u/No-Sleep1981

In the March 1988 SD565 both transports record and play, each with its own auto-reverse. One source, two tapes recorded at once. Or one after the other: with two C90s, three hours without a break. ¥69,800 - about $540 then, roughly $1,360 today.

On the SD385 below it, the left transport is playback only. The SD285 has two wells and no auto-reverse at all.

The SD565 page opens with "Toward the accelerating digital age."

HX stood for High-Position Extra. The powder was metal, but bias and the rest were set for Type II, so decks and boomboxes without a Metal position could use it.

TDK made the powder just for HX: crystals twice as long as in its metal tapes, coercivity kept inside the Type II range. Dark blue shell, the same SP mechanism as MA, and the same price as MA: ¥750 for a C46, about $3 then, roughly $9 today.

In TDK Cassette Tape Maniacs, TDK veteran Yoshino says the market didn't take it, probably because it wasn't the mainstream. "I still think the idea was good (lol)."

The tray slides out like a CD drawer, the cassette lies flat, and the transport is mounted horizontally too. Denon's reason: less axial vibration of the flywheel and less modulation noise. The tray and the cassette stabilizer are a ceramic composite.

The DRS-810G is the three-head one: closed-loop dual capstan, off-tape monitoring, manual bias fine-tuning, and a transport that parks the pinch roller in STOP if the power goes. Grace Gold with wood sides, to match Denon's CD players and DAT decks. ¥69,800 - about $520 then, roughly $1,120 today.

The black DRR-780 does auto-reverse its own way: when recording, an infrared sensor catches the clear leader near the end and the tape flips at speed. ¥49,800 - about $370 then, roughly $800 today. The DRS-610 is the plain two-head one.

Her name is printed on the cover of this November 1984 SANYO general catalog: GINA NANA, ジーナ・ナナ. She also fronts at least three more SANYO catalogs from 1985 in the museum.

What I've confirmed so far: she was the cover model of ViVi, August 1985 - that one comes from a National Diet Library of Japan reference record. Seller listings add a two-page swimsuit feature in Weekly Playboy (March 27, 1984), a non-no cover (June 20, 1985), and a piece in CM NOW (October 1985) titled "Gina Nana's Summer". I haven't read those pages yet.

Her real name, nationality, agency and how SANYO came to hire her are still unknown. The search continues. If you have magazines, ads or anything else with her name, I'd be grateful if you shared it.

On the cover she's holding the red U4 MK III, a double-cassette boombox that could receive stereo TV sound on channels 1-12, ¥46,800 (about $197 then, $560 today). The smaller U4L came in red, black, pink and blue at ¥29,800 (about $125 then, $357 today).

The last page of Sony's November 1997 cassette and DAT deck catalog is cables. The EC-R15 balanced XLR cable, 1.5 m, is ¥30,000 (about $248 then, $456 today). The TC-RX300 cassette deck in the same catalog is ¥28,000 (about $231 then, $425 today).

Optical: the POC-5A, 0.5 m, is ¥1,800 (about $15 then, $27 today). The POC-5ES, also 0.5 m, is ¥12,000 (about $99 then, $182 today) - 6.7 times more. The catalog description for both is word for word the same: a cable for connecting devices with optical digital jacks, square plug to square plug.

For scale, the RK-C310GS interconnect with LC-OFC copper and 24K gold-plated plugs is ¥1,500 per meter (about $12 then, $23 today), and the VMC-10G coaxial digital cable is ¥1,400 (about $12 then, $21 today).

The rest of the catalog is the decks. The flagship DAT, DTC-2000ES, is ¥200,000 before tax (about $1,652 then, $3,037 today): four heads and separate direct-drive motors for the capstan, both reels and the drum.

Music 77, 61, 53 and 33 each combine a cassette deck, FM/AM tuner and record player. The modular part is the speakers: SV-771, SV-611, SV-531, SV-5 and SV-321 are chosen separately, and the catalog prices them per speaker, marked ×2.

Music 77 as a set cost ¥95,800 - about $435 then, roughly $1,540 today. That's the SR-K77F unit with a metal-tape-ready deck plus two SV-771 speakers at ¥6,000 each (about $27 then, $97 today). The catalog also lists ARC racks, DM microphones, SH headphones, the RC-55 remote, the AT-2 timer and DENON tapes (DENON being Nippon Columbia's own brand).

The full room setup on the second card, furniture and speakers included, would sell in no time today.

STAX were a fussy lot: phono stage separate, power supply separate.

The phono stages are plug-in modules that go into the PS-3: EMC-1 for low- and medium-output MC, EMM-1 for MM, MI, IM and high-output MC, ECC-1 for electret cartridges including STAX CP-Y and Toshiba.

PS-3 cost ¥50,000 - about $300 then, roughly $870 today, and that's without a phono stage: the modules were another ¥20,000 to ¥43,000 ($120 to $260 then, $350 to $750 today). The leaflet says the cable from the phono stage output to the next amp shouldn't exceed five metres. Makes you wonder who needed more.

