Peak Portable?
This is the promised/threatened follow up to my JVC PC-V77 (My Personal Stereo Story).
There was always this feeling in the 1980s that Japan was living in the future and they kept all the really cool stuff to themselves. If anything, this proves it.
https://youtu.be/6tcz7qhzZtU
The sad thing though was that once the internet arrived and I was finally able to see for myself what cool gadgets were on sale in Japan - by then, by and large, they only got the same mediocre rubbish we had.
The glory days had already passed. The Victor RC-X90 is one artefact from a different time.
I hope all is well with you - take care.
Comments (63)
I had a cheap Schneider midi system back in 1988. My neighbour, the kid next door had a JVC boombox, but I can’t remember which one. I was very impressed by that but it was no where near anything like this.
Just catching up on Mat's recent videos, I really enjoyed this one. I notice that one of the items from Mat's Tat 3 found a place on the shelves, though not illuminated this time. :)
Yes I forgot to press the button. There are a lot of buttons.
2:40 I can't wait for the "Boom box" vs "Ghetto blaster" debate that will break out in the YT comments feed when this video goes public!
I purposely chose to use Portable Stereo because I really can’t stomach this kind of nonsense one more time.
There’s a design/UX reason for doing the random function like this, the animation/number scrambling indicates to the user that it is I in shuffle mode in case they forgot they had it on. This one has a particularly nice implementation of it.
That is spectacular! Pretty much feature parity with my Pioneer midi system from a full 2 years later. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but yeah, this is all bubble economy tech. I suppose that, and the tendency for Japanese homes to be smaller, so something like this could make sense (whereas we’d rather have a full sized stereo).
I do wonder how much truth there is to the Small Japanese Home/Small Japanese Tech thing. I’ve never heard it first hand from a Japanese person, it’s only something shared amongst westerners telling each other what they know about the Japanese. It’s only in recent years that I’ve stepped back and just wondered if it’s definitely true. Some of the worlds craziest HiFi enthusiasts are Japanese. They also liked their giant CRT TVs and Laserdiscs. I do wonder if they just appreciate small neat things in general. Bento boxes spring to mind. They don’t have that western ‘bigger is better’ mentality which has driven so many to buy cars that don’t fit on the road. I know there are some people who live in Japan who are Patrons so perhaps they could weigh in.
Wow, this thing must come from the far future! No, you can't compare it to today's crap. Thanks for sharing that cool device.
Great personal video - I was also listening to Key 103 very Sunday - signal out to Wrexham North Wales was weak and mono mode only - but also my intro to hip hop and what was then an underground secret club in the mid/late 80s! Still have some off-airs of Bus’Diss with jingles but sadly my archive management not as complete as Mat’s!
I had a Panasonic Rx-DT707 in the early 90's... beautiful machine with every feature imaginable. I'd say you should look for one, but it had so many features that wouldn't have survived 35 years... a lid that raised to expose the tuner and tape decks, remote cassette eject which never made much sense to me etc. https://youtu.be/ZOkHRHKlouA
Ah yes one of the “Cobra Top” models. These do get mentioned to me quite a bit, but I’ve yet to use one for myself.
You are not wrong about Japan 'hoarding' all of its incredible technology. Every time I look at eBay and find something I've never seen before I think to myself 'must be for the Japanese market' and it always is. This portable player would have blown my mind as a teenager, but undoubtedly few teenagers would have been able to obtain it - anywhere. Most especially cool is how the remote control adjusts the volume on the unit, and that random feature on the CD player. I love the graphic EQ also. Absolutely love the video and I am glad I was able to get some time to watch it. Take care 🤍. EDITED FOR CONTEXT
The same happened with cars. The famed Nissan Skyline GTR was only sold in Japan.
What a lovely device. The Sony hifi system I had in the late 90s (MHC-EX5) did similar things with CD to tape recording, it had a slight difference in that when the tape ran out half-way through a track it would re-wind to the start of the track on the tape, re-record the track and fade it out just as the tape ran out. Then it would start the track again on the other side of the tape. I love functionality like that, how far they were able to go with relatively basic technology.
