The Hub: Made in the USA: First in a series

The expression, "familiarity breeds contempt" is itself so familiar as to draw contempt. Nowhere is the expression truer than in America, land of Wal-Mart, SuperSize, and Open 24 Hours, where we demand the New, NOW, and kick aside the old and familiar. Nowhere is our fickleness more obvious than in the flavor-of-the-moment world of consumer electronics.

Don't believe it? Ask almost any American teen WHY they need a new cellphone, despite having one only a few months old. In the audio world, forget the tube/transistor debate; the significant epochs will one day be viewed as pre-iPod and post-iPod. Like it or not, change is the norm: in today's 500-channel world it's impossible to conceive of a TV show capturing American viewers as the Tonight Show once did. Given Best Buy, Audiogon and Amazon, can we imagine a world in which a speaker-maker has nearly a THIRD of the market?

But that's getting ahead of the story.

Yogi Berra once said, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." In theory, the consumer electronics business is an international one, without restrictions. In practice, there are constraints. For example: a variety of frequencies and voltages of household current make trade in amplifiers and players more difficult than it would be if AC standards were the same worldwide. Similarly, trade in large and heavy speakers is restricted by the sheer cost of shipping them around the world. Obviously, if the shipping costs approach the cost of the product itself, that's just not a commercially-viable product.

Now think back to a time when shipping was so cheap as to be almost inconsequential, at least within the USA. That period, roughly from the end of World War II to the first energy crisis in 1973, was perhaps not coincidentally the golden era of American Hi-Fi.

The end of the war saw a boom not just in babies but in electronics and in new forms of merchandising. Wartime training created a huge pool of talented engineers and technicians who needed work, following the diminution of the defense industry. Those same techies contributed to the creation of a buying public far more sophisticated than that of pre-war USA, when new gizmos were rarely purchased unless the OLD gizmo died.

Add to these elements vast warehouses of war-surplus radios, electronic components, and untold tons of tech toys, and you have a period of material and technical prosperity unmatched in human history. For those with a technical bent and an ability to work with their hands, even the sky was no longer the limit. Out of this pool of resources came the Californian Hot Rod culture, the Hi-Fi industry...and NASA.

Our concern today, however, is earthbound. The Hi-Fi business in America had its roots in the '20's and '30's , in the alarmingly-expensive radio consoles of E.H. Scott, McMurdo-Silver, and even RCA. Those radio- and radio-phono consoles were the first consumer products which sold the concept of "High Fidelity", occasionally even using that catchphrase in marketing. At the same time, fundamental research done by Bell Labs/Western Electric and RCA laid the way for broadcast and theater sound-systems, the technology from which found its way into products for the home.

Take that heritage and blend in the post-war elements of war-surplus and mail-order radio parts houses, and the modern Hi-Fi era begins. Magazines like Radio Electonics devoted more pages to amplifier and speaker projects, ads for kits, and finished products from brands such as McIntosh and Jensen. The final tipping-point which spurred mass interest in home Hi-Fi was the development of the LP by CBS Labs in 1948. Records were no longer limited to the 3 minutes per side common to 78 rpm records.

A flood of Hi-Fi companies appeared, most of whom are long forgotten. Once-prominent brands such as Fisher, Pilot, Bogen,and Jensen have either vanished altogether, or morphed into mere shadows of their former glory. One such phantasm was for 25 years the leader of the American audio industry, and was recognized worldwide for its quality and technical innovation. That brand was Acoustic Research.

Our next installment will look into the history of Acoustic Research and its best-known product, the AR 3a loudspeaker. Meanwhile, check out the AR family tree in our model database and feel free to search our discussion forums for our members' extensive experience with AR speakers, which were once among the best and best-known in the world.