The electronics needed to make a decent tuner were still relatively large, so the idea of a tuner pack was good. Of course, it meant that you had to choose whether you put in the tuner or a cassette and you couldn't use both at the same time, but you were used to physically change something if you wanted to listen something else anyway.
Next to the tuner pack "quirk", this player has another really cool feature which we saw more often later with Toshiba's: If you push the FF or REW buttons on the lid, you'd actually push the tape transport axes down which would select the right gears for the motion. See the left side in this picture: This button was pushed and you can see the left axis recessed. It's so cool!
Next up is the KT-S1. If I'm not mistaken, this model came out AFTER the KT-VS1 and if that's true, it's weird to me that the size increased so much.
Ebven though it's a plastic unit, it is quite nice and well built actually. It's a proud member of the Tuner Pack Crew.
The KT-S3 is very similar, it's a minor revision of the KT-S1. All of these are functionally very similar to the TPS-L2 with a tuner added: Double headphone jacks, volume slider, screaming "STEREO" on the lid, etc
It's not only similar size-and feature wise, even the color scheme's were all the same: Silver player with blue accents and blue tuner pack.
From a distance you may think that it's a rebranded Toshiba, but it isn't. The Sharp also feels a bit more metal/solid than the Toshiba's.
There's also a Konitech with tuner pack, clearly inspired by the others. It's a clone of much lower quality. I don't like it but for completeness I list it here.
I took these 4 tuner packs to show you the differences: They all have proprietary means of contacting. The early Toshiba KT-VS1 uses a RP-AF1 tuner pack with 6 contacts, pogo-pin like, on the side. The KT-S1 and KT-S3 both use tuner pack RP-S2. It mentions "use in combination with KT-S2" The Konitech uses a rather flimsy 5 pin connector, with a central contact and 4 around it. I think we saw this connector at later Toshiba models too. The Sharp has 6 contacts on top, actually a good idea because once inserted, contact pressure is well defined and there's no need for a physical lock switch like the Toshiba's have to ensure contact.
Sony also had tuner packs, I believe only the CTP-1 model was released and I don't see them often. For reference, see the 6 contacts here in one of my WM-W800s. I have a couple of them and most of them do not have this connector, I guess it's country specific or they may have stopped fitting the contacts in some production runs.
This Toshiba tuner pack belongs to a model I posted before - of course the ultracool KT-AS10. It features 5 contacts, pogo pins which apparently were inspiration for Konitech. There are many more tuner pack models, but I believe this gives a decent impression of the era and I'll stop here. Of course tuner packs were only used for a limited amount of time and faded away when radio hardware was compact and affordable enough to integrate without too much compromise. As we know, many models came as a cassette only and a cassette+tuner version, so from then the buyer chose how important listening to radio was when the purchase was made. The Tuner Pack Era is lone gone, but the Tuner Pack Crew remains cool till this date.
