Today we’ll take a nos­tal­gic jour­ney back to the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, when music was on vinyl (and on the radio) and home audio was new and excit­ing­ly futur­is­tic… with Hits In Hi-Fi.

In the ear­ly days of stereo, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of albums were released that were designed espe­cial­ly to show off the won­ders of this new way of pre­sent­ing musi­cal enter­tain­ment. Sounds “ping-ponged” across the stereo sound­stage; instru­ments appeared hard on one side and then hard on the oth­er… and there were a lot of space ref­er­ences, bloops and bleeps start­ing and end­ing the pieces — and once the Moog Syn­the­sis­er became avail­able, that was includ­ed in the mix too.

A selec­tion of these albums forms the core of our music today. Often the tracks con­sist of instru­men­tal arrange­ments of pop­u­lar songs, but there are also plen­ty of orig­i­nal tunes too. Aimed at the imag­ined bach­e­lor in his pad, invit­ing his friends around to blow them away with the lat­est stereo­phon­ic sounds, the genre is some­times called “Space-Age Bach­e­lor Pad Music” or “SABPM”; lat­er “Jet Set Pop”; or more broad­ly, “Space Age Pop”.

Today you can also hear “Engines of our Inge­nu­ity” from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton, every 4 hours from 4am Pacif­ic. Our pop­u­lar Sec­ond Life trav­el series, “Where Have You Been?” resumes on July 7.