Back in the Day is a new interview series where we talk with veteran consumer electronics professionals about their careers and perspective on how things have changed and evolved over the years.
We talked with Joel Rosenblatt, who has been working in the audio electronics industry since the mid-to-late 60s. He started out working with Bozak, the company from which Terra ultimately emerged, and has been working in the industry since. At present, Rosenblatt is a Marketing and Relationships Manager at our company.
Disclaimer: This sort of thing should go without saying, but in this context and because this is an interview, Joel’s views are his own and not necessarily those of this company.
How were you drawn in to the consumer electronics industry? Why do you think you were drawn to audio in particular?
I had no life. If I had any kind of talent, I would have been in a real business. [Laughs] There was a guy on television not long ago and he was talking about creating a life worth living. He had written a book about the subject and he said that all other things aside, if someone isn’t passionate about their career, it’s just a job. It’s meaningless. If they’re passionate, even if they’re not as talented, passion takes them a long way toward success. I agree with that.
What was your first job?
My first job in the business was building amplifier kits. There were companies that made these kits the customer would solder together at home. I made tubes and all of these components. Then I worked at a generator set department while in college. I had a friend who worked at Bozak and I got a job there. I wanted a job in sales, not that I had any experience. I am sitting in the office with the application and I hear this woman behind a desk say to a manager, “Oh, are we hiring? Do we need people?” I had put on my application that I was looking for a job in sales, and the guy says, “We need people in manufacturing.” So I added to sales a slash and included assembly. [Laughs] I needed a job! They hired me. I worked for them building loudspeakers. Really big ones.
Are you a natural tinkerer?
My father was a tinkerer and that’s part of it. He took an old console radio and added speakers to it to make it stereo because stereo had just come along. I saw him do that and I thought it was interesting. And I would say I like toys. I don’t really think men ever grow up. We like toys, but the toys I like now aren’t the same I liked when I was a kid. I like motorcycles, cars, cameras, and audio equipment. I like stuff like that, and I like to know how that stuff works. I liked listening to music—I enjoyed the devices themselves—and so I started building myself stereo systems. I read lots of magazines, and read about how this and that worked. I learned from that.
I was at Bozak for a year and a half. Around 1970, there was a store down in Norwalk called Arrow Electronics and I looked there for a job. I walked in on a Saturday, talked to the Assistant Manager and told him I wanted to sell audio equipment. There was lots of nice, big speakers and stuff and he told me later that when I walked out of the store, he called the Manager and told him “You know how you once told me that there was never a natural born audio salesmen.” Whatever that means. And the Manager said, “Yeah?” The Assistant Manager said, “One just walked out of here.” I wanted a part time job and he convinced me to leave Bozak to come on full time.
What was that job like?
The industry was very different. Arrow was was a full line electronics store. We had a tube tester where you brought in the tube from your TV to see why the TV wasn’t working. We sold ham radios. It was like a Radio Shack, but with more, higher quality stuff. Lafayette Radio was around then, and Allied Radio, and lots of stores and catalogs like that. You could pick up catalogs with 600 pages — everything from $1,000 loudspeakers to potentiometers, resisters, diodes and all that stuff.
We, the guys who worked in the audio department, didn’t see ourselves as salesmen. You can look at a salesman like a used car guy. I have worked with some salesmen who are like that, where a customer would ask a question and the salesman would knowingly lie or say anything they thought necessary to make the sale. I didn’t enjoy working with those people and I am proud of the fact that I was never that way.
The people that were buying those products were passionate about what they were buying—they were as passionate as we were about selling it. They would want to come in and listen to maybe 15 different loudspeakers over the course of 3 hours. It was more like being a consultant than being a salesman. It wasn’t about selling something like you would sell a refrigerator based on it having a bigger freezer. We felt like we were selling something special. At that time, I think we were selling something special. What we were selling was the experience. They’re going to go home, they’re going to turn the lights down, they’re going to smoke a joint, and they’re going to listen to Dark Side of the… or whatever the hell it is. It was not going home and taking a steak out of the freezer.
