Remember the Transistor Radio?

[MikeRivers]

This day in 1954, Regency introduced the first commercially built portable transistor radio. It cost $49.95, about $420 in today's dollars - roughly the same as an iPod with 32 GB of memory.

 

The cost for portable entertainment hasn't changed very much, has it?

[A. Einstein]

also the transported message hasn't change much since the people's receiver (Volksempf

[Lee Knight]

This is the type I had when I was 10 or so, circa '69. It had a single plasitc in ear. Sugar, Sugar, Tommy Roe's Dizzy, all the Grass Roots hits... totally rocked on one of these. Rams games too... Go Roman Gabriel!

 

[PermaNoobie]

 

This day in 1954, Regency introduced the first commercially built portable transistor radio. It cost $49.95, about $420 in today's dollars - roughly the same as an iPod with 32 GB of memory. The cost for portable entertainment hasn't changed very much, has it?

 

 

I don't think it's that great of an analogy.

These days you can have a personal DAP for a substantially lower price than that

 

Also the TR-1 was, like you say, a tech breakout product whereas the iPod was more a marketing blockbuster of established tech (I had been happily using DAPs for a few years by the time iPods came out)

 

I hope that didn't sound like an Apple bash, it wasn't intended as one - I just think the role of the two products is substantially different and their relative prices don't reflect the same area of the Rogers curve

[WRGKMC]

I remember having a portable Tube radio we would bring to the beach. Had a couple of high voltage batteries in there.

The only thing that was new with the transistor radio was the fact it was smaller and had a single battery.

japan imported millions of them and they werent very good on quality.

 

I still remember the back of magazines like Popular Mechanics where they would have adds for the ones that were pen sized.

 

Of course you could build a Crystal radio to pick up local stations too. I must have built dozens of them as a kid. Not exactly high fidelity

but they were portable if you had a long enough antenna to connect it to. No batteries needed either.

[A. Einstein]

best guitar amp ever

 

 

[A. Einstein]

2nd best mastering processor, after the radio guitar amp above

 

 

 

[thankyou]

best guitar amp ever

 

My dad (mostly) and I built a mono hi-fi amp from a kit that was made by a company called Pilot. It has a lot of the same tubes as an old Fender Deluxe - 6V6's, 12ax7's and a 5y-something rectifier. I still harbor the dream of cleaning it up, checking it out, and hooking it to one of the old 12" bell backed Jensens I have from a sixties home made 4X12.

[ggm1960]

This is the type I had when I was 10 or so, circa '69. It had a single plasitc in ear. Sugar, Sugar, Tommy Roe's Dizzy, all the Grass Roots hits... totally rocked on one of these. Rams games too... Go Roman Gabriel!

 

Almost the same thing I would have posted except the part about the Rams, never did follow sports much, and I don't know what brand I had, palm size black plastic case, perhaps Panasonic. Reminds me of my youth, Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood. Dizzy was my favorite song!

[MikeRivers]

 

I don't think it's that great of an analogy. These days you can have a personal DAP for a substantially lower price than that

 

 

I think it's a great analogy. So there! Back then, there was only one transistor radio, and today there's only one 32 GB iPod. Both provide music and other forms of entertainment, but in different ways, but that's the way it goes with progress. All you had to do was turn on the radio and you'd get music or news. With the iPod you have to load it with files first, that you obtained with a different process. And if you want news or a ball game, you'd have to find a web site or on-line radio service that's streaming it (and maybe have to pay by the kilobyte to listen if you don't have access to a free WiFi connection). That's progress for you!

 

I have an MP3 player that I take with me when I travel. It cost $15. But in all but the basic function of providing sound on the go, it's not the same as either a radio or an iPod.

 

 

I hope that didn't sound like an Apple bash

 

 

No, just a Mike bash

 

 

I just think the role of the two products is substantially different and their relative prices don't reflect the same area of the Rogers curve

 

 

You can over-analyze this if that's the way you work. I just thought it was an interesting observation - music on the go from two very different products 47 years apart.

[blue2blue]

 

This day in 1954, Regency introduced the first commercially built portable transistor radio. It cost $49.95, about $420 in today's dollars - roughly the same as an iPod with 32 GB of memory. The cost for portable entertainment hasn't changed very much, has it?

