Hi People!! Paid £55 for this last week, the seller even took it of Ebay then offered me discount! Think he knew I was keen to get it!! Now I all too aware that these are under performers, they always were but not to a great extent & 35 years later after knowing someone who had one & that they very nice looking & solidly built, the chance to own one boxed with the instructions was something I couldn't pass up! Anyway it arrived today & so far this is the stereo I have had to nothing more than clean it up - Just dust & dirt & not much either!! A couple of stubborn marks & f**king sellotape on the tuner window AGAIN Who are these people?? Funnily enough this sellotape was just as stubborn as yesterday on the Maximal boomer, I mean really hard to get off leaving no trace!! Head & roller clean of course - look at the cassette door & tuner window...........so clean & like new Everything works like a brand new machine, never had batteries in it either & I doubt the aerial has ever been fully extended - the eject door makes that brand new quiet piston noise as it slowly opens Sound is good, it's how I remember they sounded - doesn't compete with the better Pioneers at all but all said & done, it is a very nice stereo & a lovely addition as well as being a keeper This model needs no introduction here or on Boomboxery
Nick, you're scoring aces after aces! This new Pioneer of yours looks even mintier than when it left the factory! What's your secret, you scoundrel? Nahhh, no secret: you just pay attention to details. Well done mate!
A classy looking box back from the days when Boots "the Chemist" aspired to be a department store. They were actually quite into Records, Tapes and Audio Gear. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Boots-Aud...857471?hash=item43a919ed3f:g:KtIAAOSwdIFX0UFY In the late 1960s their shop in Whiteladies Road was the only place where I remember there being Listening Booths where people could preview a record before buying it (I think the records themselves were played from turntables behind the cash desk). Since you rarely saw people wearing headphones back then it was quite bizarre to see someone stood in a booth the size of a phone box boogieing away to an inaudible soundtrack. I wasn't old enough to be in the market for records back then. Later Boots also sold their own brand Music Centres and Radio Cassettes. I hesitate to refer to them as boomboxes as I doubt if any of them approached Pioneer for quality. I wonder if there is any record of what your box cost in 1984 ? Regarding the Sellotape on tuner dials I wonder if people were marking where the stations were ? I have seen lots of old radios with little diamond shaped numbered stickers stuck on them for this reason. I think the BBC must have given them away when they reorganised their stations moving Radio 1 from 247m to 275 and 285m and The Light Program, AKA Radio 2, from LW to MW.
Lovely Nick, Pioneer are fairly uncommon beasts so having one in the collection is awesome. I thinbk they sound pretty good to, i have a similar model. You are getting quite a collection together, gonna need a warehouse soon
Hi, Mr Eccles. As other Stereo2Go members were telling you months ago, that Pioneer SK-303L that you scored for all of fifty-five pounds certainly looks minty. (The ginger-furred one certainly shows some interest even as the dear lady enables the "big reveal" in your characteristically nice, big pictures.) A would-be eBay sale that the seller instead de-listed to let you have it at what seems to be such a bargain? Quite amicable. Following what I assume is a "disassembly first" cleaning of the cassette-deck heads, you report -- to the delight of quite a few readers here -- thus: "Everything works like a brand new machine." Right down to the pleasingly civil eject-mechanism sound, eh? When it's time to be heard, the '303L's 24-watt power consumption makes it beefier than, say, an Aiwa CS-600U, so good for the stereo that time around. (And good it sounds and looks in the ninety-odd-second YouTube video that you share with us. Don't know the lady singing in the song someone recorded onto that 90-minute Type II audiocassette we see in the happily clearing-up video. Nice vocals, though.) Yes, I blink over the fact that this Pioneer model has no fine-tuning control for enhanced reception with the one shortwave band -- for instance, to tune 12095 kHz for BBC programming about or somewhere in West Africa. (Then again, neither does the aforementioned Aiwa -- or many other Aiwas, I shrug to say.) But what I really logged in to do was to blink some more and ask: what, no 108 MHz coverage with FM? In a European-market boombox designed and built after 1981? (Uh, the SK-303L is a post-'81 model, right? Our Longman certainly seems to think so.)
The receipt which Nick shows is 1984. Of course the Pioneer could have been sat in a stockroom for a year or two. I wonder what the frequency is with the pointer against the end stop. It looks to be quite a bit above 104 MHz. Having had a few radios that won't tune 108MHz I did some searching and found this discussion https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2023662/plans-to-extend-band-ii-downwards The interesting post is There was a time when in the UK (and Ireland) the majority of FM radio receivers stopped at either 104Mhz, 102MHz or even 100MHz! It was only around the mid-late 90's that the 105-108MHz sub-band started getting used for broadcasting (though that was more to do with clearing other services off there first). As an example, in Dublin in 1989 the radio station that is today known as 98FM was originally allocated an FM licence to serve the city on 105.5MHz, but requested a different frequency (on a supposed temporary basis, but it became permanent) because they claimed that many FM receivers in the service area couldn't receive that frequency.
