So I found the Norelco Player in the photos above but it looks like they still haven't released a radio-corder yet in the USA. From 1969 Billboard.
From Billboard 1968, mentioning the Ampex Micro 30. Philips/Norelco has a huge insert talking about compact cassettes, mostly prerecorded but there's no mention with any players with a radio.
The First Radio-Corder (Magnitola) in USSR: Ленинград - 002, Leningrad-002, 1972, were made in the same city where I was born 2 years earlier.
I don't know if this qualifies, Bell & Howell Decks seemed to be more of the flat style, they don't mention if any of these were radio cassettes.
Lafayette with a 1969 entry! Lafayette had a huge audio catalog but I don't know much more about them. $2.95 USD for a frickin tape, that was huge money back then! I think an album was around the same price.
Sorry Mystic, I'm not sure what they're called now but we always used to say cassette (compact cassette) or album (12" vinyl) back then. It gets confusing now. I was going through some of Wegavision's Brochures and don't see anything from Sony until early in 1972, if anybody knows of an earlier unit please post. I was hoping one of the others like ITT or Telefunken might also have something. https://www.hifi-archiv.info/
Yep, "tapes and records" - I still remember that phrase from my friends from London I first met in Leningrad back in 1990.. "Tapes and records" Love it.
I have been looking in Practical Wireless and elsewhere. The first thing I found is bizarre. A Cassette Tuner pack from 1968 predating the Walkman by 11 years. The stupid thing is it precludes you from recording from the radio so gives you a Radio OR Cassette Recorder. In the same month Montgomery Ward thought cassettes were something new. A car player with a microphone! I guess you could record from the car radio if you sat still in silence. By 1970 JC Penney were finally selling what we would recognise as a basic radio cassette recorder I don't have any U.K. Catalogues from the late 1960s but here are a couple of pretty normal looking Philips Radio Cassettes again from 1970
I thought Toshiba Patented the radio cassette but I don't know which part because there were a few versions before theirs. It's hard to believe there was one from the 60's, I'd love to see a full color photo of it.
A nice one! My pal asked a good question if this unit had a sort of connecting pad to base To enable playing via a big speaker.
I just found the photo on Pinterest, no model number and I haven't found more info. The unit is labeled "radiocorder" so it must at least have a mic jack. Then you start thinking radiocorder, cassette-corder, Concord might have started with the nomenclature. The Concord Brand doesn't have a lot of info on the internet, as far as I can tell it was just an office in California sourcing out equipment overseas,mostly Asia. I don't think they had high-end audio but they really seemed to like high mid-level equipment and they did a ton of advertising for cassette-based players which seemed to end in the 80's with automotive cassette decks.
Thanks AB388 over on Twitter for the first ad, the other was down in the JVC Brochure Thread. I can't read this but they are both from 1969, It looks like the top one is a Victor CCR-620R and it really looks like the number is 520R on the bottom tape drawer, obviously they are slightly different.
