We have spent some time here looking at the history of recorded music and how it has been made in a studio and reproduced at home. We have examined ancient formats like Edison cylinders and 78 rpm discs, and slightly less ancient formats such as the Long Play record and the smaller 45 rpm disc. One thing all of these forms had in common was that they were mobile only insofar as you could lug your phonograph from one location to another. Music in your car? That was what radios were for.

Everyone knows about the Compact Cassette tape and its precursor, the 8-track tape, but not everyone knows about an earlier attempt to take your own music on the road – the Highway HiFi.

During the transition out of the longtime standard 78 rpm shellac disc, there was one format that came out around the same general time as the “33” and the “45” – That was the 16 2/3 rpm disc. These discs were mainly offered for spoken word records aimed at the blind. However, they also served as the basis for a collaboration between Columbia Records and the Chrysler Corporation for a device Chrysler called the Highway HiFi. We all know how that experiment ended, but the story is interesting just the same.

The system was the brainchild of Peter Goldmark of CBS Laboratories. It is not as though Goldmark needed a new invention under his belt – he is credited with a major breakthrough in color television before the war and had also been a member of the team that had invented the 33 1/3 rpm Long Play disc for Columbia (then owned by CBS). In his later years, Goldmark wrote a book in which he attributed the idea for the Highway HiFi to his young son, who observed that with radio, passengers in a car were at the mercy of broadcasters who decided on programming. You could switch to another station, but then (as now) there was only so much variety available.

Goldmark worked through what would be needed – to get the same 45-minute playing time as a standard LP and still have a disc and player that would fit in or under a car’s dashboard, a smaller disc with even finer grooves would be necessary. The 16 2/3 rpm format was already in existence, so that was a start. That format had a built-in limitation in that it was only really good in middle frequencies (like the human voice), but then in an environment like a car on the road when playing time trumped sound quality, the trade-off seemed worth it.

Goldmark came up with an “ultra” microgroove that packed far more grooves into the same space than did a standard LP. To go with the extremely compressed grooves, the system needed a stylus of .25 mil (.00025 inches). This has half the thickness of the .5 mil stylus that remains the standard for a normal stereo LP.

With the basics out of the way, it was next necessary to make a player. Goldmark made a prototype and installed it in a collegue’s Thunderbird for a test, and it seemed successful. But when he approached higher levels of management at CBS, he ran into resistance. William Paley, who ran the company, was not at all keen on the idea. This was mainly because CBS was in the radio business, and Paley viewed a mobile phonograph as a potential threat to radio – a medium which was already straining under competition from television. Still, Goldmark retained a stubborn belief in the value of his invention and decided to present it directly to Chrysler Corporation.

Why Chrysler? Goldmark said it was because he owned a Chrysler and it was, therefore, the first company he thought of. He contacted Chrysler’s chief electrical engineer and demonstrated the prototype. Goldmark’s recollection was that the engineer drove the car on Chrysler’s test track, which contained all kinds of inhospitable surfaces. Despite this determined attempt to make the record skip, it would not. Goldmark’s memory may not be completely reliable, because he also remembers that future Chrysler President Lynn Townsend personally told him “I must have it” for the company. The problem is that Townsend was an outside accountant who was not brought into the company until 1957, so it is doubtful that he would have been involved in the prototype stage of a device that would probably have gone into production late in the summer of 1955. But whatever.

The Highway HiFi (the name given the player by Chrysler) was offered as an option for 1956 models. At $200, it was not at all inexpensive – that equates to about $2,200 in 2023. But the Highway HiFi was a Chrysler Corporation exclusive, and that company gave it plenty of promotion.

Like in this short dealer film that showed off the new features of the 1956 Chrysler line of cars. If you want to skip past all of the other life-changing innovations of new Chryslers that year, you can see where they pushed the Highway HiFi system starting at the 3:36 minute mark.

The reality turned out to be a little different from the test that Goldmark described. Because the player would have to withstand road shocks of all kinds, it pressed that extremely thin stylus into the disc with higher than average pressure (2 grams) in order to discourage skipping. The chassis of the player was mounted in some soft rubber mountings to further cushion the unit from road forces. Even then, skipping became a problem and Chrysler began to experience high warranty costs. The players may have worked under the careful calibration of an audio engineer, but there were very few audio engineers capable of such finesse found in Chrysler’s dealer service departments. Even for those lucky owners whose players worked more-or-less as intended, the discs tended to wear quickly because of the concentrated pressure of the ultra-thin stylus on the vinyl grooves, despite the extra thickness of the pressed discs.

Another problem with the discs was the extremely limited selection of titles. Some attribute the lack of rock & roll titles to William Paley’s distaste for that music, and others to Goldmark. In reality, this should not have been an issue as the teens listening to the new sounds in the fall of 1955 were not the ones buying new cars (especially cars with $200 record players in them).

But the selection was still far too limited for the adult demographic. Chrysler’s press release for the system demonstrated the problem:

“Making up the collection are Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, Borodini’s Polovtsian Dances, Ippalitov-Ivanov’s Procession of the Sardar, the complete score of the Broadway musical show Pajama Game, Walt Disney’s Davey Crockett, Gene Autry and Champion, Romantic Moods by Percy Faith and his orchestra, quiet jazz by Paul Weston and his orchestra, Music of Cole Porter and Victor Herbert by Andre Kostelanetz and his orchestra, and dramatic readings from Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell by a cast of top Hollywood and Broadway artists.”

So, if you were in a mood for some Duke Ellington, some Perry Como or some Dinah Shore, you were out of luck (never mind Sinatra or Elvis). Not even Lawrence Welk, one of the main celebrity pitchmen for Dodge cars, made it onto any of the Highway HiFi records. Go figure. Only 42 titles were ever offered, so the original vision of the Highway HiFi was never actualized – if your programming choices were limited by radio broadcasters, they were limited even more by the sparse catalog of records being offered.

After Chrysler’s initial burst of optimism, consumer interest fizzled quickly (if it was ever there to start with). Sources put the size of the initial order Chrysler placed with Columbia Special Products at between 18,000 and 20,000 units. But when it came to actually installing them in cars, Chrysler sold just 3,685 of the players in 1956 and a mere 675 in 1957 before the option was discontinued.

Mind you, this was with the player being offered by every single brand under the Chrysler Corporation umbrella: Plymouth, Dodge, DeSoto, Chrysler and Chrysler’s Imperial. Those five Divisional brands, by the way, totaled over 1,000,000 units of production in 1956 and almost 1,300,000 in 1957, which shows just how dreadfully unpopular this option was for the company.

This was very much a replay of the fiascos that resulted from early efforts at creation of the long-play record as offered by Edison in the 1920’s and RCA Victor not long after. As before, there were too few record titles and too few early-adopter customers willing to pony up for the too-expensive yet compromised players. And while most record players of the 1950s-60s offered a 16 2/3 rpm option, those household turntables did not come equipped with the ultra-fine stylus necessary to play the Chrysler/Columbia titles at home without damaging them.

Chrysler was not dissuaded, and tried offering mobile music one more time with an RCA-Victor system in 1960-61 model cars. This second version (which was not called Highway HiFi because it was not a Chrysler-exclusive system) avoided the problem of poor music selection by playing standard 45 rpm discs. The good news was that this player cost only $51.75 ($525.96 in 2023 money). However, the players turned out to be even more troublesome than the original Columbia system. First was the need for a mechanical disc changer because individual discs were limited to only 3-5 minutes of playing time. Also, the extra-high stylus pressure wore the records quickly. After this second system flopped as well, both the audio and automotive industries were ready to concede that the traditional disc was not the answer to road-going music to be chosen by the driver and not by radio stations.

It would take close to another decade and an entirely different method of music reproduction to make on-the-go audio a popular automotive accessory. Until that finally came about, AM radio ruled supreme as the source for music on the road, proving that Mr. Paley had nothing to worry about.