I'll take any big AIWA 70's Portable, this even has an LCD display which would have been fairly advanced back then, maybe the first on a boombox. This AIWA TRP-980 seems to be a rarity around here and I'd love to see the matching external speakers and rack for home use. From 1978
I wonder how many hidden treasures there are still out there. I was just at our local hobby store where trains seem to be on the way out. They have hundreds of boxes of everything, a lot of it looks like it could be 40+ years old. Some of the radio repair guys have stacks of boxes I'm sure haven't been touched in years.
Quite a lot I believe considering how many of those were produced. Problem is to have them end up in a proper hands not in a dump.
What made it revolutionary might have also caused it's downfall, the revolutionary ghetto blaster from 1986.
Here's a great review of the JVC RC-828JW from 1978. When I was a kid in the 70's the JVC Boomboxes seemed to be the adult boomboxes, extremely good looking and very mature in design, it's no surprise they did an in-depth review of this model. From the great americanradiohistory.com website, Radio-Electronics Maganzine.
Cool, thanks! Biphonic is a kinda Anti-HiFi. What it makes with signal. But a HiFi sound conception and boxes are nowhere near.
I like the write-up, I wish they had done more like this way back when but when the monster receiver wars were heating up, boomboxes were really looked down on.
Popular Mechanics November 1978 Quasar XP-1239 This came out when there was a flood of small portable TVs, Quasar was a Motorola Brand but was bought by Panasonic and product quality is hit or miss. A vast majority of late 70's boxes were pretty heavy duty build so it wouldn't suprise me if this was a decent box. Fresnel Lenses were extremely popular the late 70's, you could buy square panels and attach them to windows for a larger panoramic view, you'd see them everywhere and manufacturers were also trying to figure out how to make your TV screen look bigger for the next great thing. I posted one of these in the mega-sale thread if you want a better view, it looks thin in this photo. https://books.google.com/books?id=oM8DAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
A little off the beaten track, an intresting article about Japanese Manufacturing in Britain. I remember a story when Ford bought Jaguar and they brought the head of the British Union over to Detroit to their state-of-the-art factory and said, if you guys give us any issues, were moving production over here......
What a fascinating article. When it came out I bought this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Setmakers-...?keywords=the+setmakers&qid=1574412363&sr=8-1 which tells many of the same stories. Something in the article which you posted which struck me was the statement that in 1980 Panasonic needed 500 people to make 60000 TV sets a year. That is just over two sets per person per week. Since that didn't even include the cost of materials it isn't surprising that TVs were so expensive back then. Here is one from 1982 It also explains how a bloke, now in his 70s, who I know has a very nice bungalow worth over £500000 which he bought by repairing TVs in the garage there. Going even further off topic, when I started college in 1978 the lab next to ours was where they taught TV repairs. One of our lecturers who was about 60 hated anything Japanese claiming all they made were sub-standard copies of other countries products. Amusingly, I once tried to catch him out by asking where his Prinz calculator was made. He picked it up, looked at the back and proclaimed "Made in Korea. Nothing wrong with that. Quality products, unlike the rubbish the Japanese make !". Since he would have been an adult in 1941 I can only think that he might have had personal reasons for his views. Back to TVs, I still use a 2009 Toshiba that was one of the last TVs made in the UK by a Japanese manufacturer. I had been looking at it for a while and the announcement that the Plymouth factory was closing spurred me on to buy it. Nowadays, most TVs sold in Europe are made in Turkey. I recently saw (and posted somewhere here) a video of Thorn's Gosport factory in the 1990s. That seemed to be more automated than a far more recent video of a factory somewhere abroad where they were assembling and putting LCD TVs into boxes by hand.
The Japanese are experts at quality control, but when it comes to styling, they constantly rip off Euro brands. A very risk-averse culture.
Lovely box on Yahoo.jp COLOMBIA RN3500N Rebadge of TRK 8290. IMO, good for Reli's site if has no this model yet.
So is that almost a Denon? It's such a good looking box, I love the way Hitachi's "STEREO" Font looks.
I was filing down in the vault, I don't think I posted the Bose Wave Radio AW-1 but members have posted these in the past although more of a desk radio.
