60's Mixing and Equipment

60's Mixing and Equipment

Mixing stuff in the 60s ranged from absolutely absurd to top-shelf. In my research, I found that the silicon device was the single biggest step forward for consumer gear. Germanium devices were too unstable to design with although they did, pretty much, send men into space with the stuff.

The biggest drivers for equipment in the 60s was the reduction in heat and weight and a potential rise in reliability once silicon hit the streets. This, I believe, is one thing that hastened the demise of US manufacturers, BTW, as receivers/amps were cheap enough to enter the US from Asia since weight had been eliminated plus manufacturing processes were cheaper in Asia *and* Asian vendors had perfected their distribution networks in the US.

By the end of the 60s, then, the biggest limiting factor in consumer audio was the limitation of a device to produce large wattage amplifiers. That is, about the top end for consumer receivers in 1972 was about 60 w/c. This steadily rose through the 70s until the giant receiver wars broke out around 1976. Note that by this time, the first ICs were showing up in gear and digital readouts were just behind that.

On the high end, folks like McIntosh, among others, succeeded with large amps mainly because they were not as constrained as the mass consumer-oriented vendors were with total cost versus functionality so they could operate amps with many paralleled devices. Crown did a good job of making one of the world's most non-destructive amps with the DC-300 in the early 70s, so it could be done.

So, short answer is that mixing was being done in the late 60s but the device costs had not come down until the 70s when big, high-power amps (competitively priced for the Joe-consumer type) were the pinnacle. But it wasn't just the technology that made the changes over time. Distribution channels and lower cost manufacturing had their parts also.

I had trouble finding info on this. Everywhere I looked was talking about price changes from then until now. It got me frustrated, but this is what I found.