The history of audio and visual equipment starts over 150 years ago with Thomas Edison’s numerous inventions. Since World War II, audio and visual equipment have undergone remarkable changes. Manufacturers of audio and visual equipment have incorporated each advance in audio and visual image recording and reproduction and electronics technology as quickly as they could into the products available to consumers. As electronics components have gotten smaller, faster, cheaper and easier to produce, manufacturers have reduced the costs for audio and visual equipment tremendously while improving audio and video quality and incorporating more and more innovative features. Not too long ago, we designed audio equipment exclusively with vacuum tubes and each audio component had a specific function. Examples of these single purposed components are power amplifiers and radio tuners. Today’s receivers have powerful amplifiers, satellite tuners and video processing for a tenth the price. Along the way, manufacturers replaced the vacuum tubes with transistors and integrated circuits. The quality of the equipment and the images and sound keeps getting better and the size and costs of the equipment keep dropping.

Seventy years ago, we might have had a small round television, a radio and a record player in our home. In the 1950s and 1960s, we could expand to high fidelity audio equipment that included two sound channels with two speakers (stereo). In the 1960s, manufacturers gave us color television, remote controls and better quality audio and visual equipment. In the last ten years, we have embraced five or more sound channels with as many as seven speakers surrounding the listener. Over the last twenty years, our televisions have grown from twenty inches across to 55 inches and more. In the last few years, digital audio and visual reproduction has quickly replaced analog giving us crystal clear pictures and sound.