
How Boomboxes Got Badass (2013) - bra-ket
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-boomboxes-got-so-badass/
======
jacquesm
There is a very interesting trick that you can pull with small speakers to
make the listener believe that you have this amazing ability to make loud low
tones (which is physically impossible below a certain size). You synthesize
the overtones of that low tone (which you _can_ reproduce), which will fool
the brain into thinking that the low tone itself is present.

Pianos have the same effect for the lowest notes, they will not reproduce the
bases directly because the soundboard simply isn't large enough to accommodate
the waveform. But the harmonics do fit and again your brain will interpret the
harmonics pattern in such a way that they conclude the low tone is actually
present.

This is called the 'missing fundamental' and is one of the more interesting
psycho acoustic phenomenon.

It works like this: instead of playing A0 directly (27.5Hz) you'd play 110,
137.5, 165, 182.5, 220 etc all the way up to say 2 KHz in diminishing fashion
as you go higher. For a piano you'd have to keep track of odd/even harmonics
and ensure they are in the right relation to each other to get the right
timbre. The brain then is apparently capable of determining the _distance_
between those harmonics and make you believe that you are hearing A0 even
though that frequency is not at all present in the output.

~~~
Slartie
Has this been the trick employed by those tiny Bose speakers that got popular
in the 90s?

I remember being in some kind of demo truck as a kid, where they were showing
a scene of Jurassic Park (from a Laserdisc!) and they had these big speakers
left and right in front and small ones behind, and were blasting the audio at
pretty high volume so you would think "surely the thick base is coming from
those big speakers up front". Then, half way into the demo, they would open up
the "speakers" in front of the audience, revealing the surrounding wood to be
fake and the actual speakers inside the fake housing being just the same tiny
ones as those located in the back.

I remember being very impressed by that demo. By the speakers, but actually
even more by that Laserdisc ;-)

~~~
bitwize
The Cheat is showing something on a Laserdisc!

Everything is better on a Laserdisc!

Whatever happened to the Laserdisc?

Laserdisc!

I saw that demo too, though it was in a store and I don't remember a JP scene
being used. Bose were always shite at accurate sound reproduction, but great
at making things sound _good_. And nothing noise-cancels like a pair of
QuietComforts.

~~~
Slartie
I definitely saw Jurassic Park in that demo. It was specifically that scene in
the kitchen with the velociraptors sneaking around, hunting the kids.

But probably they had multiple variants of the demo.

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S_A_P
In my formative years, we always had something like this playing music as we
played basketball. From the age of say 13-16 we would camp out in someones
driveway or a park and play pickup basketball pretty much all day during the
summers. Many D batteries were used in those days. Whoever had the loudest box
with the most bass would get to play their box. I was friends with some kids
whose dad repaired electronics, so they always had the best box. My folks
weren't interested in competing with that so I had the weakest box. That all
changed as we got our drivers licenses, and we proceeded to put amps and subs
in our cars. That caused a whole other wave of competition. This was from
1988-1993 timeframe so by then I think the boom box era was mostly over. The
boom car era was just getting cranked up though. I have that to thank for my
poor hearing in crowded restaurants now. Im relatively young, and started
noticing it in the past few years. I cant hear well enough to hold a
conversation with lots of ambient noise. Hearing loss is completely
preventable, and its much too late by the time you notice it. sucks...

~~~
heyflyguy
We are similar. I spent alot of time on cardboard spinning around next to a
boombox. As a result I have to repeatedly ask my daughter to "speak up" or
"look at me" when talking so I can read her lips.

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suzzer99
I had the Crown pictured in that article. Used it to rock Crazy Train on the
bus. Then I got tired of carrying it around and it just sat in my room for the
rest of high school.

