Porta-Fi: Shoddy Goods 092

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There’s a spectrum of music lovers that runs from those who value fidelity above all else to those who value convenience. I’m Jason Toon and I’m toward the convenience end, but even I draw the line at listening on a phone’s built-in speaker. Anyway, this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, is about when General Electric tried to appeal to both ends of the spectrum and wound up satisfying neither.


I mean, any stereo is “porta” if you turn it up loud enough

“It’s like having any room in your house wired for sound - *without *one extra wire.” That was General Electric’s pitch in the 1965 ad campaign for their new Porta-Fi system. One big console was the source of the records or radio, while a shoebox-sized portable speaker brought the audio to anywhere in the house with an AC outlet.

As American homes got bigger, along with spending on home entertainment, GE bet on Porta-Fi to vault their audio division ahead of competitors like Magnavox, RCA, and Zenith. So why aren’t we all grooving to the Porta-Fi beat today? Because of other trends that GE didn’t predict, which ultimately did more to shape how we listen to music.

Plug in, turn on, buzz off

For almost as long as homes have been wired for electricity, people have been trying to use those wires to carry other kinds of signals. The science for multi-channel power-line telephony was demonstrated in 1910. Dozens of shared power/telephone systems were in operation in the 1920s, especially in Europe, before being overtaken by generally superior separate lines for each. Electrical companies have long talked to technicians through the power lines they’re working on, and used power-line communication for automatic meter reading.

In the home, the first baby monitor sent radio signals through a home’s electrical wiring as long ago as 1937: that’d be the Radio Nurse, which will be familiar to diligent Shoddy Goods readers. The 1950s saw home intercom systems like NuTone become de rigeur in upscale new homes, again using AC lines to transmit sound.

So when GE developed Porta-Fi in the early ‘60s, the technology was tried and tested. A line of Porta-Fi-ready consoles - “The Sutton in contemporary styling, the Jamestown in Early American, and El Camino in continental design” - came with their own transmitter and remote speaker. Plug the transmitter in with the console, plug the portable speaker in somewhere else, and a low-frequency FM signal travels along the power lines from the former to the latter. Simple, indeed: “as easy as plugging in and turning on a lamp”, as one ad put it.


Just chilling with some patio jams while wearing a suit

Unfortunately, the further away the speaker was from the console, the worse it sounded. As a 2012 demonstration shows, the cumulative interference on the line produces an increasingly loud buzz as the path gets longer. Just because power lines can carry sound doesn’t mean they’re good at it. They’re just not made to shield the audio signal from everything else.

At one point, midcentury listeners might have been willing to put up with that noise for the convenience and sense of futuristic freedom. By 1965, that point was fast fading into the past.

Bye bye, Miss GE Porta-Fi

At the higher end of home audio, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s saw huge leaps and bounds toward ever-higher fidelity, now considered a Golden Age for hi-fi sound. GE would have loved to attract these free-spending audiophiles, but that buzz would’ve been an immediate buzzkill.

Down at the lower end, portability wasn’t the draw it used to be. Cheap transistor radios took off in 1957 and 1958, no AC outlet required. The first boomboxes were on the horizon, appearing in Europe and Japan in the late 1960s. There wasn’t much novelty left in listening to music in any room of the house - certainly not enough to invest in a massive new GE console.

Speaking of which, stereo consoles themselves were reaching their run-out groove. Newer audio gear was both more compact and higher quality. The aforementioned audiophiles preferred the customizability of component systems, and the stereo’s place as the center of family entertainment was more and more lost to the TV. If Americans were going to devote space to a big, bulky piece of technological furniture, they preferred to be able to watch it.


It looks better than it sounds

By the early 1970s, GE had phased out Porta-Fi and its whole line of consoles with it. It didn’t turn out to be the savior of their stereo business, much less the wave of the future. Maybe if they’d had the idea a decade earlier, Porta-Fi might have caught on. Or maybe it just wasn’t quite either “porta” or “fi” enough to have a reason to exist.

In an echo of Porta-Fi’s problems, the idea of using power lines for Internet data would founder decades later on similar issues. In the early days of online infrastructure, broadband over power lines (BPL) seemed to hold some promise. Why bother building out extensive broadband networks when we already have this grid of wires that go to every house?

But it was another case of the wrong tool for the job. Again, all that noise on the line was too much to overcome, and increasing wireless coverage put paid to the idea for good. The various BPL projects were wound down by about 2010, never to be revisited. It was an ending that any Porta-Fi owner could’ve heard coming.

Where are you at on the audiophile spectrum? I bought some reasonably high quality but still fairly small speakers for my TV set-up…in 1999. Still using those! And I basically gave up on all headphones and even most other speakers once I got my Airpods. Do you go all in on sound quality, or are you more about cheap and convenient? Let’s hear about your sound set-up and audio gadgets in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Enjoy these previous Shoddy Goods stories in any room of the house, without extra wires: