From Market Failure to Market Democracy: Visions of the Audiophile as Triumphant Consumer Citizen, 1945–66

My paper will analyze how high fidelity enthusiasts framed their relation to the political economy of mass consumption. Emerging after the Great Depression and World War II, the enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who brought high fidelity sound into the home believed that consumer electronics giants such as RCA were not only tied to low fidelity technologies on which they possessed the crucial patents but by nature mired in mediocrity. Taking matters into their own hands, they styled themselves as heroic entrepreneurs and consumers who bucked the system. In the 1950s as high fidelity firms competed successfully with consumer electronics behemoths, audiophiles moved towards a self-conception as active and critical citizen-consumers who “talked back” collectively and individually to both the record industry and the electronics industry, pushing towards higher standards that benefitted all. “Now everyone gets the best seat in the house,” conductor Erich Leinsdorf told Time Magazine in 1959. “That is proper for a democracy, is it not?” Thus, by the 1960s, the visions of the high fidelity industry that echoed through the enthusiast press as well as the mass media painted the audio business as a technocratic consumer utopia of competition, value, and technological innovation rooted in consumer vigilance. In transcending John Philip Sousa’s famous epithet “canned music,” the success of the high fidelity industry was used as an example of the viability of an American system of capitalism that was not only efficient but flexible enough to quench the diverse thirsts of consumers.