Hey! Remember the Boombox?
How many did you have?
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This article takes a look at the era of boombox portable stereos and how cool it was to have your music loud and in your ears. You could take your boombox anywhere and share your music with your buddies. It was the thing to bring to the beach, camping or when your car stereo stopped working. Turn it up!
High school
I got my very first boombox when I was in high school. It was nothing to see several kids roaming the halls of our school, carrying their books in one arm and a boombox in the other. My high school was pretty laid back. I had medium size Panasonic stereo cassette boombox. I took it with me everywhere. I used to record everything. I would bring it to school and record our band rehearsal so I could practice the songs when I got home. Nobody else really thought to do this.
So many stores around the Loop
My senior year, the entire high school took a class field trip to downtown Chicago. When we got there, we split off into groups of a dozen kids, and wandered the streets of the Loop. Window shopping like this was something we simply didn't see back home. Giant glass window displays with unbelievably huge boomboxes, seemed to be at every other store we passed. The size of these radios was staggering. Sharp made some of the biggest boomboxes at the time. How could anybody even carry something so large?
This was during the time of the beginning of the hip-hop break dancing craze. As much as I would have loved to have been able to buy one of those monsters and bring it home, I certainly couldn't afford something so immense. I couldn't begin to imagine how loud and how heavy those things must have weighed.
Recording our youth
I was something of an archivist for as far back as I can remember. I wanted to have recordings of everything I did. I think it started when I got my first Sears portable cassette player when I was 14 years old. My best friend Curt and I would record ourselves talking about girls, telling jokes and of course passing gas. To two young teenagers, this was hysterical stuff. We even recorded our own radio shows and pretended to be DJ's. When we upgraded to boomboxes, we could record in stereo, which was amazing to us.
Sears charge card
A few years later, I drove my car out to the mall and applied for a brand new Sears credit card. I think I was 19 years old. I wanted to begin to establish credit. Getting a Sears charge card was the easiest way to do this. I waited for the clerk to approve my card. Then she handed it to me and I went shopping for a brand new, bigger boombox. This would be the first purchase I would ever make with a credit card. A couple of years later, I bought an even bigger boombox. I was making good money at the time. This thing could drain 12 D-batteries in only a few days.
For the next few years, I upgraded to even bigger boomboxes. Since I was the one out of the group to invest all of this money into sound systems, I became the self-appointed entertainment committee for our annual camping trips. I made dozens of rock tapes with my favorite songs. My friends all seemed to like my choices, so I continued to make even more tapes. I really liked being the "go to" guy for music.
Upgrading to CD boomboxes
In 1990, I bought myself a boombox with CD and cassette players. It was the best sounding boombox I had ever owned. I took that thing with me everywhere. I lugged it to the beach and guitar lessons. Sometimes, I would bring it with me in my car, since I didn't have a CD player in my Firebird yet.
By the mid-1990's, boomboxes were quickly fading away. It was becoming more and more difficult to find a really nice boombox. Smaller sizes meant smaller sound. By the late 1990's, boomboxes were slowly being replaced with bluetooth speakers.
The iPod
In 2007, I finally gave in and got myself an 80 gig Apple iPod. It could store tens of thousands of mp3's and fit in my shirt pocket. A few months later, I got the speakers that went with the iPod. This was now my latest boombox. I loved that I had just about all of my music with me on one wallet-size player. No more cassette or CD carrying cases, no more batteries, except for the speakers and It was easy to carry to the beach.
It's all on my phone now
Times have certainly changed since those early days of carrying around heavy, large radios with huge speakers. I am on my third smartphone in seven years. Last year, I upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. It has an internal memory of 512 gigabytes. At last count, I have around 40,000 mp3's on my phone. That's almost my entire music collection. Can you imagine? Nearly every vinyl record album, every pre-recorded cassette, every CD from my entire collection, now fits on my cell phone.
A couple of years ago, I finally got myself a JBL Flip 5 bluetooth portable speaker. It sounds absolutely amazing. I have all of my music with me at all times. I take the Flip 5 with me to my guitar lessons and to the beach. People ask me all the time, "Why do you have all of your songs on your phone? Why don't you just stream?" I think it's because I'm old school. I grew up listening to full albums, not just single songs. Vinyl albums hold the same value to me as books do for people who love to read. I have my entire library with me everywhere I go. I cannot see paying for music streaming services, when all you have to do is take the time to dump your music from your laptop to your phone and create a bunch of playlists.
Times have indeed changed
I have no idea how many boomboxes I've owned. I'm guessing about a dozen or so. Some I sold, some I gave away and some just stopped working. I don't have a boombox now. I miss the retro-nostalgia of listening to tapes on a huge radio. That's what we had 30-40 years ago. It was a pretty big deal to have a nice boombox that sounded good.