Finding enclosure
Godzilla and I are precisely the same age: We were both born in 1954, Godzilla as an expression of the postwar fears of a nation uniquely aware of the horrors of nuclear armaments, I as an expression of the postwar comfort felt by an American veteran fresh from foreign wars. We both dislike being awakened from our slumber, and we’re both unusually handsome.
Like so many Americans of my generation, I love Godzilla—along with Mothra, Rodan, Tobor the 8th Man, Speed Racer, and the Panasonic transistor radio my dad gave me in 1965. During more or less the same stretch of time, Japanese baby boomers came under the spell of Mickey Mouse, The Durango Kid, Elvis Presley, and virtually any piece of audio gear designed and made by Western Electric and that company’s descendent, Altec Lansing.
The suggestion that American and Japanese consumers spent the second half of the 20th century buying each other’s castoffs overstates the case, yet it contains a grain of truth. Truer still is the observation that Japan has done a better job of preserving, even curating, certain products of America’s technocultural history than the other way around. That’s well known by any audio enthusiast, in the United States or elsewhere, who has tried to buy an original Western Electric 300B output tube or 555 compression driver, or an Altec 604 dual-coaxial loudspeaker. Almost all the best-condition examples of those and other coveted products now reside in Japan.1
Why? Because just as British teens in the 1950s understood American rhythm-and-blues records better than most white American consumers of the same era, so did Japanese audio enthusiasts understand the earliest and coincidentally best-engineered products of the American audio industry far better than anyone else, virtually from the start. What is it about these island nations?
Cabinets of curiosities
As I explained in,2 I own a pair of Altec 604 drivers—a version called the 604E, made from 1965 to 1972, which was designed with both a higher-compliance bass diaphragm and a treble horn that’s better at dispersing high frequencies than previous versions. In other words, it made a little more bass, and a little more treble, and was thus a little more modern.
