So we dealt with Dick Smiths (just before they went into receivership) to buy some TVs for the school. And I understand that JVC have pretty much dipped out of making consumer gear under their own name, it tends to be rebranded product from somewhere else. As I understand it JVC TVs are rebranded Amtran TVs and possibly this manufacturer also produces the Veon TVs sold by the warehouse. Now getting someone else to make gear for you and rebranding it is not that uncommon but in this case I would think JVC dipped out of any design work on the product as well, so there is a difference where a company designs the product and has it contract manufactured and where they simply brand something that the manufacturer’s own designers produced. In this case I think is the latter. Note that JVC still produces a professional line of equipment, mostly in the video industry and I would guess they are making the gear themselves, but with these TVs the remote control for example is a generic looking one that is cheap looking without much design flair so the impression overall would be JVC isn’t designing the gear themselves, Amtran has done the whole lot and basically just stuck on a JVC badge.
The school also have some JVC camcorders, it’s hard to say if the same is true of these products, we do note that JVC consumer gear is no longer as commonly seen in NZ as it once was, particularly when they made VHS video gear which they were the principal developer. JVC for many years, more than 50, from the 1950s to the 2000s, were subsidiary of Panasonic but now belong to JVC Kenwood so have changed ownership. Apart from video gear they also did a fair bit of audio and in the rest of this posting I’ll show a couple of pieces of audio gear produced by them that I owned at different times.
So what we have here is a JVC boombox the model PC200 and the one above is exactly the appearance of the model that there were up to 2 of in our household at one time. The one below is a variation with different trim and a bit easier to see some of the detail of, but otherwise pretty well identical. I don’t know how much these cost but I would guess several hundred dollars would be an educated guess, they were made in Japan and this was the 1980s so not cheap like a lot of gear is today and they were almost a mini hifi system except they were portable as the speakers clipped onto the sides of the central unit but could be lifted off, there was a carry handle on the top that folded, and it could run on dry cell batteries as well as the mains.
Amongst the features of this model was the autoreverse capability on the cassette deck which was effected by a rotating head which a motor turned. In other words when the lever on the front was pressed, the head physically turned 180 degrees and the tape direction reversed. They also had track search, press FF or REW during play then these buttons would lock down and the tape would go forward until it found a gap then release the FF or REW button and return to playback.
Rotating heads for autoreverse are not unusual in cassette decks generally but some manufacturers had better engineering than others. I remember with these that the wires tended to break off that came out of the heads because of the rotation, poorly designed, I remember pulling one of these to bits to reattach the wires which were just soldered onto the back of the head. The main reason to have a rotating head is you have the erase and playback heads together on the mount and when it turns then the erase head is always in the correct position for the tape direction for when you record. But on walkmans which don’t record, autoreverse was a much easier implementation with a four track playback head so that the reverse simply involved changing the direction of the tape and switching across to the other two tracks on the head.
Because probably of the reason that the wires had broken off or kept breaking off the head I ended up inheriting one of these units in the household and using it for quite a while, it also had line input sockets and a turntable could be connected witth a switch on the back probably for the RIAA and low voltage sensitivity switching. They were quite a powerful unit with as usual a ridiculous PMPO rating as was common at the time and a more regular RMS rating which I think was 10 watts per channel. I have an idea it was claimed to be either 100W or 200W PMPO which of course was ridiculous but PMPO really meant nothing, it could mean whatever the manufacturer wanted. The label on the back of the speakers (seen in the video clip below) was much more realistic, 10 watts nominal 20 watts max.
Here is a video clip from Youtube, it also shows you the back detail which was exactly the same
The second piece of JVC gear I owned was the KD-2 portable cassette recorder, seen below in a few different photos.
These were quite expensive new in the late 1970s. I picked this one up second hand in the mid 1980s as I did have a small number of occasions for using it as a portable unit to record steam train sounds at the time. The middle photo of the front panel layout tells you a lot about its capabilities. The fact that in a portable unit that could run on dry cell batteries it also had full manual control of the recording level with channel meters that had lights on them for use in the dark, it had the ability to use FeCr and CrO2 tapes and also noise reduction (JVC’s ANRS and Super ANRS one of which was equivalent to Dolby B from memory). On the side which you can just see in the bottom photo was the array of jack sockets, there were DIN and RCA sockets for both input and output, there were also standard 1/4″ mic sockets, a switch selected both plus there was the headphone socket with its own volume control. Some sites claim it had a built in monitor speaker which I believe was not the case. I used it as a general tape deck as well as a limited amount of portable recording for some years.
I got all these photos off the net, I know I have some somewhere of it but I am not going to try and find them as they are not digital so will be somewhere in a pile of prints.
Here is a video clip from Youtube