And yet I still can't seem to reliably get music reception on my 3G smartphone...*

 

Thank heaven for SD chip memory.

 

And, at least it was 'free.'

 

 

But I still love walking down the street, listening tot he tinny music coming out the wee speaker.

 

 

 

*It is, however, in most other ways, an exemplary device. And when it's on WiFi instead of 3G, it certainly rocks.

[Lee Knight]

Almost the same thing I would have posted except the part about the Rams, never did follow sports much, and I don't know what brand I had, palm size black plastic case, perhaps Panasonic. Reminds me of my youth, Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood. Dizzy was my favorite song!

 

North Hollywood? I thought you were Iowa born and raised... North Hollywood and no Rams?!?! Well, me niether any more... I still like Dizzy though.

[ggm1960]

North Hollywood? I thought you were Iowa born and raised... North Hollywood and no Rams?!?! Well, me niether any more... I still like Dizzy though.

 

I'm a transplant. I did get a Rams jersey one year for Christmas. I was taken to a couple of Dodgers games but I was only interested in the hot dogs.

[rasputin1963]

In 1969, I was 6 and in First Grade, at St. Mark's Episcopal School.

 

My teacher, Miss Ruby Mahan, was about 70 years old. In 1969, she still wore a marcelled fingerwave bob hairdo, as though it were still 1930.

 

We would have nap period, in which we kids were to lie on mats on the floor and rest for an hour.

 

My father then was a highly-visible politician and city planner who was often being interviewed on AM talk radio. I remember Miss Mahan would be listening to Tom East's discussion show on KITE-AM during our naps.

 

She would quietly motion me to come up to her desk during naptime... I felt privileged to be momentarily excused from naptime, while the other six-year-olds slept. Miss Mahan would remove her beige plastic earpiece, connected by a "peppermint" spiralled cord to the beige and chrome transistor radio in her lap, and instruct me to put it in my own ear.

 

Receiving it, I remember the translucent yellow-beige earpiece was encrusted with yellow and gold wax from her ears.

 

But I stuck it in, so I could hear my Dad on the radio.

[rasputin1963]

This is the type I had when I was 10 or so, circa '69. It had a single plasitc in ear. Sugar, Sugar, Tommy Roe's Dizzy, all the Grass Roots hits... totally rocked on one of these. Rams games too... Go Roman Gabriel!

 

 

In those days, those pop hits were carefully mastered to sound well.... or at least discernible.... on those transistor's speakers. That limitation, rather than ruining pop mixes, constrained them in a very crisp way, and that's why all those records still sound so tight and so "right". (IMHO)

[Lee Knight]

In those days, those pop hits were carefully mastered to sound well.... or at least discernible.... on those transistor's speakers. That limitation, rather than ruining pop mixes, constrained them in a very crisp way, and that's why all those records still sound so tight and so "right". (IMHO)

 

Absolutely. That's why I wanted and got a Victrola. Those records sound great on Victrola. The Toscanini and the Caruso or early Casals. Not so good on CD. The limitations of a medium are sometimes its charm.

 

It's interesting to remember what something like Spirit in the Sky or Satisfaction sounded like on a little radio. Buzz guitars and ratty snare and a suggestion of bass somehow. We adjust to the new world presented to us. The one where there's nothing above 3k or below 300. It's fine. It's beautiful even.

 

 

I love the ear wax detail. Very cool story.

[blue2blue]

 

I remember having a portable Tube radio we would bring to the beach. Had a couple of high voltage batteries in there. The only thing that was new with the transistor radio was the fact it was smaller and had a single battery. japan imported millions of them and they werent very good on quality. I still remember the back of magazines like Popular Mechanics where they would have adds for the ones that were pen sized. Of course you could build a Crystal radio to pick up local stations too. I must have built dozens of them as a kid. Not exactly high fidelity but they were portable if you had a long enough antenna to connect it to. No batteries needed either.

My family had an old battery powered AM radio from the early 50s or maybe late 40s. (It looked as old and grungy as sin when I found it in the late 50s. I also found my dad's stash of pretty much inoperable wire recorders. And a couple of his pistols. Different time.)

 

I actually ordered one of those $1.75 pen sized portable radios... although, instead of the pen shape, it was trendily Sputnik-shaped. It had a little stainless steel 'antenna' (that was really the core of an inductor loop -- you'd try to use that for 'tuning').

