First box with a sub? Probably either the GF777/767 or Big Ben. When did the manufacturers start thinking about bass? When they came up with the idea of putting 8 inch woofers in what was supposed to be a PORTABLE radio!

Then of course there were many boxes with sets of 4 woofers, a few with even more....but I don't think boomboxes got really bass heavy in general until the late 80's or so. The boombox is often associated with the birth of hip-hop; but we must remember hip hop was still wayyy underground in the late 70's/early 80's and these machines were originally built to blast rock, funk, pop, whatever have you. Of course, hip hop came into the mainstream later on in the decade and the big electronics corporations took notice; they had to come up with products that could reproduce that low-end which is crucial to that genre.
As for the various sound enhancement switches; that all trickled down from the 'loudness' switches often found on home hi-fi stereo gear. The clever names are just marketing tools; they all are designed to boost either just the bass, or the bass and treble at low volumes to make the music seem more 'alive'. The better designed circuits will roll off the extreme lows and highs as the volume is increased; others will just push the amp and speakers into distortion as the volume goes up.
I'm pretty sure the 'stereo wide' feature found on many early models is a descendent of the 'faked' quadraphonic effect found on many lower end receivers of the mid to late seventies.
DISCUSS!
