Another Reason the Old Days Weren’t So Great: Car Audio

Even though I write a lot about old cars, I still think they were actually pretty terrible. If you're over 35, you probably remember how broken-down cars with the hood up were once an every-half-mile sight on the shoulders of American highways during heat waves… and then there's the crummy— yet expensive— sound you once got from car audio systems. Let's take a tour of Radio Shack's car-audio accessories for the 1966-1986 period, shall we? Yesterday, I was thinking about the inherent terribleness of AM radio, and that reminded me of the scrawky 9-volt-battery-powered transistor radios you used to see all the time during the 70s, which led to a recollection of (and inevitable Google search for) Radio Shack's brightly-colored "Flavoradios." From there, it was just a quick jump to the amazing Radio Shack Catalogs website, which has scans of just about every page of just about every Radio Shack catalog going back to 1940. We've become accustomed to electronic equipment being quite cheap, but it was not always so. In 1986, for example, Radio Shack's best 30-watt(!) AM/FM/cassette stereo sold for $299.95. That's $615.61 in 2012 bucks! Nowadays, even the most desperate crackhead won't bother to bust your car window to steal a CD player, much less a cassette deck. from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com

puts the internet to work for you. via task 680102