Oh, PSB? One of the fav bands of my old school buddy. In his Top 5, with PF, Depeche Mode and Jean-Michel Jarre.
I feel kind of goofy looking at the magazine, I actually like 90% of the bands in it but I liked music much more when bands were mysterious and I didn't really know a lot about them. If I had seen these photos I probably shrugged them off as being too fluffy but they were their own kind of niche back then and most of their music has aged very well.
wow i didn't see that Alex lad, the fh7 is built better imho but the m90 sounds much better along with super anrs (dolby c)
According to the Bank of England, £1242 in 2018s money I was looking around at other prices and found this https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/cost-car-year-born/ So in 1981 you could buy a new Mazda 323 car for just over the price of ten M90s ! In the UK most peoples first sighting of new band would have been on the Thursday early evening programme Top of the Pops. With only three TV channels until late 1982, but national coverage, some episodes were watched by 1/3rd of the UK population https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/nov/29/popandrock.television As we had recently had Glam Rock (of which David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust is probably the only performer who made an impact in the USA) people expected Pop Stars to have wacky Haircuts and Outfits. However, I still remember going into College on a Friday to find a big discussion going on about the previous nights episode. "It was a Boy", "No it was a Girl" "BOY" "GIRL" The person everyone was talking about was Boy George who would go on to be a Smash Hits, TOTP, and Tabloid regular.
yea just thought about it the m90 sure was big money back then since i was only earning £30 a week on YTS in the mid to late 80's
Judging from the number that appear on Ebay.co.uk the VZ3000 was a big seller back in the day. Compared to other music centres they still fetch a decent price as well.
Centrex, Pioneer's Budget Brand, similar to Marantz's Superscope Line. The RK-112, RK-222, and the beautiful RK-888.
The Crosley reminded me that Aldi have got a Boombox (or probably more realistically a Squeakbox) in again. The graphics are different to last years. The casing of the box is also different but we don't know about the internals. I guess they are aiming for the Fathers Day market (again). The back to the 1980s box labels are probably intended for youngsters who know Dad was a teenager in the 1980s but don't know if they were using wind up gramophones or MP2 players back then. Sorry about the rubbish photo, taken with my phone through a glass cabinet. Aldi don't want high value items like that going missing. Some better photos on an external site https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/06/aldi-selling-nostalgic-boombox-29-99-9838014/
Finally a few of them realized the egg shape was a doomsday device and they're making some pretty cool reissues of the golden age. That's not bad looking Longman....
Target group. Yep, this one looks better. But anyway as we call it "balalaika". Nobody, IMO, will be ever producing StereoS which live up to the old day standards. BTW, what do you think happened to those production lines which once produced hid quality boxes and decks at Matsushita, Pio, etc.? All scrapped a long ago?
scrapped, I am sure! And all professional personnel fired. As happened with F-22 production line and workers, only to realize, years later, that F-22, with all its glitches, is still better than whatever else is out there What is StereoS ?
I'm not a target customer, I've got enough of the vintage stuff to not care about the reissues but it's nice they're not doing what I think is the most ugly design cue of all time, big eggy rounded edges. It was on everything and hideous, I always loved the square edges of the late 80's Hondas, but Honda did the same thing, rounded everything and got ugly in the process. I give these guys a little credit but not much, I've got a tiny Sanyo Mini that will blow these away. So many nice features, it was designed with a lot of love by guys that seemingly loved to one-up even if it was a relatively small feature. A lot of the productions lines were just assembly, the parts, sourced from outside vendors, were stacked next to the guys that put them together. There was probabably a line and each person had a unique part but I don't think anything was too high-tech to not duplicate today. The problem today is that they had so many parts, that it would be hard to start from scratch and do it at a price level people could afford. These guys built upon the models from the year before or had a supplier they could buy a component from. These suppliers were also upping the quality of their components so everyone was happy but now most of these companies are long gone.
It is a fact that Technics scrapped all the SL1200 turntable tooling when they decided that Vinyl was dead - just before it became fashionable again. After a few years they decided to restart production and had to remake all the tooling. I guess it would wear over the decades of use so maybe that was a good thing. or just as likely retired. If the guys who designed boomboxes were in their forties back in the 1980s they will be in their eighties by now. Dealing with obsolescence problems on ten year old equipment I know what you mean. I expect the supplier base for things like tape heads is extremely limited now. However, the key problem is cost. The Bank Of England inflation calculator shows a figure of three between 1985 and 2018, so the 1980s equivalent cost of the Aldi Boombox is £10. Lets have a look in the 1985 Argos catalogue to see what you could buy for £10 back then A very basic radio without the FM band. The cheapest Mono radio cassette in the 1985 catalogue was the equivalent of £100 in 2018 money. Would people be prepared to pay that today when you could get a Sanyo CD Radio Double Cassette from my local charity shop for £6. I was half tempted but decided I didn't need an oversized egg.
