A Sony "Portable Component System" model XF-5000.  Found it at a thrift store today and I thought I had seen everything but never one of these.  It almost looked like a home-made job at first look.  It was sold un-tested without a power cord but when I got home it fired right up.  It had a tape stuck in it and for some reason the 'eject' will not work.  

The sound is really good.  It has inputs on the back for a turntable and I hooked up a nice Sony LT turntable to it and fed a pair of Pioneer TS-X20 speakers to it.  Sounded great and apparently it had/has specs that match Sony's top of the line home stereos.  

My plan is to totally restore this thing.  It needs some touch-up paint, it is missing some knobs, and it needs to be gone over and the cassette portion needs worked on.  It does play cassettes but the tapes will not eject.  I plan to match it up with a pair of Technics SB-F1 speakers.  I have only one of them for now but will eventually find it's "soul mate" 

I can't really imagine the market for a system like this.  It operates on a battery pack as well as car power so it was extremely portable but it is very heavy (25 lbs) so it is not like you could bring it backpacking lol.  I think back in the day it would had been great to have something like this when we were waiting all day for general admission seats for a rock concert and needed tunes.

very similar to an Aiwa model i know

looks good -

I have never seen that one.  The deck kind of looks like a car deck!

I posted a brochure scan on this model a while ago, the entire unit mounts on something similar to a luggage cart.

The funny this is I had never seen one of these before, either in the 'wild' or on the internet.  After doing some research on the net I saw that a local Goodwill had one on their auction site last month.  And this weekend this guy I was buying a radio from said that he had one recently and sold it to a collector locally.  So either it is just some weird coincidence that all 3 of these units just happened to pop their heads up at the same place and the same time, or the units are more common that I initially thought.  Any ideas????