Going to work every day in the store was fun. We wanted to go to work. We wanted to be there. We would close the store at 6 o’clock and we wouldn’t leave until 7:30 or 8:00. We would listen to music then. We had customers who we called tire kickers and the come in and bring pizza and we would all listen to music together. It was a pretty neat time.
Unidentified audio / electronics store and salesman in 1973. Credit: winnabowflash via Photobucket
How have you seen the industry change over time?
I think a big change in our industry is that there is no longer the passion that the passion has changed. The old time guys are constantly making the case that the art of the demo is dead. This is something that I’ve seen 15 times in the last year by various people in the industry. “Why don’t people do demos anymore? Why don’t people know how to demo?” It’s the same stuff that’s been said over and over. There will be 40 more of those articles in the next 2 years and I don’t think any one of them will have much impact on anyone because there is no passion. It’s not the way it used to be. People don’t demo. People don’t have show rooms.
The change in the industry that I see is that when I was young—when the Baby Boomers left home—there were no video games, there were no computers, there was no Internet. We could play Pinochle, but there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff to do. The Boomers found that they could smoke dope and listen to Pink Floyd and that was fun. Or maybe the Grateful Dead or Moody Blues. The bands changed, but the dope was a constant. It didn’t matter what the band was—you smoked dope and you listened to music.
They would go out and spend a good portion of their money—it was a lot of money to them because they didn’t have much—on a stereo system. This was a big thing. They’d sit around at night and listen to music and they were passionate. They’d come into a music store and they’d spend hours in there. They’d go to four stores. They’d spend a month trying to figure out what kind of speakers to buy. It doesn’t happen anymore. The world has changed. There’s all these other things they can be involved in now. They have Facebook and video games and computers.
And now dope cultivation itself—the process of that—is both the habit and the hobby. They can be as nerdy about growing it as they are about smoking it.
Absolutely. The products have changed. The focus has changed.
Take Apple and the iPod, where they took the Walkman and made it all of these great things and eventually folded a phone into it, but the quality of the sound was an enormous step down in high fidelity. It didn’t really matter. The reality is you may not feel as involved and it is a huge step back, but it is convenient and small. Convenience trumps lots of stuff. As a friend in the industry says: easy trumps everything. You can talk about a million technological benefits that a product packs, but if you can push one button that does it all, it can work like crap and find a lot of success.
Similarly, look at Beats headphones. Eventually Beats were everywhere—an overnight sensation. Suddenly this company came along and it became huge. The reality, though, is that people didn’t buy them because they sounded good, but because they were jewelry.
And because Dr. Dre told us to.
They became a status symbol. Dozens of people are walking through airports with $300 headphones around their necks and while they aren’t great, they are jewelry. So what I am saying is that caring about music was a microsecond in the history of the world, and this industry in particular. When Baby Boomers left home and took this tiny hobbyist business on the road, they made it kind of an industry, but then it imploded and it is right back to where is used to be.
I don’t think much of anything is going to change. I think the position of listening to music—I mean it as a focus, not as a background activity while doing something else—is no longer a priority.
You have been in this business a long time. How does it feel to look back on it?
The human mind is amazing. Time goes on and you look back and things look a lot rosier than they were. I miss retail. If there was a way for me to go back and sell audio equipment again, I would do that. But you know what? That time doesn’t exist anymore. You can never go home again. It’s gone.
To me, this work was everything. Listen, I joke about not having a life, but I have no interest in sports, I’ve never been drunk in my entire life… I’m passionate about this stuff. That’s my life. I come down into my basement when my wife goes to sleep and I watch a concert or I listen to Crosby, Stills and Nash. I still do this. I still listen to music. It makes me smile. I enjoy it. This work has been fun. This has been everything to me.