So people I'm back with a somewhat unusual machine this time......... I have seen what I believe are similar versions or AKA's of this type of machine over the years but never one sporting the Pye or Philips badge until now The princely sum of £17 was accepted by the seller & just a day & a half later, this little guy arrived much to my delight - Reassuringly heavy affirmed my initial thoughts that this is a really solidly built stereo & very nicely finished too!! I would date this baby around 1976, it uses the same cassette mechanism used in the Bush/Arena/Rank Organisation cassette decks of the same era - strong pressed steel chassis with very long lasting components needing belt changes throughout it's life to keep it running reliably!! The mains operated decks in the UK used a synchronous motor locked to the 50Hz mains frequency to maintain accurate speed control - This guise of the same deck uses a much nicer arrangement, a DC motor with a servo & electronic speed adjuster in the motor underside & definitely a better arrangement all round! Now there is nowhere on the stereo proclaiming where it was made but I think we can safely assume Japan or Korea as that was where the Bush/Arena decks originated from & badged for the UK So what else do we find inside the machine?? Well some unusual but perfectly functional connectors to the main & tuner boards & the first portable stereo I have seen with a fuse protected output stage Yep, 2 fuses one for each channel right on the output board feeding the next surprising find.......... Two full range speakers for left & right plus two side firing eliptical speakers - Like those mid 70's Sony units that bear some resemblance to this stereo........CF-580 I think they were! Anyway, the electronics were of good quality, all switches were filthy & unresponsive & to my horror there was only weak audio seeping from the right channel This turned out to be a red kipper, I thought blown output stage etc despite the protection fuses being intact - To my relief, jammed rec/play switch on the tape deck pre-amp & recording board was the culprit.....unusually it affected radio playback too Never had that before!! Tape deck removed very easily & it's single square section belt replaced - This deck was very fussy about having the right size & tension beltwise! Rewind refused to work properly until I tried a third belt just a tiny bit tighter than the previous two I tried So now we have good torque in all modes it is time to clean the many switches that adorn this little guy & it took quite a while to completely free up all the switches & get them working again.............. So far seems to be going well so plug in headphones & test cassette deck! We now have both channels working but terrible sound due to the azimuth adjust screw had worked it's way loose over the years - A adjustment of almost three full turns restored nice stereo sound so screw locked with a dab of locking paint & speed adjusted to the correct setting as it was slow as fuck I was surprised to find bass & treble controls on a portable of this vintage & even more unusual is the choice of manual or auto level recording This little stero has it though & this added to my liking of this little machine & I could almost see the even keels in front of me by now! All that remained was to clean clean clean the casing, control panel & knobs - The slatted design of the speakers means this takes some time to get a good result, around two & a half hours in fact but worth it of course!! Reassembly time & this was easy enough being careful not to snap any of the slightly brittle posts that screw the case together, I just pinch up the screws not too much but enough & it was successfully back in one piece...... The little Pye sounds far better than it has right to! This little stero produces a sound that belies it's size & spec! Lovely sound & gorgeous backlit VU meters on the top work flawlessly too! We had by now completely caught up with the even keels & it was time to load a nice chrome cassette recorded on the Technics RS-BX727 3 header & just enjoy the music - The simple design using just a square belt is very good indeed mainly thanks to a nice biggish flywheel & I didn't expect sound quality like this like a humble pie!! So that's my story of this little Pye/Philips Japanese built stereo radio cassette, I hope you enjoyed reading about it........ Et Viola: Hi-Res Images Here: https://onedrive.live.com/?id=BEA218B70F2B18D1!31514&cid=BEA218B70F2B18D1
Those illuminated meters look really smart. For those of you outside the UK, Pye was a British company which was taken over by Philips in 1967, so this would be well after then. In general their products were a bit cheaper than Philips. I wonder if there was a Philips equivalent to this one.
Yep, like them too! Great story and the PYE, Nick! Oldies but goldies. Unusual, right. Thanks to Longman mate for clarifying, never heard of this brand.
I'm a sucker for 70's units and this has all of the right buttons including those cool meters. PYEs are non-existent over here and the Philips are probably very rare. Those big buttons must be different than the little tiny square ones you usually post and the unit is black, not silver, maybe we'll see more of these cool legacy boxes from you.
Some interesting information on the History of Pye http://www.pyemuseum.org/ As the introduction asks "How can a local company employing 14000 people just disappear ?" I suspect they might be asking the same thing about Philips over in the Netherlands in a few years, and people in the USA might already be asking the same thing about Motorola who were one of Pye's rivals. Part of the answer might be that I remember when Samsung was a brand you bought if you couldn't afford one like Philips. Consumer electronics was just a small part of Pye's product range, although one of their subsiduraries produced Britains first Transistor Radio. http://www.pamphonic.co.uk/html/710.html Pye's other divisions also made two way radios used by the Emergency services, Taxi firms etc, and products like TV cameras, back when they were things two men pushed around a studio. I guess it might have been these products that interested Philips. The mobile Radio divsion is still going but seems to have been bought and sold and have changed names several times.
Of course. However, can you spot the difference between the Pye and Philips sets in the 1984 Argos catalogue except for the case colour and £3 ! My parents had at least two Pye Colour sets. The first was the CT200 (item A in this scan). They first hired it because of a Royal Wedding - Princess Anne's back in 1973. £200 = £2300 in 2017 money according to the BOEs inflation calculator. It is not surprising that most people rented especially since the things had a mean time between failure of about two years. Off subject, but thirteen years later I got given a Philips G8 like item C for free, by a colleague when I bought my first house
Item B (The Colour set) sold & rented in huge numbers under many different badged names! My grandad had 1 for years! Not a great looking set & horrible when it went wrong - but a great picture & sound! Decca was a popular variant of this set
That Philips in the bottom photo with the wire frame is outstanding Longman, even the square PYE looks kinda of funky fresh.
We had rent a center over here but it was more of a room full of stuff for 10x the list price but payments spread out over several years to make it affordable.
Got to admit: I seldom see a 'box with a DIN-5 port on it. My only guess is it's slated for high-end external equipment, such as a linear-tracking turntable I once spotted at a resale warehouse.
Its a European standard so far more common over here. I have seen boxes where the European version has a DIN socket and the USA version has Phono sockets.
Ooh, lovely - almost art deco styling & side shooters too Aiwa & Sony knocked out boomers like this too (in the 60s/70s, I think), packing in the electronics in a similar way. Nice...
I think the same could be said about RCA... after the CED debacle. And why did Phillips get with Magnavox, anyway? It's interesting how sales and rental of video equipment surges in Britain whenever a event involving the Royal Family occurs. Here in the 'States, it only seems to happen whenever a team makes the playoffs... or every Superbowl. I'd just like to finish noting how Longman's story of his family's first color set reminds me of the history of the entertainment center in my parents house as I grew-up... But that's a story for another time.