Loved this video, showing all the functions of this great device, these were the good times... Today all of that is on our phones, we can download yesterday's radio program, but where is the fun? where is the "I'm so glad I can do that"? Ofc, looking forward to the 1-hour tuner hacking video <3
They’ll be no hacking, just testing some augmentation options.
This video really resonated with me and took me back to my old Ferguson casseiver with Garrard sp25 turntable. I had a Crown boombox. Not a great name but it was a real powerhouse. Now, like you I buy old retro kit that I could never have afforded on my meagre retail worker salary at the time. Reel to reel, cine projectors, betamax videos. My contemporaries think I'm mad.
What a lovely video about a lovely system! The CD display with track numbers in squares reminds me of my first standalone JVC CD player. It had the rare subtrack indices feature, where you can access subparts in long tracks if they have been recorded that way. Mostly relevant with classical music CD. Yes, that era was definitely the peak...
Lovely video. I grew up lusting after this stuff, but never being able to afford any of it.
…and now you can you don’t need it.
Peak Techmoan. However… 18:10 “it doesn’t really matter” Woh hang on. Did you spend about a month getting your FM stereo signal sorted?
I did. I’m nothing if not not consistent.
That machine is giving everyone the G-Horn
This was a joy to watch. So much now is "my camping/motorhome/career went to shit" . They have their place but it's great to see "I bought a thing and I love it" Very nice. Happy Friday
When I was 16, I remember seeing the Sharp WQ-T360E in the Argos catalogue with its double handles and thinking me and my cousin would be so cool if we carried that between us when we were on holiday at Butlins. I'm so thankful I couldn't afford it. In my efforts to find the model number, I see the handle design was from the Sharp QT-73CD released a few years before. One of the many products over the years given the moniker "King Of Boomboxes". https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255867249129
Ooooo this is nice, and I really mean that. Totally understand why people collect these bad boys now. Love my simple Hitachi TRK-3D30E Super Woofer that I restored a few years ago, something I couldn’t afford back in the day, but nice to own now. Cheers Matt. Lee
It’s that age old battle of G-Horn vs Super Woofer. The kids today wouldn’t understand.
What a gorgeous looking machine, the gold accents on the 'feet' really set it off. I wonder why, as a Japanese only model, all the text on the device is in English 'Latin' characters.
It’s just how they do things. Another example would be the original Nintendo Famicom which has buttons labelled Power, Eject, Reset, Start, Select, A & B but was never intended to be sold abroad.
Oh man, this is a fantastic video. Thanks
Is there a resource that has devices from this era listed? I had something similar to this with motorised volume etc and would love to find it again.
Unfortunately I don’t have a definitive resource to share, I just do a lot of searches. Finding anything about this was proving impossible until I found that one Japanese chap had shared the flyers on twitter many years back.
Thing was, back in the 1980s and 1990s, we started to get cheap commercial electronics. And everything was much of a muchness, built down to price. But sometimes, just sometimes, manufacturers would put in effort and produce something that was actually pretty good. Finding these items was almost impossible because information sources like hi-fi magazines were too sniffy to cover them, and mainstream sources like newspapers just focussed on raw functionality rather than actual quality. But sometimes we could luck-out and find something that was actually good quality. This happened to me with my Panasonic walkman-alike. I was always shocked at how poor my friends' personal stereos were by comparison. But I hadn't really chosen it. It was just one more thing bought from Argos. And now I see YouTubers have even done videos about that exact model. And this portable stereo is another great example. In fact, my friend had a great portable stereo that Mat already covered a few years ago. Again, he didn't really choose it. It was just one other item at Dixons that he ended-up getting, but he lucked-out with the quality.
You really sum this up well, that matches my experiences perfectly. I used to buy all the HiFi magazines but these quality devices for the regular consumer didn’t fit into their remit. For years I used to trawl all the shops compiling my own internal catalogue of who made what. I had an idea that there should be a magazine that covered consumer tech and gadgets. Many years later T3 and Stuff turned up…I didn’t sue.
