The TC-399 came in Sony’s Autumn 1978 catalogue at a time when the domestic open reel tape recorder was already on its way out. Only two years prior, the Akai 4000DS had stunned the world by selling in significant numbers, delivering outstanding sound-per-pound from the (at the time) dormant open reel format. It was as […]
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1992 was a memorable year for avid amateur recordists all over the world. Sony announced the first ever DAT portable, the TCD-D3, which offered better-than-CD quality digital recording on the move for around £600. However, contrary to common opinion, it was not the first DATman. Denon won the award ahead of Sony, but those who
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In comparison to any modern music portable, Sony’s WM-D6C Walkman Professional cassette recorder is a massive, brick-like device. It’s ridiculously large by today’s standards, measuring 180x90x40mm and seeming like an eighties phone compared to the latest iDevice. When you look closer, however, you’ll notice the best-sounding portable ever created… Let’s not forget that Sony, not
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Loudspeaker design isn’t the dark art that some consider it to be. Speakers aren’t immune to physics’ laws; in fact, it’s the principles of physics that decide the sound of any particular product. Simply put, there are the cabinets to get right, the drive units to get right, and the interplay between the two to
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Sugden has no introduction; everyone with even a passing interest in audiophilia is familiar with the A21 series of English amplifiers, which began with an 11 watt solid-state bipolar integrated amplifier in the mid-1960s. The A21a became a nineties benchmark; a specialist product that promised clarity at the expense of all else… It was produced
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The narrative of this renowned record player begins in 1972, when it first emerged from the Castlemilk factory, blinking into the Glasgow sunlight. That was a long time ago, and the Sondek has been chastised in recent years for being “old hat.” It may lack the acres of gleaming Perspex and fancy gold-plated finery that
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The original NAIT was the product that kicked off the ‘super integrated’ fad in the 1980s. Whereas “integrated” was formerly considered the poor relation of their high-end pre-power brethren, it became fashionable to opt for a high-quality one-box design with the same level of attention paid to internal component quality and circuit design. As a
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Arcam hi-fi separates have always been geared at the mass market, but they’ve frequently turned out to be a little odd. Always well-engineered, the company frequently tries bold engineering techniques, sometimes with tremendous success — as evidenced by this high-end CD player introduced at the turn of the century. The FMJ CD23 was a development
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Do you recall the birth of the Squeezebox? It was introduced in 2003 as the SliMP3, an MP3-only gadget with a connected connection that required a computer programmer to interface it with its host computer – or so it seemed. Two years later, the Squeezebox a proper arrived, with Wi-Fi, a digital output, and native
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Compact Cassette was still considered a novelty media in 1973, having been invented by Philips a decade before for dictation purposes alone. It was absurd to think it could deliver true hi-fi performance. Serious tape users possessed Revoxes, particularly the A77, or one of a growing number of high-end Japanese decks from Sony, Akai, or
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