High Fidelity and the Politics of Consumption in Market Economies and State Socialism
Several historians of technology have discussed the history of the realistic and uncolored reproduction of live music with sound technologies (Morton 2000; Gritten 2008; Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004). The term High Fidelity, abbreviated as Hi-Fi, is a technical standard of sound reproduction with a range of frequencies and the maximal limit of noise, but it has also come to symbolize the audiophile culture. Eric Barry identifies the core elements of this culture as “overlapping values of fidelity, spectacle, and the sublime power of technology” (Barry 2010: 116; cf. Hales 2017).
This culture has received some attention in consumer culture studies with a paper by John Branch on a “consumption microculture” that exists in relation to the high-end market segment for audio technologies (Branch 2007). As Branch argues, consumers use the values of sound fidelity and the technological sublime to shape an elite social formation and to distance themselves from mainstream mass consumption symbolized by mass-produced audio electronics for price-sensitive consumers. Although such products offer sound reproduction, according to the audiophiles, they do not offer the possibility of experiencing the technological sublime that is only possible with HEAs. As Barry notes, this community defines the HEAs as “objects of aesthetic pleasure” (Barry 2010: 116). The centrality of aesthetic experience in the audiophile culture can be illustrated by Kieran Downes’ study (2010) of the commercialization of the Compact Disc that not only included claims over the superiority of digital sound processing over analog systems but also the aestheticization of the CD itself and sleek CD players with LED digital display panels, which were juxtaposed with old-fashioned vinyl records and bulky vinyl record players.
The emergence of the post-war audiophile culture was stimulated by the commercialization of long-playing records in 1948 and the availability of a large amount of surplus military radio equipment that was reappropriated for experiments in sound transmission and recording. At the same time, the rise of the popularity of HEAs among consumers was driven by broader social forces. The mythology of audiophiles as connoisseurs pursuing individual aesthetic experience emerged in the public discourse of the 1950s in the context of the dominance of the figure of the organizational man and the “passivity of mass consumption” (Barry 2010: 121) embodied by The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit from a novel by Sloan Wilson (1955). Eric Rawson, in his work on how the audiophile culture fits into contemporary American culture, explores the dissemination of the audiophile culture and the “commodity aesthetics” (Rawson 2006: 202). He discusses the HEA market as an instance of “niche marketing” and how the marketing strategy is built on the offering of an aesthetic experience through the use of a commodity. At the same time, this experience provides a way to pursue an individualized lifestyle and to distance oneself from the vulgar world of mass consumption, in this case embodied by ubiquitous cheap audio systems.
It is important to note a significant divide in the audiophile culture. Marc Perlman, in his study of how audiophiles pursue authority in their community, notes the distinction between “golden ears” and “meter readers” (Perlman 2004). The former are members of the community that form their identities through the claims that they possess golden ears, the ability to hear a broader audible spectrum than the average human, while the latter emphasizes their meticulous technical expertise in sound reproduction and electronics.
A paper from the field of semiotics focuses on the negotiations of the meaning of the “British sound” among audiophiles (Ng and Skotnicki 2016). As the authors argue, the meaning of such a term is linked to both the cultural values of the national brand stereotype of “made in Britain” HEA products in the era of the globalizing supply chain as well as the personal experience of listening to the British sound systems made to fit in small British apartments.
Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the agenda and politics of other relevant social actors playing a part in audiophile cultures, such as manufacturers of HEAs, music producers, and intermediary actors, such as editors of music and audio electronics periodicals, clubs, and organizers of trade shows. As possible fruitful areas of study, I can point out the marketing strategies of manufacturers and the specificity of operations of a market with prohibitively priced consumer technologies, performative aspects of popular HEA-related trade shows, and the performance of masculinity in audiophile culture.