I like how they all had some kind of "turbo bass" switch - like a kid carrying
around a boombox would ever _not_ want turbo bass. The worst is when you
accidentally turned it off and didn't realize for hours or sometimes days.

~~~
Stratoscope
Like the Turbo switch on a PC!

Of course those did have a purpose. You would run in Turbo mode all the time,
except when you were running bad old software like I wrote, that used timing
loops assuming a 4.77 MHz clock rate.

~~~
qubex
My father used to hit Block Scor (“Blocca Scorrimento” in Italian, meaning
“Scroll Lock”), disable TURBO, and then pipe DIR * . * | MORE on our shambolic
386SX-16MHz to see all the files he had in the pigsty directory he kept _all_
his documents in, all of which horrified me.

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js2
If I can go off on a bit of a tangent. The image at the top of the article is
from Spike Lee's _Do The Right Thing_ (1989). The character is Radio Raheem
and his boombox plays only _Fight The Power_ by Public Enemy, which was made
for the film. The movie is strictly about what happens when racial tensions
boil over on a very hot day in Brooklyn. But really, it's about people, and
how we treat one another when we're stuck in a system more powerful than
ourselves. It's as relevant today as it was thirty years ago, and not just in
America. It may as well be about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. Great
movie, strong recommend.

Back to the article: I owned a JVC-100 in red, just like the one pictured. I
never took it out much because it seemed so fragile and my memory is that it
sounded like crap compared to a hunk of plastic durable Sony that I also
owned. I have no idea where either of those boomboxes got off to. Probably
sold in a garage sale at some point.

~~~
bayindirh
> The image at the top of the article is from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing
> (1989). ...

Funny you mentioned that. I've watched that movie when I was a kid and, very
impressed. I wanted to watch it again but I never knew its name to start with.
Yet an internet stranger just blurts it out and makes my day. Thanks stranger.

------
foxhop
The best boom boxen on the market right now is sold by tool manufacturers.
Image search Hitachi Radio or DeWalt Radio. My plumber had the DeWalt and it
boomed. Ran off the same chargeable batteries as his drill, and other tools.

~~~
yardie
I seriously forgot how much fun boomboxes were. Then we had to rehab our old
apartment. Our contractor had one of those DeWalt toolboxes with the boombox
built-in. I've been looking for ages for one like it and still haven't found
it.

------
Shaddox
I don't think I'm nostalgic for these at all.

Near my office, kids gather all the time and play music really loudly on small
Bluetooth speakers. I don't even dare to imagine the experience if they had
one of these bad boys.

~~~
mhd
I found that quite interesting: After the boomboxes went away, "outdoors"
music got more personal, less communal. You had your CD/MD/MP3 players and
listened with headphones.

Now common/cheap BT speakers made public music listening _en vogue_ again.
Just right for me to enter my grumpy old man phase, but interesting
nonetheless. (And to be honest, it beats the sheer cringe level of someone
carrying around a vintage portable record player)

This also seems to make it more acceptable to listen to music/videos on your
smartphones external speakers, so I'm willing to bet that having better ones
will be a factor for current/future development.

~~~
big_chungus
Not sure everyone blaring his own music is a good thing. Doubly true in the
era where lots of music has cusses and otherwise age-inappropriate content; I
can't imagine people with little kids appreciate it. Besides, it's just rude
for one to force his personal tastes on another. Headphones are cheap; no one
likes the guy blaring tacky rap music and forcing everyone else to hear it.

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lstamour
The trailer’s over here, it’s a bit rough.
[https://youtu.be/ik6KUwB3sus](https://youtu.be/ik6KUwB3sus) I haven’t seen
anything since then indicating the project’s status, and the website is now
offline. Copyright on the site was 2017, and the last blog post was late 2015.
So the project went off the rails somewhere, probably lack of funding, and
everybody involved still having day jobs to do...

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ansible
Hah. I still have a Panasonic RX-DS20, purchased around 1990. This is a late-
era device, with a CD player in addition to the tape cassette, and digital
tuning for radio. It uses 10 D-cell batteries, plus another four AA to store
the radio station presets.

