Yeah some boxes just have crap speakers and crap circuitry. Especially the made-up brands from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
A very early Concord Boombox, the Concord F-95, yep they were in the first wave but never had similar wonders that the big guys had in the late 70's. These ads are dated July 8th, 1968. The bottom unit doesn't have a radio, is a little more money and weighs more. Some of these old boxes had an area in the back where you could store a tape.
Some more early Concords from 1971 including the F-150 boombox. This ad is for Billboard Magazine's 1971 Chicago Electronics Show Issue.
Norelco (Philips) 1570 from 1971. Norelco Branding was used extensively for Philps Products in the USA.
Karaoke, what's it all about? I wish he went more in depth with the equipment, they show up for sale all of the time, it would be nice to have one of the high-end units. I do have one that's like a boombox that I've posted before, after using cassettes and 8-tracks they went to CD only which were instruments only and could also display lyrics. I don't know if they had a battery powered version but most were made to carry around. Do the Karaoke, Audio 1985
The Cassette A Short History, HiFi-Stereo-Review-1978-02 I don't know a lot about the history of either Nakamichi or Concord but there's an interesting tid-bit on page two, "first titled the Concord-Nakam Model Z and then the Nakamichi Model 1000" Is this implying that Nakamachi made the deck for Concord before branding it with their own name? Does anybody know, is this common knowledge?
ITT Boombox Information is starting to pop up on the forum, it looks like they started sourcing components from Singapore around 1977. From BizTimes (Singapore) 1977
The Advantages of Buying Portables 1975, New Nation. The Fisher Ad is interesting, didn't Sanyo own Fisher at this point?
Does anybody own one of these unique boomboxes with built-in TV tuner? The Silver ST-530 from 1976, so rare it isn't on the wikiboombox! I'm sure there's more but I know AIWA, Pioneer and now Silver had these with a larger TV tuning knob like the old TVs. Later boomboxes incorporated it into the normal tuning dial. Of course for the younger members, taping songs off the radio was a given but taping TV shows was almost as important, we loved listening to TV and this was back when movies and shows rarely got rebroadcasted, sometimes the first time was the only chance you had.
"Monotone radio cassettes"? Huh. "One year ahead of schedule" sounds to me almost like "five year plan in four years". The only difference is that instead of a boastful motivation it is just a humble fact.
Do we have cassette deck archaeology? Here are a couple of Soviet TV spots. The first one is from 1978, they still make RTR machines. By the end of the spot they say, "More than a thousand of these tape recorders will be delivered to the stores in this year." This is from 1984, finally (another factory that used brand "MAYAK", that is, "Lighthouse") stopped making R2R machines and started to produce cassette decks. They had audacity to announce that they were switching to cassette-based models ahead of customers' requests. Hilarious.
Leisure Time Electronics 1981, Mini hi-fi components gain market share. This magazine is aimed at retailers and has some great insite, was AIWA the first mini-stereo manufacturer? Randix says NO! Megatron Mini-Stereos? Never heard of them but they spent $12 million USD advertising them. Also an early plug for Loran Cassettes with some background on the manufacturer. I've posted some of their ads below.
Sharp QT-50 from 1983 Playboy Magazine, this design was hot and copied, I've got a few different versions out in the shop.
