High Fidelity, or Just Rambling?

High Fidelity.  What an elusive concept, eh?  I think a lot of males my age (we grew up in the 70’s) tend to want a certain degree of great sound from their stereo that you cannot get from an ipod in a docking station with two 2 ½” speakers eight inches apart and a 3” subwoofer.  Sure, that thing can be surprisingly better sounding than you would have ever imagined in 1977, but an H.H. Scott receiver and a pair of some long lost to time bookshelf speakers an old girlfriend of mine had handed down from her brother would put that ipod dock to shame.  Not that I had anything that nice back then (I was positively green with envy the day we hooked it up!), but kids my age usually tried to get a decent stereo.

That picture above is the first real stereo I ever owned.  My dad had a little Webcor stereo with a small record changer built in to an AM/FM receiver.  The speakers were 4” cones and weren’t much to write home about.  I saved a lot of money (for me, anyway) and bought this GE stereo.  It was an AM/FM receiver with a phono input and an AUX jack, with a built in 8 track player.  It came with two speakers.  The phono input was just a line level, and my first “turntable” was a shitty BSR changer with a plastic woodgrain base and a ceramic cartridge.  The GE system had pretty decent speakers, though.  They had an 8” woofer and a 3 ½” tweeter.  So yeah, the tweeter wasn’t exactly accurate and good at imaging, but it was damned good with electric guitars!  That thing played surprisingly loud, had bass that didn’t offend me, and best of all, it was durable.  I would bet that had my BiL not wrangled it from me, it would still be working.  He put the speakers on the outside of his garage and left the receiver in the garage for his daughters to use by the pool.  Rain, snow, heat and cold killed the speakers and I don’t know what happened to the receiver part.  It’s a little sad now that I think about it.

That stereo and I got through me growing up.  I also had an old pair of JVC closed back headphones with a volume knob on (I think) the left ear cup.  They were okay, but I got better ones.  I can remember lying in bed late at night and listening to WCSB or even WMMS and hearing all the underground music of the times.  I liked my headphones, and I could just blast them really loud and feel totally lost in whatever it was I was listening to.   I remember one day after my JVC phones crapped out but before I got a new pair I laid on the floor with the speakers on either side of my head at full blast so I could better appreciate Roxy Music Live at Hammersmith Odeon 1979.  I can still hear, and I still have that bootleg record.

I really liked the blue lighted tuner dial.  It was a great color of blue and I don’t know why stereo’s don’t always use blue lights.  They just look really cool if you ask me.  I used to have a bunch of beer lights and a really weird 7UP can that had a big light bulb in it that also had a huge filament that went around a magnet, and when I turned it on the filament it would flick back and forth.  I had some really weird lighting in there, and I thought it was cool.  I used to sit in there in my weird light and listen to Yes and The Doors lying on the floor for hours.  Eventually I got to move my stereo to a room in the back of the house, and that was beyond cool!  I had a couch and it was just a great place to hang out.  I wish my parents had been the kind that let me smoke back then, but they weren’t (if you wondered, I quit long, long ago).  So it wasn’t always cool to hang out at my house, but I still had my moments.

Eventually I got my first Dual turntable from some old stereo shop in my downtown.  I bought records from the guy, too.  I think I still have several of them, and by now some of them are actually pretty valuable.  I think my first Dual was a 1009, and it was pretty old and looked it.  But it was kinder to my records, that’s for sure.  After a while I ended up getting two more small speakers (my receiver had a Quadra Fi button,  and it was cool to have two more speakers.   But then I got a real turntable.  I got a used 1219 with some kind of Audio Technica cart on it, and it sounded great!  I used that until I bought my first big boy stereo.  I wonder what happened to it?  There are people online that would like that old thing.  I bet it’s in a landfill, though.

I can remember coming home from swimming practice and listening to Suzi Quatro or some other such thumpy noise.  I learned a lot from that stereo.  I learned what I wanted from ever stereo from then on.  I wanted some high notes and I wanted a richer bass.  But I also wanted to make sure it would play as loudly as I wanted it without distorting, which my GE did with apparent ease.  I also learned that I didn’t care what anyone else thought about my stereo, because I bought it because I like the way it sounds.  And that’s important!  I remember some girl’s older brother telling me he bought a new receiver at Radio Shack and I think I said, “Isn’t all their stuff shitty?”  He showed me his new receiver and it was one of those monster mega watt things with like fifty knobs and dials on it.  I was blown away!  He had the Realistic Mach One’s hooked up to it and that thing was amazing.  It took up his whole bedroom, but it was worth it, and I had no problems appreciating that thing and asking him about stereo equipment all the time back then.  I knew one day I wanted something like that, but I never did get one of those huge receivers.  They’re just too big.

My little GE and a bunch of older girls seem to me to be the main thing that helped shape my musical tastes.  It’s weird being the oldest.  My parents didn’t have records I wanted to listen to.  I wanted to listen to music kids listened to.  I think from guys I got my appreciation of stuff like Grand Funk, but I think the girls I knew tended to encourage me to listen to Yes and anything else that was something I could feel a personal connection to.  The girl that played Patti Smith for me told me to never buy records to keep in my collection for other people.  She said I’d never play them, and I learned that with a couple of Led Zeppelin albums that I gave away.  I sure do miss all those old days where all the music seemed so new and my very own stereo turned me onto those sounds.  Not that I don’t have my very own stereo (I have one that works really well for me), but it’s funny that so many of those people I used to talk to about music all the time seem to have put that part of their life in the same landfill as my old GE stereo.  I wonder if they ever miss it?