Featured Classic

Rear View Mirror: Highway Hi-Fi

For as long as people have been driving, they’ve been looking for ways to entertain themselves while doing so. Conversation was one possibility, but since many drivers are guys, it’s likely that a search for other options soon followed. The earliest and longest tenured of these driving diversions is radio. In recent times, the over-the-airwaves broadcasts have been joined by hundreds of satellite channels. But, as with television, the sheer volume of selections is no guarantee that you’ll find anything worthwhile. The desire to personally select the soundtrack for one’s road trip led to the development of a series of devices over the years. Many drivers today plug their iPod or media player into their car’s sound system. Before iPods, CD players were the preferred packaging for mobile music. CD’s were preceded by cassettes, and previous to that, 8-track tapes. Earlier still, we had record players. No, really – there once were record players in cars.
The original, automotive record player was the Highway Hi-Fi. It was developed by Peter Goldmark, manufactured by CBS Laboratories, and first made available in select, 1956 Chrysler products. The system was mounted in a shock-resistant case, mounted below the dashboard, and played through the car’s radio speaker. Though they looked alike, the system’s 7” records weren’t the same as the then-familiar 45’s. The Hi-Fi’s platters were thicker, for one thing, to withstand warping from summertime heat. The disks had a very tight (“ultra-microgroove”) pitch, and spun at slower (16-2/3 rpm) rotation speed. Goldmark’s design made the disks less susceptible to disruption by bumps in the road. It also allowed more content to be packed onto each, mini LP: up to 45 minutes of music, or an hour’s worth of speech per side. Buyers of the record player were supplied with six disks initially. The selection included a Tchaikovsky symphony, the score from a Broadway musical (The Pajama Game), “quiet jazz” by Paul Weston, “romantic moods” by Percy Faith, even dramatic readings (Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell”). Notably absent were any rock and roll records. Though rock was already rolling by ’56, it’s apparent that CBS and Chrysler assumed that their customers wouldn’t be early adopters of the fledgling, musical form. One concession to kids was the inclusion in the Hi-Fi disks of Davey Crockett and Gene Autry selections, “ready at hand”, the press release assured parents, “to help keep them quiet”. The total available records numbered just 42, all of which could only be purchased through Columbia Records. The inability of the Hi-Fi to play the far more diverse and readily available supply of commercial 45’s tamped down buyer interest, as did the system’s tendency to skip, when driving over rough road (a trait that it shared, oddly enough, with its spiritual successor the CD, decades later). Sales of the Highway Hi-Fi were soft, and that – along with apparent, service issues – led Chrysler to drop the option in early 1957. The idea was resurrected by Chrysler a few years later; this time, with a record player built by RCA. While this system would play standard, over-the-counter 45’s – an obvious improvement – it was even more skip-prone than the original system. After a two year run (1960-61), it too was dropped from the option sheet. However, the pursuit of portable tunes continued. Ford introduced the first, factory installed 8-track tape player in 1965.