HIGHWAY HI-FI

Remember that 1970's commercial for the Mercury Grand Marquis luxury car? To demonstrate the Grand Marquis' ability to absorb shocks from potholes and road divots, the pitchman drove over a bad country road -- while a phonograph inside the car continued to play, the needle staying in the groove and not skipping.

What a goofy commercial -- who in their right mind would put a phonograph in an automobile?

Then one day, while searching through one of the boxes of records my Grandma Betty acquired from her excursions through New England flea markets and yard sales, I found a 7-inch, small-holed 16 2/3-rpm record. After retrieving my old GE Wildcat phonograph from the attic (the only one in the house that could play 16 2/3-rpm discs), I discovered this little platter was an advertisement for an accessory for new 1956 Plymouth models -- Highway Hi-Fi.

Between 1956 and 1960, Chrysler offered an underdash phonograph for their high-end cars (the Plymouth Fury, the Chrysler New Yorker, the Dodge Royal Lancer, among others). The Highway Hi-Fi promised 45 minutes of music and entertainment on specially constructed 16-rpm discs, all provided from Columbia Records' vast library of classical pieces, children's records and some radio plays. The phonograph stylus and tonearm were actually inside an outer tonearm shell, so sharp bumps and jolts kept the needle in its specific groove.

You could put a record on the turntable, start your car and drive about 30 miles while your Highway Hi-Fi played the songs YOU wanted to hear. Unfortunately, if you wanted to listen to another record, you had to stop the car, slide the record off the turntable, flip it over (or get your second disc), start the turntable, put the stylus back on the record, and start the car.

"Highway Hi-Fi was developed by CBS laboratories when Peter Goldmark was there," said David L. Morton of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Goldmark claims that the phonographs were developed for specific sizes and models of Chryslers, the big ones as I recall. When they went into production, the units were installed by dealers, and Goldmark was shocked to learn that dealers were installing them in the wrong types of cars (huge luxury cars). And, of course, since bumps affected those cars differently, the phonographs didn't work correctly."

And if you wanted to swap the Highway Hi-Fi into your Pontiac or Ford, good luck -- the Highway Hi-Fi output was attached to your audio amp, making it difficult to swap out without taking the entire radio component out of the car. Chrysler made some adjustments to the product, including an option to play standard 45's, but by 1960 its car phonograph option was discontinued.

Meanwhile, RCA Victor offered their own car phonograph, the Victrola, and this one played standard 45's. To make sure their product could be used in almost every car of the time, RCA convinced several aftermarket car radio manufacturers to add phono jacks on their radios to make installation of their car Victrola easier.

"The RCA underdash player is the model AP-1," said Phil Vourtsis of New Jersey. "It was introduced in November 1960, and could play fourteen 45-rpm records automatically. I just saw a demonstration of one of these at an antique car show as part of the Monmouth County Fair in Freehold. The unit was installed in a 1960 Plymouth Savoy and the owner was kind enough to answer my dozens of questions and provide the demo. The unit has a storage compartment towards the bottom and this is where up to 14 records are pushed 'up' on the large spindle. The records now stay on the spindle the same as with other 45 players (spindle shelves). The player now plays the bottom record on the stack (tonearm upside down). When the record is finished, the tonearm moves out of the way and the record is dropped off the spindle into the storage area. The tonearm comes back and plays the new bottom record. The owner said that even on bumpy roads, the records don't skip!"

Of course it didn't skip. The Consumer Reports testing lab noted that the RCA car phonograph's stylus "did not jump the grooves even when the car was moving at various speeds over broken pavement, cobblestones, and deep holes," because the needle was using an extremely high tracking force -- in other words, don't play your Elvis Sun 45's on this baby unless you like to see little vinyl peelings on your car mats.

Another technology company, Phillips/Norelco, created the Auto Mignon, a single-play 45 car phonograph which the company boasted could be attached to any car radio. You could slide your 45 into a narrow slot in the front of the player, similar to today's car CD units. But this player had many drawbacks -- along with a high tracking force, you could only play one 45 at a time, meaning you became a combination chauffeur and drop-changer.

"I worked on a few aftermarket units," said Val Breault, currently employed with General Motors' Research and Development department. "The time was the early 60s. The devices were a lot like the usual RCA 45-rpm players of the era with a couple big exceptions. The mechanism was upside down. That is, the records were pushed UP onto the spindle and the stylus tracked the bottom side of the lowest record in the stack. If memory serves me (HA!) they even rotated 'backward' relative to the tone arm with a 'backward' mounted ceramic cartridge. When the current record finished playing it was dropped off the spindle to a pad on the bottom of the player. There were a couple resistors and capacitors to affect an equalizing circuit. This was a good match to the vacuum tube radios that were in the cars of that time, but that was the extent of the electronics on board. Installing one of these was no big deal. The signal to the radio's volume control was cut and routed through the record player using coaxial cable. When the player was not switched on, the radio audio was passed on through, back to the radio's volume control. When the record player was in use, the equalized output of the ceramic cartridge was passed on. The performance of these units was not spectacular, especially on rough roads, but they seemed to work pretty well. Consider too, that in the early 60s, there was no other way to take your favorite music on the road. They didn't work well with the transistorized radios. I once built a transistorized preamp for one application where a customer with money wanted the player installed in his new '66 Galaxie."

Of course, these car phonograph experiments ended when "Madman" Muntz and his 4-track stereo (precursor to the 8-track tape) became a much more viable option for portable recorded music. As the record companies produced 8-track tapes of popular recording artists, 45's returned to the home stereo system.

But the memory of car phonographs lasted into the 1970s, according to Mike Butts of Portland, Oregon. "When I was building plastic car model kits for fun, AMT put out a large line of current-model Detroit car kits which could be built stock, custom or racing. They called it 3-in-1. Frequently the custom version included a record player to be mounted on the center hump. Don't recall any details, just a little box-shaped phonograph. Not many details at 1/25th scale."

© 1997 Chuck Miller

Be sure to read Chuck's report on 45-rpm record spindle adapters (and much more) at his website.