 

We were near a 50KW station and that came in -- as long as I clipped the ground alligator clip to some bare metal plumbing -- meaning I had to listen to my 'portable' radio while sitting on top of the washing machine in the laundry room, kind of leaning over, because that was as far as the headphone and ground wires stretched. Of course, it wasn't a transistor radio at all -- it was just an updated cat's whisker radio.

 

I think the sight of me bent over listening to my little 'portable' -- to a station I didn't even like -- was what finally prompted my folks to buy me a nice little transistor radio on my next birthday. (Also, the fact that my best friend had got a proper transistor radio the previous Christmas put the handwriting on their wall.)

 

At first, I was a little disappointed my radio only had 6 transistors -- since my best friend's had eight. But a few years later when I got more involved with electronics (building a pair of walkie talkies from an Allied Radio kit), I found from my reading that the so-called transistor wars were all marketing and that a perfectly good superhet circuit could be crafted using 6 transistors -- and, better yet, that most 'high count' transistor radios simply had superfluous transistors inserted into them -- often without even being connected.

[blue2blue]

 

And now thousands of billions of circuits later, there is no one around to tell us or show us how to live when the transistor age {or if you prefer, the more appropriate; technological age} is presenting your life to you on a realtime basis, in the form of a nonstop unmovable wall of image, information and sound that is more dense than all the nuerotransmitters you can muster at any given time... Whenever there is an informational overload, there is an equal and opposite correllating lack of understanding and capability to proccess said information. Resulting in an overabundance of half educated, half capable, half sane and half functional beings left to fend for themselves. More commonly reffered to as the United States Gov't and Federal Political System. Where's a real visionairy when you need one?

Gee... I honestly thought you were talking about the Tea Party movement right up to the end.

 

I agree with you about information overload, though.

 

And it does affect many, across all political spectra, seems to me. Way too many people seem to have simply given up trying to understand science and simply reject it.

[blue2blue]

Absolutely. That's why I wanted and got a Victrola. Those records sound great on Victrola. The Toscanini and the Caruso or early Casals. Not so good on CD. The limitations of a medium are sometimes its charm. It's interesting to remember what something like Spirit in the Sky or Satisfaction sounded like on a little radio. Buzz guitars and ratty snare and a suggestion of bass somehow. We adjust to the new world presented to us. The one where there's nothing above 3k or below 300. It's fine. It's beautiful even. I love the ear wax detail. Very cool story.

You really had a Victrola? That's pretty awesome. You could still find them sometimes in old folk's garages and attics (no basements 'round these parts to speak of... actually no real attics, either, not the kind with garret rooms and such) but, while I did have a full wind-up and then a hybrid (electric motor, acoustic sound head on the child's-arm-weight tone arm) 78 player, it was really for playing those little yellow kids' 78s that were still common in the 50s.

 

 

One good thing about being the only hi fi nut in my junior high school was that by the time I finally started listening to rock and roll again (or rock as we then knew it in the second half of the 60s; I gave up on it for much of the first half, when goopy, cornball "surf" vocals mostly pushed surf instrumentals off the radio; I was severely unimpressed by the Brit invasion at the time; I came back when blues and psychedelic influences started making rock interesting again), I had a decent enough sounding rig.

[Lee Knight]

 

You really had a Victrola?

 

 

No... I have a Victrola. I got it a year ago and it is fantastic. Nothing beats listening to Classical music from that era on a Victrola. It really sounds great. But you need to make sure you're getting 78s that were produced with the Victrola in mind, and not a 78 that had any electricity in its recording path. Those will play but aren't really the real deal. Acoustic recording/acoustic playback = awesome.

 

And... people just give the vinyl away. I answered a Craigslist, a guy cleaning out his garage, had a bunch of "crappy old records, really lame 78s". I took perfect quality, from the era, like new, albums and albums. Like the book type albums? Awesome. Perfect.

[blue2blue]

Some know how to read between the lines.

Thought I was...

 

 

I'll say this, though, when it comes to the US Patent and Trademark Office and some of the judiciary tasked to sit on IP-related cases, I think there's more than a small slice of pertinence in your explicit target. At least some of the IP rulings (in both the US and Europe, actually) strike me as smacking of failing to get it.