Maxell made Japan's first C60 in 1966. Low Noise Cassette came out in March 1970, and that June it was renamed UD, Ultra Dynamic.

For UD, the magnetic particles were shrunk from about one micron to 0.3. More powder helped the high end but made shedding more likely, and a smoother tape rubbed harder against the head. The developers say they made about 300 trial samples in a year, which is basically one every working day plus some weekends.

The black shell and the cleaning leader only came with the second-generation UD, they were technically out of reach for the first. The first 46-minute cassette came with that generation too, sized for an LP. That's 22 minutes 30 seconds a side, which looked half-baked, so they printed 23. People called it "yonroku no Maxell", the forty-six Maxell.

In 1979 Maxell came up with the slogan "Only good sound remains" (いい音しか残れない), and Tatsuro Yamashita starred in the UD ads.

In Maxell Cassette Tape Maniacs the people involved tell it themselves: Tomizo Taniguchi made the powder, Shigeo Sasaki did the shell, Masaki Kuno ran marketing.

The face of the catalog is Mariko Nagai (永井真理子), on the cover and on the pages inside. A pop singer who debuted in 1987 and in October 1989 released "Miracle Girl", the opening theme of the anime YAWARA!. On the cover she shows the QT-77CD: a SEGNO with CD, double cassette deck, Active Support Technology and remote. Then come the CD-JC2, three DIGITURBO models and the TwincamW CD boomboxes.

The last two spreads are portable players. The Piu JC-K99 weighs 99 g, 46% lighter than Sharp's own JC-K70, and the headline on the spread says it straight: "lighter than yours". The Being series has the wireless JC-T70, the JC-N30 with TV sound, and the JC-TV10 (Mr. Joycasse TV) with a 2.5-inch black-and-white LCD TV built into the player.

In 1990 neither CD nor cassette had pushed the other out yet (well, cassettes hadn't given up, though they were close). So Sharp still printed them side by side, and added a TV to a pocket player.

Victor's AV MASTER is an A4 booklet whose last page folds inward. Behind the fold sits the AX-V707GM: the same AX-V707 in a gunmetal finish that isn't on the main spread. Or the other way round, and the real treasure is supposed to be unfolded?

AX-V707, AX-V707GM and AX-V505 all list Dolby Pro Logic, a D-D converter and Victor's DIGIFINE. Next to the specs Victor runs stills of Sylvester Stallone from Lock Up, and the caption says the film opens in Japan in early December 1989, two months after the catalog. Hard to say whether Sly himself knew.

The last spread is called THEATONE: the AX-V707 with SX-700 speakers, the AV-3362 TV and the HR-S8600 S-VHS deck, a complete Victor home-cinema set.

A regular Technics tape deck and accessory catalog from February 1979, mostly the RS-M cassette series up to the RS-M88 flagship.

On the open-reel page sits the U-76, a 2-track deck built for 76 cm/s, the professional mastering speed. Consumer reel decks of the time ran at 19 or 38 cm/s, and 76 cm/s was left to studios.

It has the Isolated Loop transport (the tape at the heads is isolated from the pull of the reels) and a quartz-locked direct-drive capstan.

¥950,000 - about $4,340 then, roughly $20,400 today. That's six and a half times the RS-M88 a few pages earlier in the same catalog, and within the range of a new Toyota Corolla that year, from the cheapest 2-door up to the top GT.

This is Pioneer's first DVD player catalog, November 1996: the flagship DVL-9, alongside the more affordable DV-7 and the compact DV-F21.

The DVL-9 plays five disc formats in one machine: DVD, LaserDisc, Video CD, CD, and 8cm CD. Two separate trays handle it, a 20/30cm tray for LaserDisc and a dedicated 12cm tray for DVD and CD, and it's backward compatible with roughly 19,000 existing LD titles. A Sigma turntable auto-flips to the LaserDisc's second side at high speed, no need to get up and turn the disc over.

Dolby Digital (AC-3) decoding, plus digital coaxial and optical outputs, built for a format that had barely existed for a year.

¥133,000 - about $1,220 then, roughly $2,600 today.

This is Lo-D's (Hitachi's in-house audio brand) routine full-line catalog for September 1982, about 90 models. The HS-10000 floor-standing speaker is listed right there among them, same grid, same format as everything else.

Every driver on the HS-10000, low to high, is a flat aluminum diaphragm: a 30cm woofer, a 30cm passive radiator, a 6cm midrange, a 3.5cm upper-mid, and a 0.9cm supertweeter, all foam-filled, under Lo-D's own F.F. metal name. Cabinet: 900 x 1800 x 600mm, sealed for infinite-baffle operation, designed to be built into a wall rather than placed in a room.

It was custom-order only (受注生産), never a stocked item, and this 1982 catalog still lists it unchanged four years after its 1978 debut. By some uncorroborated collector accounts, only about 4 pairs were ever built, with one going to NHK, Japan's public broadcaster.

