop a secret long-range wireless communications system for military intelligence use. After the war, the FCC set aside the first frequencies for this military tech that morphed into the Citizens Radio Service Frequency Band.

Gross formed a company called Citizens Radio Corp. to produce two-way radios for personal use. Two years later, Gross’ company was the first to receive FCC approval for making consumer radios using the new so-called “Citizens’ Band” using short band 226-27 MHz frequencies. Cartoonist Chester Gould was so taken with the idea that he asked Gross if he could borrow the idea, resulting in Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio.

Initially, CB radios were used primarily by military, marine, commercial trucking, and emergency services. It took 25 years – for the oil shortage, a truckers’ strike, and a pop song called “Convoy” by C.W. McCall in the mid-1970s – to make CB the biggest electronics fad of the decade. 10-4 good buddy indeed.

In 1975, EIA reported that consumer CB was a $1.5 billion market, that one in 28 American families and one in 15 farm families used CB. CB units were back ordered and in short supply. In 1976, 10 million CB units were sold.

But the CB fad faded far quicker than it had arisen. After the FCC expanded the band to 40 channels and banned the sale of 23-channel units after Dec. 21, 1977, sales sharply declined. In 1978, annual unit CB sales dropped by more than half of their peak; the year after, sales slumped to an estimated 2.5 million.

Had demand for CB simply reached its peak? Did a combination of the oil embargo/gas lines and recession/inflation dampen sales? Did companies stuck with large inventories of 23-channel units glut the market via a cheap sell-off? A combination thereof? Whatever the case, many surviving CB vendors instead turned to making new-fangled cordless phones. And instead of becoming a permanent piece of the consumer electronics business, CB turned out to be a shooting star fad, its consumer need soon to be usurped by the cellphone.

People don’t always need to talk to communicate, of course. In 1921, the Detroit police department started alerting its officers to call in simply by transmitting a signal that made a device “beep,” which logically resulted in the new paging devices being dubbed “beepers.”

But the first true pager would take nearly 40 years to be developed. In 1949, walkie-talkie and CB developer Al Gross patented the telephone pager. New York’s Jewish Hospital started using Gross’ pager system the following year. But the FCC didn’t approve the system until 1958, and the first consumer paging systems didn’t appear until the mid-1970s. Soon it seemed everyone had a pager clipped to their belt.

But soon, like CB radios, needs for pagers would be supplanted by the cellphone, which we’ll cover in Part 6.

Not Always Unintended Consequences

Inventors and engineers such as the aforementioned Inoue and Gross tend to be optimistic and altruistic. They pursue new products and new technologies with the best of intentions in the belief that their efforts will better and advance humankind.

Unfortunately, these best-laid plans are usually usurped by the law of unintended – and sometimes intended – consequences. A scene in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind about the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 directly relates. The Clarence Darrow-based character played by Spencer Tracy tells the Tennessee jury considering the legality of teaching evolution in public schools that:

“Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says: ‘All right, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance.’ ‘Madam, you may vote, but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat.’ ‘Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline.’”

In our modern world, the consequences of new technologies seem to have become more sinister and calculating, often, even frequently, purposely subverted and misused for greedy, criminal, or downright evil intent. Electricity meant to lighten a dark world gave rise to the electric chair. Airplanes designed to shorten distances so people can travel and experience a world outside their own become tools to deliver death and destruction from the sky. Radio, television, and the internet created to more quickly disseminate news and information vital to a healthy democracy soon become distractions from achieving that very purpose. Social media provides powerful unfiltered, unvetted platforms to those intent on inflicting humiliation, spreading inconceivable lies, and promoting previously hidden hate.

Now that I got that off my chest….

One insanely popular new device in 1979 unintentionally contributed to our social isolation and division to become the symbol of 1980s self-indulgence. And, like most new devices, it was created under the most innocent of circumstances and quickly adopted for completely understandable reasons.

Walkman

In February 1979, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka told the company’s audio division president Norio Ohga that he’d be flying to the U.S. the following month. Ibuka asked Ohga if it would be possible to cobble together a portable music player so he could listen to stereo recordings on the flight. In just four days, Sony’s engineers removed the speaker and the recording assembly from one of the company’s piano key-style mono home cassette recorders and installed stereo circuitry and amplification in their place. To the engineer’s surprise, the stereo sound the jury-rigged unit produced in headphones was – great.

Ibuka was thrilled. When he returned home from his trip, he showed the makeshift player to Sony’s other co-founder and company chair, Akio Morita. Enchanted, Morita borrowed the player for the weekend, showing it off to his golf buddies and his family, everyone expressing equal enchantment and surprise at how good the stereo sound was. Buoyed by the results of his abbreviated weekend focus group study, Morita wanted to turn the player into an actual product. Morita was convinced that kids, already toting portable radios and boomboxes, would love a light and cheap private music player.

Despite the short production schedule, the first Sony Walkman – officially model TPS-L2 – along with headphones weighing a mere 1.4 ounces, went on sale in Japan on July 1, 1979, for $125.

Morita’s confidence was quickly rewarded – the first 30,000 Walkman units sold out by September. Walkman’s popularity in Japan actually stalled its introduction in the U.S. and Europe – the company couldn’t make them fast enough.

When the Walkman finally showed up in the U.S. in June 1980, however, Sony’s wariness about its name meant that Walkman was initially dubbed the “Sound-About.” But with its newsworthy sales success in Japan and ravenous customer anticipation everywhere else, everyone around the world referred to it as “Walkman,” and the name finally was adopted in every market worldwide.

