I saw this little guy on eBay & as I remember this range of stereo's from the 1970's, I put in an offer & bought it!! It arrived packed very badly, but thankfully undamaged & in amazingly good condition - Just dirty everywhere & a non functioning cassette deck of course! These are easy to strip down & repair.........New belts & serviceoil on all the switches & we had a functioning radio with no noisy controls - The cassette deck was still completely dead though..... I was swinging on the gate with this one..........Do I shelve it for now & come back to it when I was in the mood for fault finding!! Just before I put it all in a box for a rainy day.........I spotted one of the motor supply wires was not looking quite like a ticket! - In fact it was just hanging on by it's insulation! Soldering iron produced & plugged in & in no time the offending cabble was firmly soldered to the board once again & I was no longer caught up in the tentyhooks! I then spent well over an hour just cleaning & cleaning over & over again - It was really dirty & traces still remain that a decent cleaning foam will probably remove........I don't have any at the moment - Always the way! The build quality is so high on this era of portable stereo's, even the knobs are nicely ring chromed & solid plastic knurled rotary type controls make it look really nice!! Typically Hitachi - It just all works perfectly & will do for many years to come!! All original it even has the handle that "Clicks" when you pull it up & also when you fold it down again - A nice touch! Some folk aren't fans of Hitachi models, I am & they are a joy to work on! I give you.........The TRK-5280E Radio Recorder!! Et Viola: I Found This From THe 1977 Brochure
Good to see Mini-Meow W'Orange in training. The Orange "Stereo" writing on the Hitachi matches him. That and the cream tuner dials are very distinctive on these 1970s Hitachis. I remember seeing similar Hitachis back in the day in the window of Gardner and Badman, a local TV shop in Nailsea near Bristol. I guess they must have been a Hitachi (and Toshiba) main dealer as I don't recall them having Sony stuff. That was when every moderately sized town would have one or two independent TV shops which also sold Radios, vacuum cleaners etc. I hope you got it for a good price. There were/are several on Ebay and prices seem to be all over the place.
Those are really nice looking first generation boxes, the color and layout are flawless, everything looks beefy. I like the boxes with external antenna hook ups, sadly a feature that disappeared over time.
Yours looks like a reincarnation of my favorite Hitachi TRK-5190H: The build quality and attention to details in these Hitachis' is truly amazing, each knob was like a piece of jewelry I spent quite a few happy hours with this baby over "beer and boomboxes" rites
Thanks for sharing, both of those are stunning, Hitachi really put a lot of attention into these, sure everything looks kind of normal, but these were the ones that set that trend. The hint of orange is priceless, it would have matched your orange or avacado colored refrigerator perfectly. Now I'm going to have to keep an eye out for one of these, they tend to be more rare over here.
Jorge - These are definitely built on the same chassis no question & they hark back to a great time for Boomers
