Throwback Thursday

Twenty-five years ago this week a little-known band from Seattle called Nirvana released their second album, Nevermind.

Fifteen years ago Al Griffin and David Ranada teamed up to conduct a double-blind listening test with a half dozen $300-a-pair bookshelf speakers. (Gotta love those Sam Sisco caricatures!) Models from Acoustic Energy, Boston Acoustics, Jamo, KEF, Monitor Audio, and NHT were set up in two groups of three with each stereo pair situated so the “listener only had to turn his head slightly to bring the sonic image of each pair into focus.”

Say what you will about Abba but the ‘70s pop band is able to lay claim a small but significant piece of tech history. The Swedish group’s final studio album The Visitors was the world’s first commercially produced CD when it rolled off the production line 34 years ago this week at the Philips/Polygram-owned CD manufacturing plant in Langenhagen, Germany.

Enjoy this multi-part collage recalling long-forgotten audio brands, represented here by iconic advertising of the day.

Last week we presented a selection of iconic ’70s-era advertisements from long-forgotten brands with names that fall in the first half of the alphabet (A–M). Our favorites included the Carver ad showing a young Bob Carver hamming it up, Garrard’s “Improve Your Hearing for $200” turntable ad, and the iconic Maxell ad depicting a listener getting “blown away.” Here we pick up where we left off, starting with classics from Nakamichi, Nikko, and Optonica. Watch for Part 3, our final installment, next week.

Few products have the power to single-handedly change the course of history. Thirty-seven years ago this month Sony introduced a portable cassette player that would forever change the way we experience music on-the-go.

Electricity. The force behind everything readers of this magazine cherish. Try to imagine a world without it. Impossible. 264 years ago this month Benjamin Franklin—inventor, entrepreneur, and one of America’s founding fathers—hypothesized that lightning was an electrical phenomenon that could be transferred to another object and set out to prove it by flying a kite during a thunderstorm.