I’m tackling smaller tasks on the Matador 968 project car these days. One recent task was to address the audio system. When the Matador was new it was configured with the standard 968 audio system which was the Porsche CR1 AM/FM Cassette head unit and 6 speakers. During its lifetime the original head unit had been replaced with a Sony CD player but I wanted it back to stock being the purist that I am. I had an old CR1 in my parts stash so I sent it out to be reconditioned. As I discussed the reconditioning task with the vendor, we went over the work he would perform and one of the options he offered was to add Bluetooth to the CR1. This addition would only cost $150 and be invisible so I agreed to the update and when I received my reconditioned CR1 and hooked it up to the Matador I paired it with my phone and had instant access to the 6 million songs on Apple music. This was just amazing. As I sat back and selected various tracks from the vast music library I had at my disposal I started to think of the car audio evolution that I had witnessed during my lifetime and how far things had come.

For me, It all started back in 1973 when my father came home with a Mercury Cougar. It was green and had a factory 8-track tape player. Up to this point, if my family was in the car and wanted to listen to music we listened to the radio and the music we heard was whatever the radio DJ selected and was playing. This 8-track tape player was an amazing new concept. We could purchase a tape of music from our favorite artist and just insert it into the player and listen to the music we wanted!

This was an amazing advancement but the 8-track did have some drawbacks. It didn’t like cold weather resulting in “strange” music or sometimes the player destroyed the physical tape during playback. My favorite idiosyncrasy of the 8-track was the limitation of the lengths of the individual full tracks. For those of you that remember (and those that don’t) there were 4 individual tracks on each tape; each tape was only a certain length, and could only fit just so much music. Contemporary rock music of the time was pushing the boundaries when it came to song length and this caused an issue with 8-tracks. If a song was too long to fit into one of the individual tracks it would have to be “interrupted” with an artificial fade-out at the end of the tape track, then the 8-track would change to the next track with a loud “click”, and then the interrupted song would fade back in where it left off on the new tape track. I can still remember a few songs from my childhood with this artificially inserted pause. The use of 8 tracks started at the end of the sixties and they were gone by the end of the seventies, replaced by cassette tape.

The cassette tape was an improvement. It had two sides which matched the two sides of a vinyl album of music so the distribution of the music didn’t have the challenge of fitting onto the new media that the 8-track had. Another big improvement was the ability to create your own cassette tape with your own music. This creation was called a “mix tape” and was very popular and allowed more control to the audio listener. Now, while driving, I could listen to what I wanted and even mix the artists up on a single cartridge. Limitations still remained with cassettes such as the cold weather challenge and just the mechanical nature of the device often resulted in a destroyed tape. Despite those drawbacks the option was popular and many under-dash cassette players were purchased and installed in vehicles of the time. Cassettes came out in the late seventies and lasted into the nineties when they were replaced by the in-car compact disc player.

The CD was an even bigger improvement! Digital quality sound reproduction was now available in your car and audiophiles rejoiced. No longer did we have to worry about “sides”. A disc contained the entire album so you inserted it in the player and let it play with amazing sound quality. There were a few limitations. Earlier players did not have enough “over sampling” which caused the devices to skip while you were driving but they improved early on and the new media was a solid offering. Users could “burn” their own CDs with their choice of music similar to that old cassette “mix tape”. With control of what the user wanted to listen to fully in their hands the next improvement they demanded was music quantity. This resulted in the CD changer which could hold up to 10 CDs at once and provide the audiophile hours of listening pleasure without having to do anything but hit a button to change to a different CD. Things had certainly come a long way but again, a CD player was still a mechanical device which meant it could break and they did, especially the changer. But the CD had a good run going from the late eighties and only losing steam around the mid-2010s.

And that brings us to the music-listening pinnacle that we have reached today, streaming. There is nothing to insert, nothing to hook up, nothing to store in the car, and nothing mechanical to break down. All I need to do is bring my phone with me and I have unlimited access to millions of high-quality digital songs. It is just amazing how simple and expansive it is. And if my favorite artist releases a new album of work I can have access to it the day it comes out. All I have to do is pay my subscription cost for my music service or have my music stored on my phone’s hard drive to have immediate access.

As an audiophile, I am truly thankful for the technology we enjoy today and I have to laugh when I think back to all the media offerings I have embraced over the past 50 years. I hope you have enjoyed the journey back through my vehicle audio evolution. It looks like a nice day out there so I think I’ll take the Matador out for a spin and enjoy some streamed tunes. With so many choices, I now have to decide what to listen to. I’ll see you on the road.

Jeff Coe