Audio nostalgia or how we used to install music in our cars ...
02/12/2012
When I read that today 97% of all cars (in Germany) are delivered with a factory-installed car radio (if you can even call these computers that also produce music that), I immediately had to think back to the time when this was not the case at all and when the best you could hope for was a standardized DIN installation slot into which an aftermarket radio would hopefully somehow fit.
In order to choose the right radio tailored to your personal needs (and within your budget), you organized the beautiful catalogs of Blaupunkt, Philips, Grundig, Tacano, Pioneer and other suppliers and compared performance data and design aspects. You went to a specialist radio store or discount store and were able to examine shelves of car radios in a wide range of price categories.
Once you had decided on one of the devices, the next question on the agenda was the choice of speakers. Here, too, performance and design aspects could be the deciding factors, but more important in many cases was whether these sometimes quite bulky things could be accommodated in the car at all, how many cables would have to be laid and how big the holes would be that had to be cut out of the panels (there were nice templates for this in the packaging).
Once you had all the parts, sufficient cables and assembly aids together, the happy tinkering could begin. Power had to be fed to the radio (via the ignition lock, or directly from the battery with continuous voltage?) and the individual devices had to be installed. Finally, with a little luck or a lot of skill, the first test was carried out and how happy you were when the installation was successful and music could be heard from all corners of the car.
If you later sold the car, you often removed the expensive car radio to put it in the next vehicle.
And today's restorers are of course just as worried about the many holes in the original panels as they are about the missing radio slot covers. But of course hardly anyone thought about that back then.
