I just “celebrated” my 60th birthday (BTW, it’s popular to say “60 is today’s 50”, but forget it, 60 is still 60). It’s a time for contemplation about life, love and, yes, audio and how it all fits into one’s future. Retirement looms with the life-style changes that follow along, often meaning moving into smaller quarters or even frequent moves to follow the weather, etc. So I thought it would be interesting to work on what I call a “back seat” system.

I define a back seat system as a system of very high quality all of whose components will fit on the back seat of a car. This rules out 6 foot tall speakers, 200 pound amplifiers, 4 chassis preamps and the like. Not necessarily cheap, but thrifty with regards to size, weight and complexity without sacrificing performance as much as possible.

And this may come to the fore even more as time goes on for people not of retirement age as tight economic conditions enforce smaller living spaces and may require more “following the sun” from place to place to stay employed. Not to mention that some people just prefer a less obtrusive stereo or to have music in family shared spaces where big, hot and complex systems just would not be appropriate.

So I am going to try to investigate this as time goes by. I hope, besides satisfying my own personal curiosity, this will be of interest and use to readers of this log. Equipment that is part of this survey will be tagged with “Back seat stereo”.