Feeding that through the inflation calculator gives a 2019 price of over £2200. The fact that the price is given without tax is a give away that it was aimed at broadcasters and similar who could claim the tax back, while back then Wireless World magazine was aimed at electronic professionals who would be doing things like purchasing all the equipment for a new local radio station. For the home user, even an Akai HiFi cassette deck with Dolby was less than half the price while "toys" were available for 1/10th of the price.
The Grundig wins for looks, the others are nice but fake wood didn't age well. For the members that lived through the 70's, I remember Chevrolet Vega's on the Price is Right being worth about the same price, yes a car was priced the same as a cassette recorder. We were like most families back then and stereo cassette was still too expensive, even the low end units. Wireless World just popped up on www.worldradiohistory.com They even changed the name of the site to reflect the whole globe. It's amazing how much radio, tape, audio used to be part of everyone lives.
I've been close to buying one of these a few times now. Primarily to compare with my beloved Sony TCD5M and see if it really is sonically superior as indicated. I own a few Nakamichi full size decks including a Dragon and CR4 so I can well imagine it to be true but in terms of portability and ease of use, especially when bootlegging back in the day, I would have chosen the Sony every time. For anyone already familiar with the 550 should also be intimately familiar with it's (probably) most famous bootlegging advocate - Mike “The Mic” Millard. Mike made some of the best-sounding Pink Floyd bootlegs back in the 70's using one of these things secreted about his wheelchair when feigning disability at various gigs. Crafty. The recordings are an absolute joy to listen to and have now even made it onto official PF releases. https://www.collectorsmusicreviews....th-night-mike-millard-master-tapes-sigma-242/ I doubt I will ever buy one. They're just too large and cumbersome and these days reliability/failure-risk is a determining factor. Servicing/repair costs are also prohibitive. When I went to see one after it was described as 'perfect working condition' it promptly coughed, wheezed and died on the spot. Unfortunate but in retrospect I'm sort of glad we couldn't revive it as while it sounded glorious for the 20 seconds it played one of my own recordings I would have been severely upset if I had decided to buy it, get it home, plug it in just to experience it failing on me.
I've been close to getting one but out-bid in the end, seeing them for under $60 USD years ago keeps me from paying the bigger dollars they are getting now. I love the history of some of these machines, it's too bad the last thing people think of is all of the great artists during the 70's that probably had something similar taping shows. Here's another ad from 1975