Although the sophistication of the gadgets I saw suggests it was later in the century, it had to be back in the late '60s, when my then-hometown library subscribed to a heavy electronics trade catalogue from Japan. I used to browse the pages, marvelling at the devices pictured, such as tiny TVs embedded in a small transistor radio. I had to wait another 20 years to buy something similar, by which time digital TV was starting to dominate and my little analogue TV soon had nothing left to tune into :|
G'day all! "Dollarydoos", John Farnham ('You're the Voice'), proud Australian viewer here! 🐨🦘
Beautiful, amazing machine. I love all of your videos, but these nostalgic, retro ones really shine!
3:51 had JVC just like this PC-V88 but with a CD-player on top. But the thing with it vs the one without the cdplayer was the bass speaker wasn’t the same I guess, it was much weaker. Actually the music power on that thing wasn’t exactly ”power”
If you are into stupid pet tricks, Sony made several models of Trinitron TVs for the car. One of them being the KV-6AD3. Other than being a rather fun portable Sony Trinitron with a 5" CRT screen, it can broadcast its audio over FM radio. However it only works with Japanese tuners. I imported a small Japanese radio to play with this feature but I wish I had something more impressive like the one in this video.
There's that Metal logo again, seen in the catalogue at the 3:00 mark. It was on our very heavy JVC PC-1, bought around 1983. Guessing the logo was JVC's own invention, though I note it's not on the RC-X90.
Do you mean the text that says "Metal Tape Compatible"? The "Metal" part is simply the logo for Metal tape (a clearly Heavy Metal-inspired typeface) - it's on my Roberts boombox from the 80s, and you can also see it on the Sanyo Stereo Microcassette player Mat made a video on many moons ago, amongst other things.
Wow, and to say that these older boomboxes just work straight out of the box! I can totally relate to your hi-fi history!
What a great device! I'd've loved something like that when I used to record off the radio. Looks really cool and stylish. Thanks for finding and sharing it. Matt, have you ever looked at Panasonic boomboxes? I remember the Panasonic RXDT 505. For me, that seemed the premium boombox from back in the day (I never had one, but always wanted one - lusting over it in the Argos catalogue C. 1993!). This had a 2-way speaker system, digital tuner, twin cassette deck with soft-touch controls and a drawer-loading CD player. Seems to tick all the boxes. Or even the Panasonic RX-ED77 was even fancier! I'd love to see you look at one of these some day!
Beautiful. This is the first boombox I would gladly have even today. But I don't dare to lookup the auction prices. :D
I’d have killed for that machine back in 1988. What a beauty! Still looks fantastic now.
There are a few features of this portable that I distinctly remember on a JVC CD player that I owned at the time... but I'll be damned if I can remember what they were. I think it was the customizing the tracks to fit a cassette length. Isn't it ironic, to be born in the time when one experienced these 'golden days' of the tech, but being too old to actually remember them. Great video.
Sony had a poster showing all of the portable products they had in the mid-1980s (Walkman, boombox, Handycam, Watchman, shortwave radio, etc.) and after the iPhone got popular it became a meme with "Now known as a smartphone" written on it.
Sony and other manufacturers dug their own grave by putting an ipod / iPhone dock on every other product and not supporting their own MP3 players.
It's incredible how they made copying tapes so easy with just one touch of a button. Nowadays they don't even want you to own physical media, let alone multiply it. A shame what we have lost.
Brilliant device, this was indeed the peak 😃
I always wanted you to do a video like this for a boombox. This reminds me of the best car cassette radio ever made (imo) the Kenwood KRC999ii. To me, this is all about the then advance technology blended with imagination surrounding the common radio, cassette and CD.
Beautiful machine. All these features, and works so well. Amazing. I was too young (1981) to have experienced the development of things getting less, going into the nineties. I do remember getting a Technics boombox (present, pocket money wouldn’t cut it 😅) (after my ‘my first Sony’), 1993 it was, good device, but nothing like this.