¥1,800,000 for a single unit - about $7,200 then, roughly $24,600 today.

Sony Car Audio catalog, September 1988. The XK-R808 cassette head unit carried what Sony calls the first voice synthesizer in car audio (as of September 20, 1988): press LEVEL and a smooth human voice stored in an LSI says "VOLUME". 56 words in memory, so you confirm a button by ear and keep your eyes on the road. Siri, practically, just from 1988!

It stacked on the XE-808 equalizer with a 247-dot spectrum display, another car-audio first per the catalog, and ran a CDX-A20 10-disc changer tucked in the trunk.

XK-R808 ¥99,800 - about $780 then, roughly $2,100 today. XE-808 ¥65,000 (~$510 then, ~$1,400 today). CDX-A20 ¥89,800 (~$700 then, ~$1,900 today). Around $5,400 in today's money for the stack, before a single speaker.

Special Limited Edition dress: grace gold finish, wood side cheeks, a matching gold remote - on an otherwise mid-tier DCD-1650 class player.

The internals don't match the mid-tier price: a quad-DAC 20-bit Super Linear Converter with DENON-picked AD1862N-Z chips, 16fs oversampling, and a balanced XLR output DENON otherwise fitted only on its senior DCD-3500RG. Double chassis, heavy sintered-alloy insulators, an oversized transformer, plus D.P.C. digital pitch adjustment.

A mid-tier price with a flagship-level output stage - the kind of spec sheet that still holds its own on a shelf today, gold trim aside.

¥99,000 - about $736 then, roughly $1,810 today.

Fast track-order editing between two decks: program up to 12 tracks, pick freely from either deck. Right next to it: record your voice over a backing track for karaoke, "twice the fun."

The cutaway diagram: a newly developed high-power motor cuts the tape-speed gap between the two decks - what makes the dubs land in sync. Dolby C NR keeps a digital source's quality clean on the dub, the leaflet says. x1/x2 dub speed switch, and the back page lists the natural pairing: AKAI's own CD-A30II and CD-A70 players.

¥58,000 - about $344 then, roughly $1,050 today.

AUDIOCRAFT, September 1982.

The cover's vertical strap line translates to "Facts that spec sheets can't tell you are here," right next to a claim of 250 parts in the lineup. What follows is eight pages of nothing but spec and price tables: a dozen tonearm variants, dozens of cartridge counterweights in SILVER and BLACK, headshells, record stabilizers, and cable runs priced by the centimeter. So much for skipping the spec sheet.

AUDIOCRAFT, based in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, built its name on one-point support oil-damped tonearms - the AC-300/AC-400 line that came before the AC-3000/AC-4000 shown here. The company also made cartridges, step-up transformers and phono equalizer amplifiers elsewhere; none of that shows up in this booklet, which sticks strictly to the signal path between cartridge and amplifier.

The AC-3000/AC-4000 price table bundles specific configurations rather than listing bare arms: AC-3000 SILVER comes with an MC-300 SILVER counterweight and an AS-4PL SILVER headshell for ¥79,000 (~$320 then / ~$1,060 today). Six tonearm variants run from 65,000 to 82,000 yen at 1982 prices.

Two-sided A4 leaflet, April 1994, for the C710 Audio Control Center preamp and MC7100 stereo power amplifier. The headline translates to "Fragrant music, the allure of the Glass Illumination panel" - McIntosh's signature green-lit front panel, in continuous production since the 1960s.

The MC7100's Power Guard circuit is worth pulling out from the spec table: it watches the input signal for distortion and cuts gain automatically once it crosses 0.2% THD, instead of letting the amp clip outright. Rated 100 W + 100 W into 8 and 4 ohms, up to 250 W + 250 W bridged mono, with 14 dB of headroom before the overload indicator trips at 2% THD.

McIntosh was founded in 1949 in Binghamton, New York, by Frank McIntosh.

The ST-5140's back panel has two terminals marked FM MULTIPATH OUTPUT TO OSCILLOSCOPE. Hook them to a CRT scope at about 5 mV/cm and rotate the antenna until the multipath pattern on screen shrinks; the manual prints six reference photos of good and bad patterns. No scope at home? Feed the same two outputs into the amplifier's AUX input instead (horizontal to the left channel, vertical to the right) and turn the antenna by ear until noise and distortion from the right speaker drop.

Before any of that, page 5 walks through nine steps for terminating the included 75-ohm coaxial cable on the F-connector - strip 25 mm with a razor, leave 5 mm of shield, tin the center conductor, crimp the ring with round-nose pliers. A warranty card tucked inside the manual leaves the purchase-date field blank; clause five is printed in English, warning the guarantee is void outside Japan.

The only antenna the manual recommends is Sony's own AN-31 Loopick, a roughly 94 cm loop for ¥3,700 (~$12 then / ~$96 today) - no build-your-own spec sheet, just buy it ready-made. The tuner itself listed at ¥49,800 (~$160 then / ~$1,300 today), paired that June with the TA-1140 amplifier.