Throwback Thursday

A momentous occasion in the evolution of recorded music occurred 20 years ago when a California district court ruled to allow the sale of a curious new portable music player in the face of opposition from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Here’s a compressed history of the events surrounding the birth of the MP3 player.

Twenty-two years ago this month, Silicon Valley startup WebTV made a noble effort to bring the internet to the big screen with the launch of a set-top box that connected any TV to the internet. Noble because the World Wide Web was a wide-open frontier with only 36 million users worldwide. (Today, more than 4 billion people are online.) A good 92% of the American public had yet to even experience the internet let alone think about searching the web on their TV. Oh, and internet access in those days was via a “dial-up” phone connection.

Americans love nostalgia. A few weeks ago a construction crew dismantled the iconic AMPEX sign along Highway 101 in Redwood City, California and many people in the community were not happy.

Nineteen years ago this month, Sound & Vision had just published its fifth issue. The cover featured the “world’s biggest TV” — an 80-inch Mitsubishi rear-projection TV that was positively huge by today’s skinny-TV standards.

The results of blind listening tests with eleven audio experts.

Editor's Note, 2018: In the early 1980s, esoteric high-end audio as we know it today was just taking off as an alternative to the mass-market equipment offered in neighborhood TV/appliance stores. Fueled by an underground audio press that included magazines and newsletters such as Sound & Vision sister publication Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, International Audio Review, The Audio Critic, and others, a cottage industry emerged, one populated by small manufacturers of low-volume, high-priced exotica claiming greater faithfulness to the music than the gear reviewed and advertised in the pages of Stereo Review, High Fidelity, Audio, et al.

Our modern AV world arguably all stems from a single product: the Ampex 200A, the first successful commercial magnetic audiotape recorder, which debuted 70 years ago this month.