Philips, don’t you simply adore them? Whenever this inventive Dutch consumer electronics behemoth ventured near serious hi-fi, everything went horribly wrong. The company’s portfolio of avowedly high-end late-1970s esoterica, the ‘Black Tulip’ collection, was designed to take on both the Brits and the Japanese in one fell stroke. Unfortunately, it had about as big of an impact on the audio market as a DAF Variomatic on the Silverstone circuit…
Black tulips are considered the rarest and most beautiful flowers in the Netherlands – well, Philips was right about the ‘rare’ part, because no one bought any. The biggest issue was that these separates were black, as the name implies, and this was about as fashionable as a Vanden Plas Allegro at the time. The Japanese mass market approach of making godawful audio and putting it into enormous brushed aluminium boxes studded with massive chrome knobs worked a well, and silver looked sexy. Only Philips’ arrogance could have persuaded the marketing department that it could change people’s tastes in an instant.
The tragedy is that the preamplifiers, power amplifiers, and tuners were all excellent. They sounded a lot sweeter than anything the Japanese were doing at the time, and they were just as nicely crafted. The black brushed aluminium fascias were also quite nice; if Philips had done them five years later, they would have looked much better. Of course, it didn’t, and the ‘Black Turnips’ bombed…
