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Better Living Through Auto-Reverse

Well alright… Cheryl from the Madison office is finally coming over to the condo for dinner. I think she said she liked John Denver and Jim Croce…

Gonna make pretty much the ultimate mix… man this is really gonna set the mood…

OK it’s almost 8… let’s get this tape up on the deck. Thanks to TEAC Auto-Reverse technology, the tape will play over and over and over and over again all night, regardless of how long the night ends up being.

What a fox. Oh yeah? Like the music? Yeah I love these guys too… Saw them at the OysterFest a few years ago… oh yeah, glad you dig it…

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I am not making any of this up. This is an actual TEAC print-ad from January 1976. It features single-people in their mid-30s having a romantic evening at the gentleman’s home (condo). The selling proposition of this product is ‘Auto-Reverse,’ AKA, you don’t have to flip the tape over when the side ends. When we were growing up in the cassette-tape era, Auto-Reverse was still a premium-feature of the higher-priced tape players. I actually don’t think I ever had an auto-reverse walkman; they were just too expensive. Flipping the tape was just part of life. Good thing i was too young at the time to have any ladies to entertain. By the time I started dating, the CD was already in-play. ‘Repeat’ is of course a feature of all CD decks.

Anyhow, this advert is a good example of the ‘lifestyle-benefit’ advertising that consumer electronics manufacturers employed in the 70’s. Set a little stage, tell a little story, allow the consumer to insert themselves into the scenario. This was in some contrast to much electronics advertising of the 40s to 60s, much of which was focused on ‘fidelity’ and ‘value.’ By the 70s, 20-20k performance (OK, 30-15k) was a given in most equipment; transistors and PCBs had made this stuff affordable to most working-class folks; so the benefit of one brand over the other needs to be demonstrated in other ways. In this case, the increased romantic-potential of a dinner-date.

chris

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smokah-dehookah says:

04/11/2013 at 7:01 pm

My dad was divorced in '66 or so and his solution to romance music for his swingin' bachelor pad -it was a highrise apartment building in Chicago's Loop, and was furnished about like the one in Down With Love, the Ewan McGregor/ Renee Zellweger rom com- was a Sansui receiver with a modification to receive the SCA background music they had on a subcarrier from a local FM.

Laugh if you will, but he got laid a lot.
Tom Fine says:

04/12/2013 at 7:51 am

Chris, this is one of your better posts! The ad is awesome! I had a Pioneer RT-707 and made some good 3-hour party tapes (3.5IPS, 1800', quarter-track) in my day. I never bought into the splice-together MO for party tapes, mainly because it don't work for quarter-track. I had a Numark "DJ" mixer and two Technics SL-D2 turntables, so I could "be my own radio station." Thankfully, I spared myself future embarrassment by foregoing the temptation do add my voice to the mix! I probably still have some of the auto-reverse foil tabs around here.

The ultimate auto-reverse deck was the Technics RS-1700. One of those things with 3600' of 3.75IPS quarter-track love nest muzak could make for a LONG night.

-- Tom Fine
- chris says:
  
  04/12/2013 at 8:25 am
  
  haha yeah i had forgotten about this one. I teach a class at the Uni called 'television commercials' so I tend to be very keyed-in to /product benefit/ vs /consumer benefit/ as expressed in advertising narratives. Man i suuuuuuuuure wish I had kept a 1700. I had like three of those fkkrs at one point! Sold 'em all a decade ago.