[blue2blue]

 

No... I have a Victrola. I got it a year ago and it is fantastic. Nothing beats listening to Classical music from that era on a Victrola. It really sounds great. But you need to make sure you're getting 78s that were produced with the Victrola in mind, and not a 78 that had any electricity in its recording path. Those will play but aren't really the real deal. Acoustic recording/acoustic playback = awesome. And... people just give the vinyl away. I answered a Craigslist, a guy cleaning out his garage, had a bunch of "crappy old records, really lame 78s". I took perfect quality, from the era, like new, albums and albums. Like the book type albums? Awesome. Perfect.

Slip of the keyboard, I suspect.

 

FWIW, I have a small stack of 78's on shellac. They're all electric-era recordings, presumably from the late 30s (when my old man was a teenager) to the late 40s.

 

 

When I was in 7th grade science class, we had someone's dad (I think it was) bring in an old, all acoustic wax cylinder recorder, probably from the tail end of the 19th century or first decade or two of the 20th. You had to pretty much yell into it to get more than a whisper out.

[sailorman]

My older brother, now 68, had a portable tube radio that he'd take to the beach. Seem to recall he had to fill it with "D" batteries, which were prone to leaking. Being my anal retentive brother, he still has the damned thing; along with his tape recorder, Heathkit Hi-fi and home built speaker.

 

I started with my first transistor radio when I was about 10, which was way cooler than his big thing and only needed a 9 volt battery. Which would also leak. My real prize was a portable Craig tape recorder, with 3" reel to reel tapes. I'd hold the mic up to the radio and make tapes. I had many tapes full of songs missing the first few seconds while I hit record. Thing still works..!!! So do the tapes. Finally moved on to 'real' stereo equipment and a ton of vinyl, which I still have in addition to CDs.

 

One difference between that 1st transistor radio and an iPod. That radio might still work today, 6 decades later. Doubt the iPod will be more than a paper weight after the first decade (just a personal pet peeve )

[Beck]

Best memories of transistor radio I have is listening to St. Louis Cardinals baseball with my dad in the late '60s/early '70s. I still have one of the old radios we used. It was a distant station so we always had the AM whistle or howling sound in the background, and a bit of signal fading. I got so used to it that listening to baseball without the whistling and static just doesn't sound right.

[blue2blue]

My older brother, now 68, had a portable tube radio that he'd take to the beach. Seem to recall he had to fill it with "D" batteries, which were prone to leaking. Being my anal retentive brother, he still has the damned thing; along with his tape recorder, Heathkit Hi-fi and home built speaker. I started with my first transistor radio when I was about 10, which was way cooler than his big thing and only needed a 9 volt battery. Which would also leak. My real prize was a portable Craig tape recorder, with 3" reel to reel tapes. I'd hold the mic up to the radio and make tapes. I had many tapes full of songs missing the first few seconds while I hit record. Thing still works..!!! So do the tapes. Finally moved on to 'real' stereo equipment and a ton of vinyl, which I still have in addition to CDs. One difference between that 1st transistor radio and an iPod. That radio might still work today, 6 decades later. Doubt the iPod will be more than a paper weight after the first decade (just a personal pet peeve )

The batteries in that transistor radio might not be rechargeable -- but they were easy to replace and they're still available today. Although they tend to cost (unadjusted for inflation) almost as much as a shirtpocket transistor radio cost at its very cheapest...

 

 

In the 60s, Craig was one of the few nameplates on Japanese gear that could give Sony a good run for its money, seemed like. My mom had a Craig AM-FM-SW radio we bought at one of the first discount joints to pop up in Orange County, CA. I thought it was a nice radio but the day I rigged up a kludge and plugged my then-new Koss Stereophones into its (mono) output jack, I was stupefied by the high quality sound it was capable of. I also plugged it into various speakers. Just for fun I once took it into the high end component stereo shop where they were nutty enough to let me hang out and hooked it up to a big, 4 way JBL speaker. Sounded great.

 

The Sony 5" reel, mono tape deck (a hybrid with transistor tape preamps but a tube amp) I got in the early 60s came with a plug and alligator clip patch cord. It didn't take me too long to figure I could clip those leads to the speaker lugs of various devices around the house and record 'directly' from them... I quickly replaced the miked recording I'd made from the TV of the Man from UNCLE theme with a more proper all-electronic pathway recording...