Not Only is Stereo not Dead, It is in its Golden Age ...

November 1975, the Date when Sony opened Pandora's Box!

Why would I put a picture of the first Betamax player in an article about how Stereo is in the middle of it's golden age?  The conventional wisdom is that the VCR ushered in the doom ("Doom, I say!") of the home stereo, and we've watched a multiple decades death scene as people lose interest in stereo playback given the new options like home theater, mp3 players, and streaming services on headphones.

The golden age of stereo system was from about 1950 until about 1980 where people chose to fill their evenings with glorious music and companies poured their efforts and money into 2 channel playback ...

The conventional wisdom was right in its facts - but wrong in conclusion ...

The Thing is, the Golden Age, wasn't ...

Before the VCR, there were a few simple truths that is easy to forget if you are over 40, and unbelievable if you are under it:  The only commonly available source of prerecorded performances for the home was audio, period.  And it had been that way since the advent of recorded music in the 19th century.  Movies, and Broadcast (both radio and TV) were of the 'see it now or it's gone' variety - with few chances for catching something you missed.  For TV you had a chance catching it in the summer reruns .  For Movies, some would make it to the "dollar theater" before it departed forever.  Once in awhile, too, a TV station might broadcast a movie, too (usually hacked up for content and length, with all the curse words comically bleeped out).  Otherwise, you had to go to painful lengths to see a movie you might have missed entirely or read about that never made it to your city.  And given most Cinemas usually had "only" 1 or 2 screens (Really big ones had 4 to 6!), you could only be guaranteed access to the most popular movies as they parked in town for about a week before moving on.  What's the point to this, and what does a home stereo have to do with it?

Right up to 1975, this was IT if you wanted the convenience
of picking what you listened to and when ...

I suppose the right way to put home stereo in context here is to say the reason it was popular and ubiquitous was it was the only game in town for prerecorded performances.  It was the only way you got to control experiencing what you wanted to, when you wanted to - all you had to do was buy a few records and you were the one in charge.

Enter the VCR ...

I wonder if the mass market stereo gear makers understood how much their mass market would pull away to spending their money putting movies in their house?  I wonder if network executives knew that their choke-hold on the daily schedule of video entertainment was all but broken in late 1975 when the first VCR's went on sale?  Because right away, for around $1000 (About $5-6k in today's money), you were in a position to record TV shows, and you could play back any movie you could lay your hands on.  I remember when my best friend's family (whose father was an "early adopter") got a VCR.  When I was over at his house and we could rent and watch a bootleg copy of Star Wars, it was freedom and access like we never felt it.  We also could find and watch movies that we never even had heard of, that was made years before - which was all but impossible before.  Similar experiences happened as the VCR proliferated, and gave way to subsequent technologies.  This new capability gave nearly everyone who could afford a VCR access to things that had been essentially unavailable before.

The VCR changed everything, and then gave way to more ...

And after awhile we got access to everything through the internet.  This was even more immediate and varied than the VCR - be it music, movies, TV shows, books or any of a myriad ways of entertaining ourselves.  The changes are reverberating through our cultures, altering how we watch or listen to performances.  It is an incredible time, but one where no one media can take a front seat and gain most of anyone's attention.  We see that some fetishize some forms of media playback (meticulously reproduced home cinemas, or listening rooms for high end stereo gear that could warm an OCD neat-nik's heart), but right now, for most people, it is a wonderful pass to cultural artifacts both new and old we've never had before. 

The availability of so much, had a few unintended consequences - it knocked the king of home entertainment off it's throne, and continues knocking things off of that pedestal on a regular basis.  Any one form of media no longer can dominate, or can rest on it's laurels.  Even in audio we see a proliferation of streaming services, resurgence of old formats (vinyl), iPods, Smartphones, and high resolution downloads all vying for your attention.  But even in video, we have DVD, Blu-Ray, streaming videos, YouTube, and video chats all in competition with each other, too.

So stereo is then well and truly dead, then?  Not so fast ...

The golden age is NOW

A lot of vocal people have been predicting the demise of home stereo for decades.  I think because most of them have only seen the living room start sharing other forms of prerecorded entertainment - where there had been little competition previously.  It was inevitable in the advent of such a large amount of new capability that the stereo would no longer be the single stop for recorded media.  It would be ridiculous to think otherwise.  But it doesn't mean it is on it's deathbed, either.

The humble stereo, though, hasn't been sitting still, after the mass market attention shifted to VCR's, TV's and Home Theater, a proliferation of small to medium sized companies poured in to sell into this under-served market, bringing many novel ideas, and refinement.  The modern audiophile industry was born in throes of the 1980's and continues to this day.  It readily adopts new technology that shows promise and refines it into something that sounds good.

And while volumes aren't what they once were, stereos sound better now than they ever have, and while not cheap, it is possible to assemble a system that sounds better for cheaper than 40 years ago in inflation adjusted dollars.  It truly is the best time ever to assemble a stereo and enjoying your favorite music daily.

But let's be a little realistic, too ...

While we will always own a stereo system, and feel the home stereo system will have a resurgence in popularity, after the particular Pandora's Box of the Videotape and later the Internet was unleashed, there can be no dominant media, and recorded media of any and all kinds will be ubiquitous and available in nearly any format desired.  And we're better for it, too.

We feel, and think that well reproduced stereo music will be a favorite format, preferred by many, it will never again dominate as the source of evening entertainment after work and chores are done.