I didn't carry it around though, it was my home stereo until I was able to
afford something bigger. Since it has an aux input, I've continued to use it
over the years as computer speakers and such.

Rock on!

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jansan
In Germany we frequently called them "Ghettoblaster". Only after my brother
spent a year in the USA in 1990, I heard the name "Boombox" for the first
time. How were they called in the street during the 80s?

P.S.: Of course we all know this movie scene, right?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHyPS1boeuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHyPS1boeuI)

~~~
bitwize
"Ghetto blaster" has unpleasant racial connotations. It's the kind of term
you'd expect your white boomer parents to throw around, as they shake their
heads in looming fear that their neighborhood might degentrify. "Boom box" is
considered more racially neutral so you will hear it more in the USA.

~~~
jansan
I totally disagree. I just cannot see a racial aspect in the word "Ghetto
blaster". What makes you think so? Was it only used by white old men? Or by
middle aged cyan women?

~~~
bitwize
Using the term "ghetto" for predominantly-black neighborhoods is... one of
those things black people can do that white people can't. This is less of a
problem in other anglospheric countries, which don't have the history of
oppression of and discrimination against black people, including segregation
into specific neighborhoods and "white flight", that the United States has --
so words like "ghetto blaster" have less bite abroad than they do here.

------
growlist
A friend had a Sharp ghettoblaster ('boombox'? no one called them that) with
built-in vertical record player. Now that was pretty cool. I'd also nominate
the Phillips Roller as an iconic stereo design - popping up here and there now
in the background of photoshoots, and becoming collectable.

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proc0
Unless you are on a beach with a bunch of your friends, walking around a busy
city with one of these just illustrates how self-centered that person is that
they think their music is the best music and everybody should listen to it. In
reality most don't even care, and at worse you are just making a bunch of
needless noise. It's just a failure of thinking about other people and
thinking that maybe your taste is not everyone else's taste.

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twic
What are the "three beat buttons" [0] on the Super Jumbo? Is this the same as
a "beat cut switch" [1]?

[0] [https://classicboombox.com/tecsonic-j-1-super-
jumbo](https://classicboombox.com/tecsonic-j-1-super-jumbo)

[1]
[http://www.redwaveradio.com/11_e8026e0fe1fc5c07_1.htm](http://www.redwaveradio.com/11_e8026e0fe1fc5c07_1.htm)

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pkorzeniewski
Electronics from the past had such an amazing form factor - nowadays every TV,
smartphone, laptop etc. looks pretty much the same, dull and boring.

~~~
big_chungus
Well, people want slimmer and smaller products. There is more room for
creativity in a large, bulky form factor than in a small enclosure sized to
barely fit the components. Boom boxes were very heavy and bulky; today's
consumers want svelte designs that fit easily in one's pocket.

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redis_mlc
Cool. I didn't realize people collected them.

I remember in the early 80's the transition from all-analog to LCD display
boxes, which allowed more precise FM tuning, and programming for copying tapes
or an alarm clock.

And that the #1 item in terms of interest and sales volume at a lot of
consumer electronics retailers was the boombox.

Their size really did get ridiculous - carrying one around was a workout.

~~~
qubex
> _I didn 't realize people collected them._

Nowadays you can be fairly certain that just about every set of _somethings_
will be ‘collected’ by a set of aficionados whose number of members is or
exceeds two.

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ijiiijji1
I had a red JVC PC-30 single deck that took something like 8 D-cell
batteries... it had touchy volume controls that needed cleaning all the time
because any dust or oxidation would sound like white noise mixed with nails on
a chalkboard when changing the volume. It was kinda cool because the speakers
detached. I often plugged in a $300 Sony Discman with crazy skip buffering and
anti-skip tech (D-828K).

I was lucky.. there was a Tower Records 1/2 mile (1 km) from my house, the one
where Metallica played that concert in the parking lot. And somehow I acquired
a 1990 _West_ German The Doors - The Doors CD.

