New boombox from Panasonic?

Which model is Sony new boombox??

 

At this point ,that major brands of the past are offering cassette players is more significant than it seems.

The fact that they are not the high quality products of the past, performance wise, is not so important at the moment, it seems like they are testing waters.

That can clearly be seen with Toshiba's TY-AK1 that used the Aurex brand the once high quality Toshiba branch the equivalent of Sharp's Optonica or National's Technics.
That Toshiba chose Aurex for TY-AK1 is like a statement :"We are willing to offer a quality product" if they will succeed it remains to be seen.

Marketing definitely has something to do with it but the presence of Junichi Matsuzaki giving a lecture at the presentation of TY-AK1 about "Modern Boombox" is rather convincing.
Junichi Matsuzaki of "Design Underground" is a respected collector/restorer with a more than 3000 boomboxes collection but his interests are not limited to that sector of appliances.
A very interesting interview with Junichi Matsuzaki can be found at www.japantimes.co.jp and if you want to buy his book "Japanese Old Boombox Catalog" at www.amazon.co.jp
Thanks for the thorough presentation of TY-AK1.

 

thank you

 

Somehow, I doubt if the major Manufacturers like Sony ever stopped making Radio Cassette Recorders,
in the same way that they have never stopped making AM FM portable radios.

However, I think they recognise that currently the largest market are pensioners who either haven't moved on to CDs
or have more cassettes than CDs. They were aimed at people like my Mum who would either never have heard of Dolby
and or wouldn't understand what it was supposed to do.

One of the cassette duplicators sites says that a market that never died was for talking books. You don't need HiFi quality for those.

Hopefully as more people get interested we might get some better equipment released. After all Panasonic revived
the Technics brand an the SL1200, although it might cost more in real terms now than it did when first released.

 

I was in Currys on Friday and noticed this JVC

https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/audio...b-fm-bluetooth-boombox-grey-10155880-pdt.html

seems to have all the latest features in addition to CD, Cassette, and Radio (including DAB).
Of course whether JVC had anything to do with the design is unknown.
Four stars on the customer reviews is quite respectable though.

 

The mighty Aiwa also present...
http://www.jp-aiwa.com/products/audio/csd-m20/

 

Interesting, that is not made by the real Aiwa of USA. Many radios are given fake brand names today. There are many Panasonics and JVCs that are not actually made by Panasonic or JVC.

 

JVC is part of the Kenwood Corporation now, trading as JVC Kenwood corp. Rebranding happens a lot to help keep costs down. The only real downer with multi-brand companies is they tend to degrade many of the big names we had in the past, look at Akai for example, unless you buy their DJ/Mixing equipment, the actual speakers/radios/decks they make now are rebranded cheap Chinese stuff. Its a such a shame.

 

Next door to Currys is B&Ms. They had « Akai » DVD players and loads of « Goodmans » stuff with « Established 1925’ on the boxes.
Like me they probably had to look on Wikipedia to determine that.
Maybe someone should bring back the Havard, Benkson, and Fidelity brands. At least then you would know what to expect for your £30 or whatever.

 

LOL @ Goodmans, they slapped their name on some Jamo speakers

 

Is that B&M's where you live or in Crawley? As B&M's is next door to Currys there too!

They seem to have a lot of Goodmans and Akai branded units in there, much like TJ Hughes do, but its all just rebranded tosh really. Goodmans actually used to be pretty decent stuff back in the 70's & 80's, I have a set of tiny speakers I bought off eBay for much cheapness from around 1978-1980 ish and they sound superb. Its a case of a corporation buys them up, doesn't really know what to do with them, so just uses them for 'entry-level' hi-fi.

 

Neither. Bristol where I grew up. Thinking about it what is now B&Ms used to be Currys, with PC World next door until the two stores were combined a couple of years ago. For quite a few years there was a lot of duplication between their product ranges and both TVs and computers are a lot smaller than they were a decade ago. Maybe they sold a load of their shops to B&Ms.

 

It looks official.
From Wikipedia :
Aiwa Co., Ltd. (2017-)
On April 11, 2017, Japanese audio equipment manufactuer Towada Audio announced that Towada acquired Aiwa brand rights from Sony and produce Aiwa-branded audio and record player products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiwa

 

why can't they make something good instead of utter rubbish