Diatribe: Yesterday’s ‘radios’ are today’s ‘audio systems’

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Updated: December 6, 2011 4:09PM

If you examine any promotional literature for new vehicles, a lot of verbiage is geared toward audio systems.

It seems that in order to get the full impact of a song you have to have a 10,000-watt, 5-million amp, super double-tweeter system that will double the base price of the vehicle to the options column. In other words, you may have purchased a car for $15,995 (plus destination and delivery charges, or course), but the “available” audio package may add another $115,000 to the vehicle’s cost.

I guess it’s worth it to some people, because if they didn’t have a stereo system that can break out windows like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie they’re not satisfied.

I thought about these things the other day as I sat alongside some pimple-faced kid driving a beater Honda Accord. As I sat at the stoplight listening to his bass beat against my head, I had to use a Kleenex to try to stop the blood squirting out of my eardrums. When I finally got home I was temporarily deafened; since I couldn’t hear the television set I got to reflecting about vehicle entertainment systems.

As many of you know from reading my questionably sane columns, I’m old enough to have had a teacup triceratops as a pet when I was a young lad growing up in Valparaiso, Ind. Furthermore, my family owned auto junkyards, so I spent my formative years around cars that dated back to the Stone Age. We used to get a lot of over-the-road truckers who stopped in to buy car radios to while away the lonely miles on the road. There weren’t any fancy “systems” back then. They bought a radio from a 1949 Ford that brought in only one kind of bandwidth — AM.

Generally these truckers would only listen to hillbilly music, so their needs were limited. They’d aim their Peterbilts or Mack diesels down the road while listening to songs about wives sleeping with the plumber or the kid who mowed lawns because “their man was always on the road and they were lonely.” (Just the sort of “mood music” that’s soothing to guys who generally have a loaded gun with them.)

Then some manufacturers started offering radios with “slide bars” on them – the first examples of “seek and scan.” You’d push this bar and it would seek out a station and stay there. Technology was just coming to the radio. The next revolution: FM. Stations were clear, offered a lot of music choices with limited commercials (advertisers weren’t all that positive of its acceptance) and would even keep its signal while going through tunnels.

Then some manufacturers got clever and jumped on the transistor radio band wagon (pardon the pun). I recall that my family had a new 1958 Oldsmobile that had a removable transistor radio that could be taken to the beach or on a picnic.

Some of the big-name stereo component manufacturers like Sony, Panasonic, Bose, etc., started developing speakers and other sound enhancements and automakers would tout those in their advertising and dealer brochures. Skip ahead to the current day and unless a customer specifies he or she wants only a basic radio (defined as AM/FM/MP3 at a minimum), then they’d better be prepared to do some heavy-duty research on just what they’ll be getting in an enhanced system.

Do you see a pattern developing here? There are no “radios” anymore; they’re “systems.” When coupled with things like satellite-based navigation, high-density satellite radio, pen pals from Mars and beyond Uranus, etc., the audiophile quotient has been multiplied several times over.

Truth be told, I’m a major proponent of satellite radio. My only complaint is the increasing number of commercials on stations whose original charter (I thought) was commercial-free, nationwide radio broadcasting; but I guess the revenue is needed to keep the content affordable for the average Joe.

Outside of listening to the golden oldies stations, I generally listen to talk radio and news stations. I’m not going out on a limb to say that most people in my age group — and even a generation back — have the same interests. Sure, I like watching Fergie shake her stuff on television, but I don’t want to listen to the rest of the Black Eyed Peas shouting out a song on the radio (there’s that word “radio” again) when I could be listening to the news of the day.

Just like the oldsters who like to brag about walking 135 miles to school and back, uphill both ways, so too do they like to discuss how few times they were able to tune in to a radio station in their 1948 Buick Super and leave the channel knob in one place. Maybe it’s because us Piltdown Men don’t adapt to change very well. Either that or it’s just another “system” we’re fighting against. We’re old, you know, and get confused easily.

Al Vinikour is a Midwest-based freelance auto writer. Proving a mind is a “terrible thing to use” he sometimes sits in traffic and ponders about things — generally auto-related — that make him mad. Believing the “pen is mightier than the sword” (and generally results in a whole lot less jail time), he vents his anger through a word processor and produc