Mini Stereos and Cool Car Compo Ads

I always loved that car since it's debut in TSWLM, I got to see one up close years ago and they are tiny. I imagine they'd have to shoe-horn any stereo to fit in one, I remember some creative stereo installations with the other tiny British Cars. We had land yachts so there was no worries and the Japanese made sure that center console could fit a full stack of mini-components no matter how small the car was.

Thanks for the info lupogtiboy, I've never seen that security card before but stolen car stereos was a big issue here that was solved with pop-off face plates. I guess with the card, people would still try to steal the stereo not knowing it wouldn't work.

Outside of tiny speakers, I can't think of any AIWA Heavyweights, it was probably smart to stay out of that arena with so many other choices.

 

Japan got all the cool colors, the rest of the world got silver, black or grey. I'd love to see the marketing information that showed this was a winning strategy. All I can think of is we were coming out of the flower-power 1970's where everything was a hideous shade of color and people wanted to tone it down. While there were early black version of stereos, the myth is that Sansui had a marketing study around 1978 that showed customers really liked black. Two years later, silver was out and black was in bigly.

So the Lip-Lap must be pretty nice? and still going after several years. When I was thrifting years ago, the JVC/aiwa/Sony Mini Stereos were everywhere but they were really bare-boned with the top loading CD player and a plastic or glass cosmetic shield that made them all look alike, that along with wood trim.

 

JVC had boomboxes and component tape decks cornered here, outside of that, not much else was popular. I have at least one receiver, a big one with rack handles that looks normal compared to some of the other late 1970's equipment but tuners, amps and receivers weren't huge. Then in the 90's the UX Mini-Stereos came out and must have been a pretty good deal because the thrifts were flooded with them 10 years ago.