Mini Stereos and Cool Car Compo Ads

Another 1979 ad for Pioneer

 

Marantz Rolling Thunder from 1978. Marantz made some beautiful equipment but they don't have the same footprint for the components, the little amplifier with the treble/bass knobs is smaller then the rest. Marantz Ads are hard to find, I think a few showed up over in Australia but not much in the USA.

 

Outside of the Radio Shack System above, this issue has no ads for mini systems! I would consider these units to be Midi-size but still impressive. As far as mini-speakers, I always considered these to be the weak link of the systems. The Marantz Micro Stereo is an exception (and there may be more). It's so small, it does a great job of powering the little 5-watt speakers and it sounds awesome for it's size. The bigger systems like the AIWA 22 and Hitachi L0-D can handle full size speakers and it's like night and day difference. There's no ads for the Marantz down here, but there's a ton in the Infamous Marantz Thread.
From 1979

 

AKAI UC-5 from 1980. That remote would have been very advanced for 1980.

 

This kind of fits the spirit of the equipment, it's hard to make a small footprint turntable unless you make it horizontal, the Mitsubishi LT-5V from 1980. These systems were popular with the girls when I was young, guys bought the big overwhelming systems and girls loved the small stuff and the vertical turntables.

 

Concord 1980

 

Sony from 1982

 

Another Marantz CAR System from 1980, you can see how small the amp is. The nice thing with Marantz is they have the flat aluminum face with the familar exposed bolt heads on the corners. This is also an Australian Ad but check out the Alfasud, those cars are awesome but they turned to dust when they saw our salted-winters....

 

Sony's Micro System from 1980, anybody seen one of these? The V55 is the full size reciever, what is the little system called?

 

Mitsubishi Car Stereo from 1980

 

Found on Pinterest

 

The bottom Panasonic looks more like a Technics. I always felt their design team were different. I have a mini stereo, something like C07 that's branded Panasonic but every part on the inside is Technics and the Technics Version seems to be far more common. Technics might have been for shops that carried more of the brand and Pansonic might have been found just about anywhere, or something like that.

 

Obviously branding was huge with Japanese Product Lines, interestingly I don't think they used Lexus in Japan. Similar branding also didn't cross all borders, I think a lot of it had to change here because the names were copyrighted and in use. We also had some many tiers of retail, the mom & pop retail (entry level), the camera stores (Marantz and high-end), electronic shops (everything), department stores (mid-level), discount stores like K-Mart (Taiwan/Hong Kong/Singapore Models).

Throw in that we never got more than AM/FM bands and that's a lot of stuff with tiny differences which makes the hobby that much more fun.

 

Fujitsu 10 from 1978

 

I'd love to find one of these, I used to bid on Nakamichi Car Stereos but they always went for big money, from 1983 the Nakamichi TD-1200

 

Sharp System 1900 from 1987

 

Here's a beauty from Fujitsu Ten 1987