The King of Cool, the Olympus PearlcorderSD D SYSTEM

It's -23 F so I'm keeping a low profile trying to stay warm and doing more posting than normal, hopefully there's a few other night owls out there.

While Olympus isn't really thought of as a powerhouse personal cassette player manufacturer outside of their microcassette offerings, they did have some cool tape players, and even some stereo ones. The Olympus Pearlcorder SD is one of the most interesting foot-notes in 1970's tape history for mono-microcassette tape players. And don't immediately dismiss mono, you will find audiophiles that say mono, with the right set up, sounds wonderful.

The PearlcorderSD is branded as part of Olympus's D System, with the cassette player as the base, other units can be screwed into the bottom to expand the capabilities of the eco-system. I think it's very similar to first microcassette player from Olympus, the extremely beautiful Zuiko from 1969.

I don't hae a Zuiko but it seems to have the ability to add on accessories. There's some patent information in the Walkman Archeology Thread from Olympus on connecting these players and there's at least three versions, the Pearlcorder R905 being the last that I know of.

Olympus didn't do a ton of advertising and even brochures are tough to find so I don't know all of the accessories that came with the D System, here's mine with my favorite attachment, the Olympus DM1 Uni-Directional Microphone. The mic is on an antenna style boom in case you want to get closer to your subject and it has a windscreen that you can kind of see on the shelf to the left. This unit has a threaded dial on the bottom to attach it, no other accessory may be attached under it.

 

I'm not sure what all the accessories are but I think I have most of them, here's the unit with the only "sandwich" unit, the Olympus Remote Adaptor DAR1. There's a row of seven pin connectors on the bottom for the accesories to transmit data plus a power line. The DAR1 has a mic/remote input and 3v power line in. The main unit has a power line in on the bottom that the DAR1 connects to. The threaded dial on the front is for connecting it to the main unit.

Some of the other accessories include the Olympus DRA2 FM Tuner with antenna, the Olympus DRA1 AM Tuner and the Olympus DVA1 Voice Actuator. The unit also came with an ear speaker and a hook up for telephone recording. For the younger members, in the old days we could put this mic with a built in suction cup on the end of a phone and record the conversation. It was illegal but very cool, I think Radio Shack also sold a similar microphone.

If you know of additional add-ons or have brochures, please post. There are other Pearlcorder's that use the D System but they all look alike, I'm not sure if there's a difference.

 

I found some old ads, I should have checked radiomuseum.org, they actually have most of this stuff already but that popped up last on my search. They must have some contributors hunting down the same equipment, hopefully they are contributing to our wonderful forum as well. This ad doesn't have a watermark from them just in case your still suspicious. I love the billing as "the first home entertainment center you can carry in the palm of your hand"


And some microcassette reviews from 1977 in Popular Science, the Pearlcorder SD was the most expensive model at $240.00 USD. I still can't find a mention of the microphone.

 

Found another one, it looks like this was the first at recording two hours on one tape.


From our good friends at Shizaudio.ru

 

This guy made a frankentuner out of the radio portion, unfortunately I can't read the language.
http://www.wumpus-gollum-forum.de/forum/thread.php?board=58&thread=270

 

Thanks for posting Twopotjock, I wonder how popular this series was, more of them seem to be coming up for sale lately.