I posted mine, maybe in beer and boomboxes? It's kind of a big AIWA Turd, a basic mid-level three-piece that does have a CD player, I think it was the first but I don't know for sure. The Tosiba RT-7096 might be the best of the first generation, urban mythology says the boomers would be too expensive if they had nice features and a CD player.
They really were perfecting mass-manufacturing and plastics around that time so even though the boxes were kind of large, they were mostly filled with air. The switches and dials went from off-the-shelf heavy duty to very light duty and most of the boomboxes weren't too exciting. My AIWA with the "cheezy" chrome speaker surrounds and other design cues just looks cheap. Some of the other brands had much better looking similar models like Sansui and Pioneer had a nice one with CD player.
Aiwa fell hard in quality in just a few years. Really sad given how nice their products from the seventies and early eighties were. I have a few CD boomboxes I like, including a Panasonic RX-DS30 that sounds good and feels solid and well-built, but only a few.
It was probably the biggest audio thud, everyone saw the products fall hard. Even Sony seemed to be heading down, or they were only really pushing the entry-level products, because that's all we ever saw. The big appliance stores started popping up everywhere and the smaller audio boutiques started disappearing which would have helped the demise of the high end equipment.
It wasn't all bad since more people had access to audio equipment, but some of it was pure junk and people, even today, have memories of crappy equipment because they never were exposed to something decent. I'm still wondering if aiwa's 90's Mini-Stereos will ever be collectable. Some of the JVC's look interesting but also better quality.
That's a good point. The proliferation of cheap stereos benefitted people who couldn't afford high-end gear or didn't care about design, build quality, or sound fidelity. Now that I think about it, even the high quality boomboxes of yore were an option for people who might not have the money or space for a home component system. I bet millennials will start collecting '90s eggs when they hit middle age and get nostalgic.
Sorry if this is a repost, I officially can't remember 1/4 of the stuff on this thread... Funk-Technik 1976, anybody own a Poppy they can show us?