Not surprisingly, dozens of other bandwagon-jumping companies sold their own personal stereo cassette players, which everyone also called “Walkman,” much to Sony’s dismay. The popularity of personal audio players also sparked an explosion in third-party headphone vendors.

Over the next decade, Sony alone sold 50 million Walkmans, and the personal cassette player became the symbol of the “Me” generation. Walkman and its copycats completely altered how we commuted to work, exercised, and tolerated long plane flights. By 1983, thanks to the Walkman, the audiocassette had usurped the vinyl record as the leading format for pre-recorded music and would remain the dominant music format for nearly a decade.

And, of course, the concept of personal audio introduced by the Walkman laid the foundation for the development and success of digital audio players such as the iPod 20 years later.

You can read my more detailed Walkman development story here.

Digital Audio

For more than a century, music was recorded in analog waveforms and recorded onto and played back from discs with grooves etched into them or from magnetic tape. These recording media, however, each had flaws – vinyl only held around 45 minutes of music, but more copious cassettes weren’t exactly high fidelity and had the habit of being eaten by tape machines.

However, several technologies needed to be created and perfected before music could be delivered and listened to in a higher quality, roomier, and sturdier form.

The idea of “sampling” an analog sound waveform to create a stream of millions of binary pulses to represent that sound, thereby eliminating extraneous errors, noise and other aural impurities, dates back to the 1920s to work by Bell Labs engineer Harry Nyquist. In 1937, an English researcher, Alec Reeves, patented Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). However, the technology of the time was not capable of performing this sampling. It required the invention of the transistor in 1947.

Dr. Claude Shannon’s foundational 1948 “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” paper that laid the foundations of information theory, explained that “bits,” short for binary digits, could carry information in a digital form. Shannon, working with Bernard “Barney” Oliver, later the founder and first director of Hewlett-Packard’s research labs, and John Pierce, who named the transistor, developed a commercially viable PCM method and patented an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to transmit multiple phone conversations over a single set of wires. But it would be more than 30 years before PCM and the ADC could be commercialized into a consumer product for music.

The laser had a slightly earlier conception but a longer gestation. In 1917, Albert Einstein posited that light could be amplified and stimulated to form a powerful beam. In 1958, simultaneous with a pair of Soviet physicists, Columbia University scientists Drs. Arthur Schawlow and Charles H. Townes, who earlier had built the maser, a microwave amplifier, outlined the workings of the “laser” – Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The term was actually coined in 1959 by Columbia University researcher Gordon Gould, who sketched out the technology’s first practical scheme. A year later, Dr. Theodore Maiman actually built the first working laser, but it would be another 20 years before the laser was incorporated into a practical consumer product.

PCM and the laser needed a third technology before they could be applied to digital music recording and reproduction – optical recording.

In the mid-1960s, researcher and audiophile, James T. Russell at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Richland, Washington, was tired of having his vinyl records wear out. He started to tinker with PCM digital recording, lasers, and celluloid film media, and in 1970, patented a method to record sound on and playback from a rectangular 3×5-inch glass plate with photo-sensitive coating, using a laser to read the digitized music.

Digital recording technology also was being explored by several mainstream consumer electronics and record companies. In 1979, Sony, Philips, and PolyGram, led by Philips’ researcher Kees Schouhammer Immink and Piet Kramer, head of the company’s optical research group, began collaboration on a form of Russell’s system called the compact disc or CD. Instead of mechanical analog recording, music was encoded digitally in binary code onto a five-inch disc covered with a protective clear plastic coating and read by a laser.

Unlike fragile vinyl records, the CD would not deteriorate with continued play, was less vulnerable to scratching and damage from incidental everyday handling, held twice as much music as a vinyl LP, and didn’t need to be flipped over.

On October 1, 1982, in Japan, Sony released the first CD player, the CDP-101, and the first CD – Billy Joel’s “52nd Street.” The CD was an immediate sensation, although the tech needed work. The booming cannons on early CD versions of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” sounded more like someone was pounding a pillow, for instance, and there was a wide audio quality gap between CDs containing produced from analog recordings and new titles digitally recorded.

In all events, CDs became more plentiful after an initial dearth of titles, and digital recording techniques improved geometrically producing better-sounding discs. By 1988, sales of more smaller, more convenient, and heartier CDs surpassed those of vinyl records in the U.S., and portable CD players with digital buffers to forestall digital skipping started to replace audio cassette players.

Sony CDP-101 CD player (image credit: Sony)

In 1988, sales of CDs surpassed vinyl records in the U.S.; in 1993, CDs surpassed the pre-recorded cassette as the U.S.’s top format for prerecorded music. Audio components that were liberally tagged as “digital ready,” although what that exactly meant wasn’t always clear. Many new stereo and A/V receivers did contain either optical or coaxial digital inputs – or both – and several component makers experimented with powered digital speakers that did not require an intervening connection to an amplifier.

While Russell was seen as the father of the CD, he never saw a penny from its market success. After several court cases, Sony, Philips, and Time Warner were ordered to pay royalties on Russell’s optical recording patents. But his patents belonged to the companies for whom he worked, and they reaped all the resulting CD financial rewards.

Other than audiophiles complaining that even the best CDs lacked vinyl’s warm sound, CD suffered two problems as a portable format. First, unlike audio cassettes, you couldn’t create personalized mix discs; the first consumer recordable CD decks wouldn’t appear until 1990. Worse, personal CD players, even with digital buffers, still skipped, provided shorter battery life, and were bulkier and heavier than their tape player alternatives, and you had to carry around a large collection of CDs if you wanted a bit of variety.

Next week we’ll explore the technology that would lead to – among a host of other things – a personal music solution that solved all these portable play problems by eliminating physical media, tape or disc, entirely.

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