Throwback Thursday

In 1972, three friends from Johns Hopkins set out to capture the wonder of the live concert experience and bring it home. With a handmade wooden logo, a passion for music, and keys to a ramshackle Victorian rooming house, a famous audio company was born. Can you identify the one or more of the three young lads in the photo?

Forty-three years ago this month, Sony introduced the Betamax videocassette recorder in America, a month after the iconic product made its worldwide debut in Japan.

Julian Hirsch’s review of the Bose 901 in 1968 helped set off one of the greatest and longest-lasting audiophile debates.

There may be no singular product in modern audio history that has generated more accolades, derision, or pure controversy than the Bose 901 loudspeaker. Introduced in 1968 by a then four-year-old concern named after its MIT-educated founder, the 901 neither looked, nor sounded, like any speaker that had come before it. With its pentagonal cabinet that faced eight of its nine identical 4-inch, full-range drivers at the reflecting wall behind the speaker, its designer Amar Bose sought to have it mimic the way we hear in concert halls and imbue its sound with a giant soundstage and spatial realism that was unsurpassed.

For decades, the cartoons of Charles Rodrigues poked fun at us and the hobby we otherwise take all too seriously.

In the very first issue of HiFi & Music Review in 1958, the magazine that became Stereo Review and then Sound & Vision, a gifted 31-year-old artist named Charles Rodrigues contributed the first in a string of cartoons that both celebrated, and made fun of, that odd bird known as the audiophile. It ended up being a long run that lasted more than 40 years.

Nineteen years ago this week, the second issue of Stereo Review’s Sound & Vision hit newsstands. Stunning cover (and content) notwithstanding, the 152-page second act of the magazine that replaced Stereo Review (which enjoyed a prosperous 40-year run) and Video (which was the videophile’s go-to magazine for 21 years) was met with much praise…but not everyone was happy.

Ten years ago this week, a protracted format war between the Sony’s Blu-ray format and the Toshiba-backed HD DVD format, each vying to be the anointed successor to DVD, was averted when Toshiba announced that it would stop making HD DVD players, even though close to a million players had been sold and more than 400 HD DVD titles had been released in the U.S.