Virtually all scholarly investigations quoted above are based on research from developed countries with market economies, mostly the USA and the UK. I was unable to find any study which considers the emergence of an audiophile culture in any other region demonstrating more limited access to HEAs due to the lack of disposable income, local distribution systems, or knowledge necessary to become an audiophile. When it comes to manufacturers, such papers pay attention to the industry leaders, the companies with the resources and capabilities to pioneer new technologies. There has been little scholarly interest in manufacturers from regions attempting to follow technological innovation in the HEA segment with limited resources and technological capabilities. Similarly, there has been an absence of investigations into state-sponsored projects that support such development. The most closely related research into this area is Simon Partners’ work (1999) which investigates the trajectory of the development of the Japanese consumer electronics industry and the pivotal role the MITI played in its global success.[1]
Partner discusses complex interactions between state actors and industry leaders relevant to the establishment of “made in Japan” as a highly regarded national label in the HEA market. To highlight the relevance of audio technologies to the perception of national stereotypes and economic globalization, I offer a popular quote from the movie Die Hard (1988) that pertains to the American anxiety about Japanese economic power in the 1980s. The president of a Japanese corporation that is successfully competing in the American market gives a cursory explanation of the Japanese global expansion: “Hey, we’re flexible. Pearl Harbor didn't work out, so we got you with tape decks.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan was regarded as a country merely capable of making cheap transistor radios and knock-offs of Western products. But today the term “Japanese electronics” has a different meaning. Not only did Sony become a dominant manufacturer of high-end consumer electronics, Japanese brands such as Onkyo, Pioneer, Denon, and Luxman, with their HEAs-related products, also became highly regarded among audiophiles.
Moving to the Eastern Bloc, in recent years there has been a number of scholarly works on the history of consumption during the period of its existence (Bren and Neuburger 2012; Chernyshova 2011, 2013; Scarboro, Mincyte, and Gille 2020). Scholars were also interested in investigating the aftermath of the Kitchen Debate that took place in Moscow in 1959 and the development of the state-sponsored production of consumer technologies in the USSR, such as refrigerators, electric ovens, washing machines, radio receivers, and black and white television sets (Zachmann 2010; Reid 2005; Chernyshova 2011, 2013: 184-201). The introduction of such technologies offered the opportunity to increase household efficiency or, in the case of television sets and radio receivers, provided citizens with access to governmental political communications channels and state-approved entertainment. As the aforementioned scholars have established, generally the electric goods industries in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries had no particular problem with manufacturing technologies that required little R&D and that could be easily manufactured on a massive scale. The most R&D-intensive endeavors were large and highly publicized state-organized projects, such as the successful projects for building a system of television broadcasting and mass access to television sets (Mickiewicz 1988; Roth-Ey 2007; Bren 2010; Štoll 2019).
In state socialism, these projects were prioritized by governments because the policymakers considered television to be an ideal medium for state propaganda. The aforementioned projects also showed how, under state socialism, the state actors considered the pursuit of technological innovation and its significance, specifically in the field of audio and video broadcasting and reproduction. The development of such technologies was driven by the role of technological progress in the ideological guidelines of communism (Josephson 2009). Under state socialism, such developments were supposed to provide cultural uplift and education to citizens, a goal different to that of capitalism where, according to governmental propaganda, media technologies were used to offer access to low-brow mass culture. The state propaganda apparatus extensively communicated how successes in the production of the aforementioned technologies confirmed the (technological) superiority of state socialism.
My study also fits in with the broader political, economic, and social trends seen in late state socialism, which were insightfully grasped by the historian of consumption Kristina Fehérváry, who argues that Western commodities and information about the design and quality of Western products were key components of consumer cultures in state socialism. As she notes: “The West served as the standard by which the fortunes of state-socialist modernity were measured” (Fehérváry 2009: 435). The substantial government investment in the production of audio technologies in Poland during the 1970s corresponded with the policymakers and economic planners’ objectives for the mass production of attractive products for domestic and foreign markets, and the achievement of propaganda goals related to the “catching up with the West” slogan.
Although some recent studies on consumer culture in the Eastern Bloc mention audio technologies as one of several categories of electric goods, there is virtually no scholarly attention for the intersection of consumer culture and auditory culture in the Eastern Bloc. Only Hagen and DeNora (2012) pay attention to radio receivers, record players, and reel-to-reel audio players as material artifacts embedded in a set of cultural practices for listening to Western radio broadcasts and music. They discuss how the political, economic, and cultural context of state socialism influenced practices of listening to music as well as the ingenuity of DIY devices. However, in the jargon of audiophiles, such practices would be referred to as lo-fi, the opposite of Hi-Fi. Listeners to such content in unofficial settings were mostly interested in the ability to listen to any content they could and not get in trouble with the authorities while doing so. For that reason, they had little opportunity to experience audio technologies as “objects of aesthetic pleasure” (Barry 2010: 116). Below, I will elaborate on the body of knowledge on auditory cultures in the Eastern Bloc with an investigation into how audio electronics were used as objects of aesthetic pleasure in an “official setting” of the project of mass consumption in state socialist Poland.