That's it Mat--leave us with a cliff-hanger talking about a solution to the FM radio reception and teasing us that you've got a 3rd boombox from the peak boombox era to show us.👍 Yes, you can do so many things with a phone and likely your phone can replicate all of the features of the PC-V77 in a much more convenient fashion, i.e. no need to carry CDs and tapes with you, do anything you want with a few taps on the screen. BUT... With all of the features on a peak boombox such as this, it's so much more FUN to use them: Skip to the next track on a tape with the automatic backwind to start the next song; set the timer to record a radio program; high-quality dubbing with synchro rec; automatically calculate which songs will fit on any cassette; watch the flashing red LED on the volume dial while you use the remote. There are just so many interesting things you can do on this one that people who remember older, simpler tape players and radios could only dream about having. It's fun just to watch you demonstrate all the things this boombox does.😀
It’s great that we’re on the same wavelength. and can appreciate things like this. I was just reading through the comments under my video review of that miserable modern GPO Brooklyn Boombox. There was one chap there who kept posting over and over again about how he owned one and it was actually good and everyone else was wrong about it. It really is a shame the utter mediocrity that some people are prepared to accept nowadays but it’s even worse when they try to convince others that it’s good .
I really enjoyed that video, what a great machine! Not a Jack of all trades, a Master of all trades.
The big deal of Japan-only electronics for me were those tiny laptops. The idea of having a fully working computer the size of a hardback book was just mind-blowing, and it felt like we here in the US were being cheated by only getting the big, clumsy stuff. Sony had one that was so slick that Apple just said, "Hey, can you build one of those for us and put an Apple logo on it?"
The Simpsons and/or DankPods reference noted and approved. For a decade as well known for its wild fashions and garish colours as the 80s, a lot of the electronics of the time are surprisingly bland and insipid-looking - most of the black plastic music devices from then leave me absolutely cold. The VFD, and especially the spectrum analyser on this, lift it somewhat, though. Function-wise it's much better - that function to fit tracks onto tape is very nifty: that would have saved me a bunch of either time or empty tape back then. My Sharp WF-CD77 had a motorised volume knob, so there are others, but definitely not a common feature. Alas. Thank you for the video which I, as always, enjoyed.
I didn’t intentionally quote The Simpsons and I’m not too familiar with Dankpods, what did I say?
It must have been nice to be an engineer designing audio gear back then. It's like you were allowed to add every new technology and as many buttons as you wanted to your design. Now if doing a portable cassette player today, you can't even have soft touch buttons, not to mention no Dolby or anything like that. The irony is that with modern MCUs (ESP32 etc) you should easily be able to build a portable player with a nice set of features and even an OLED touch screen. Think DSP based noise reduction technology like Dolby, DBX etc, multiple VU meters. You might have to invest in new soft touch tape mechanism, but that's it. Check out a video I did looking at the feasibility of using an ESP32 device for noise reduction of typical Walkman style portable players (https://youtu.be/4OaQMNgNDlM). It kinda works, but would there be market for such a device today.
That's a fantastic system. I do miss motorised volume controls, especially with an LED light so that you can easily see the volume level from across the room. I remember when I got my first high-tech audio system in the very early 90s - a Sony MHC-900 (a mini system that was a replacement for the older FH line, not the later horrid multi-change CD version that used the same model number). If you were taping a CD and the tape ended before the track ended on the CD, it would wind the tape back to the beginning of the song and record the song again, this time fading the song out before the tape ended. You could also set it to add a 4 second gap in between tracks for easy track finding on auto search decks too. It even had an electronic 7 band graphic equaliser with presets. I couldn't believe the amount of clever thinking on that machine and the sound quality and recording quality was excellent too. The remote did absolutely everything, even changing the graphic equaliser settings! I never realised it at the time, but that was the tail end of the golden age of decent quality, affordable home hi-fi. Compared to the rubbish that was being sold less than 10 years later, the difference was night and day.
What a beauty. Love videos about these kind of machines.
What a beautiful machine. That stereo's not bad either!