Vintage

The smallest speaker in Technics' three-strong F series has already featured in our Vintage Review section . It was a popular product and sold in decent numbers for something that could have easily been mistaken for a mere novelty. Less well remembered were the larger members of the same family, the SB-F2 and SB-F3. Neither of these was exactly 'large', but the SB-F3 was certainly too big to be considered a miniature model like the SB-F1. It was, instead, in the class of conventional compact loudspeakers intended for shelf or stand placement, a sector where the number of competing models was far greater.

Anumber of our recent Vintage Reviews have featured CD players designed to broaden the appeal of the format by making the hardware available at progressively lower price points. This was one way to maintain sales, but another approach was to add additional features at little or no extra cost.

Early CD players from Philips and Sony are considered by some collectors to be the most covetable vintage models because they came from the very companies that created the format. You can add to this list machines from Denon, whose Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) system underpinned the way analogue signals were transformed into digital data, recorded, played back and finally turned back into music again.

Bang & Olufsen's first move into the world of serious hi-fi came in 1967 with the introduction of the Beolab 5000 amplifier and Beomaster 5000 tuner [HFN Dec '12]. These defined the European state of the art at the time and were as successful as their high prices allowed. The company then distilled these two units into the Beomaster 3000, which offered similar qualities at a more accessible price. It lacked the sheer power and versatility of the Beolab 5000 but sold strongly throughout a long production run.

When enthusiasts see a product from Crown it's perhaps natural to assume it has come from the American amplifier manufacturer of that same name. Yet this compact CD player from 1987, launched to bring the cost of portable players down to a more affordable level, bears the branding of another company called Crown – the Crown Radio Corporation of Japan.

The appearance of portable CD players in the mid 1980s presented buyers with something of a dilemma. Should they purchase a full-width model or one of the mobile machines, almost all of which could easily be connected to a full-sized system? A portable would be more versatile, but a large player would be expected to offer more facilities and better sound quality.