1957 Radio Shack Catalog vintage stereo hi-fi tubes transistors electronics - PART 1

Mail order electronics. One of the highlights of my misspent youth. Allied Radio. B&A. And Radio Shack. With more than 7000 stores at one point, how many stores did Radio Shack have in 1957?

Two. Two stores. Here's Radio Shack's 1957 catalog. They had already been in business 34 years, and had just the TWO locations. They were acquired by Tandy in 1963 and that's when their phenomenal growth began.

Let's go through this 1957 catalog and see what's first. Ah, turntables, or rather these are actually record changers--turntables on which you could pile a stack of records which would drop each one in turn and play. Hi-fi kits. This was in the day when real high fidelity buffs built their own systems out of individual components. These are some of Radio Shack's hi-fi "packages," nearly all of which, you may notice, are mono. Not stereo. Correctly put, they have monaural sound rather than stereophonic. A single channel, not two. Why is this? Because this stuff was expensive! Remember, $100 then is around $1000 today. For hi-fi-buffs it was considered better to have good quality sound in mono rather than mediocre sound in stereo.

Here are some tuners and amps. The really serious hi-fi buff would have a separate PRE-amplifier and a separate POWER amplifier. This gear didn't go in some big cabinet like grandma had in her living room. No, this stuff went on your bookshelf. These were known as "bookshelf hi-fi systems." Now, I'm not talking about the little toy bookshelf systems they make today that would go on a bookshelf suitable for holding comic books. No, these systems back in the day went on bookshelves that held Moby Dick and War and Peace, in big, leather-bound editions.

A lot of this stuff has tubes sticking out of it. The transistor era was upon us in 1957 but very little in hi-fi was made with transistors.

Here we see the Dynakit 50 watt Mark II power amplifier. I still have MY Dynakit--it's not the 50 watt--but I have the amp and pre-amp that I built from a kit in junior high school. Ordered from the Allied Radio catalog. Still works. Still sitting on my desk. I'll show you. I last replaced the tubes back in the 1970s--with Radio Shack tubes coincidentally. I remember they had a lifetime guarantee.

Now we're into hi-fi enclosures and speaker grille cloth. Woofers and tweeters. Cabinets. Wharfdale speakers, Acoustic Research AR-1. That was new stuff at the time. Acoustic suspension, tuned and sealed cabinet. High tech!

More speakers. The serious hi-fi guys bought individual speakers and cabinets for them separately. Sometimes they built the cabinets themselves to get a real custom built-in look, or in an attempt to get that ultimate hi-fi sound.

Turntables again. And record players. What's the difference? Well, a record player is a turntable that comes already in a suitcase-like box with a built-in amplifier and a handle on it so you can drag it around places and be popular.

Rek-O-Kut. This stuff on this page is serious. The guys who shopped on this page wouldn't dream of owning what I just described as a record player. Or even one of the regular turntables. Especially not a record CHANGER. These serious guys had totally manual turntables. Records played one at a time. And they dropped the needle--excuse me, stylus--on the record manually and took it off at the end. You could buy a totally manual turntable. But oh no, that was TOO easy for these guys. They were going to buy a motor, separately, and a platter, and a separate tonearm and separate cartridge and build their own. Pretty serious stuff.

But also on this page is a kid's battery operated acoustic phono. "Plays anywhere," it says. Acoustic phono means it isn't amplified electrically. This thing takes a flashlight battery for the motor. But the sound is acoustic. Like the old Victrolas. The sound comes up out of the needle and vibrates through a cavity of some kind that grows larger--like the old speaker horns. It's an acoustic amplifier. That's a real thing! I'm not making it up.

Here are some more fancy pick-ups, or cartridges, and needles, or styluses.

Tape recorders. Ampex. Stereo, it says. This is the first I think I've seen the word stereo in this catalog. Oh, and here's the Midgetape. The Mohawk Midgetape. I have one of those. It uses a strange tape cartridge of Mohawk's own design.

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