Another music system that has been in cars for 40 years is no longer built into new cars. The Subaru Forester is the last model that still had a CD player on board.
From now on, it’s just streaming and, of course, good old radio.
Subaru stripped the Forester of its CD player during the generation change. Built-in streaming services via Apple CarPlay and Android Auto will take its place. You can also connect a phone via USB.
Mercedes-Benz was the first brand to offer CD music technology in 1985 as the successor to the cassette player. Three years before that, the first CD player for the home appeared.
The CDX-1 car disc quickly became a hit, and manufacturers began mass-marketing cars with built-in CD players. By the 1990s, multi-disc systems could also be purchased to switch between multiple CDs without having to manually change them. Although cars with large CD changers (often in the trunk or glove box) haven’t been on the market for years, last year saw a selection of new models with such players – the Subaru XV, Porsche 718 and Lexus LC, as British consumer site Which? found.
The earliest car audio systems are attributed to brothers Joseph and Paul Galving in the 1930s. They call their $130 car radio the Motorola. And it was their company that became the telecommunications giant we know today.
At $130 back then, equivalent to about $1,500 now, the radio system was considered more of an expensive luxury than a driver’s necessity.
The vacuum tube radio was powered by a single battery and required a fairly strong AM signal nearby to be able to hear the hits of the day.
Motorola only worked on AM radio frequencies, which were never ideal for sound quality.
Quality increased in 1952 when the German company Blaupunkt invented the FM car stereo, followed by the AM/FM radio in 1953. This dual-purpose radio is the standard even now.
In 1956, Chrysler introduced a car phonograph for playing records and entered into a partnership with Columbia Records to produce 7-inch records that could work with a turntable that slid out of the car’s dashboard. Although innovative, it is quite impractical because the records skip over every bump in the road.