Core Response #2 by SMDI

Lynn Spigel’s horizontal sweep of television and its cultural constellations makes for a particularly enlightening text, as usual. Though her methodology does not explicitly acknowledge the traditional materialists, it is through her analysis of “magazines, advertisements and television programming” (33) as well as spatial considerations that she builds a convincing account of midcentury America’s cultural tensions. This chapter might be the fourth or fifth piece I’ve read by Spigel and, unless memory fails, Installing the Television Set contains the only reference she makes to sound, specifically the “high fidelity” (12) craze of the 1950s as well as thoughts about “sound quality” (13) in her discussion of realism.

Sound, I would argue, is especially important to historical discussions of television because, on one hand, its ascension coincides with the rise of stereo consoles in American homes and, on another, because both technologies sometimes share the same piece of furniture if not circuitry. In other words, stereo consoles and televisions either coexist in the same space, often competing for attention, or were indeed the very same item (see Magnavox ad below).

Rick Altman probably addresses this relationship in his scholarship, but much remains to be said about television sound broadly. Stereo consoles, for example, often had a “presence” knob which through a preset, stepped series of equalization curves would seek to respatialize a record's sound to the specific acoustical context of the home, offering an added promise of spectacle and illusion (“hyper-realism” in Spigel’s terms). I wrote about this knob for my MA exam but much research remains to be done. How can we begin to understand the pressures by a thriving recording industry upon the sonic practices or infrastructures of television?