Aiwa
Gizmodo has a nice piece (well, it’s not brilliant, but I’m sympathetic to the author) on Aiwa, the Japanese electronics maker. The company made real hi-fi equipment in the 70s and 80s, and then went after the consumer market in the 90s, before being purchased by Sony (who already had invested in the company) in the early 2000s for what sounds like a tax write-off (at least, that’s the impression I get from this Wikipedia article on the company), and subsequently neutered.
I’m nostalgic about Aiwa. Back when I was in junior high/high school, and you decided that it was time to move on to from that kiddie boombox to a more serious, grown-up stereo, Aiwa was a popular choice. My parents even went with an Aiwa shelf system1 to replace their 70s era Kenwood receiver and broken speakers (whose brand I don’t really remember)2.
I didn’t end up going with an Aiwa stereo3, but I spent a lot of time listening to music on Aiwa systems belonging to friends. I did own two Aiwa portable CD players4. Good memories.
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Remember shelf systems? Two generally free-standing speakers and a central unit containing integrated source components and amplification. Generally, despite the detachable speakers, the speakers were made to look nice next placed adjacent to the electronics, and so many people just set them up to act functionally like boomboxes. A quick check of Best Buy’s site shows that some shelf systems are still available, but they’ve been largely superseded by home theater-in-a-box systems and iPod speaker docks. Speaking of shelf systems versus home theater-in-a-box systems, lots of shelf systems came with five speakers that were meant to be set up in a surround sound configuration (although they were usually just stacked with the main system, where they made the stereo sound worse). But they almost never had dolby digital decoding or digital inputs, so they generally just relied on Dolby ProLogic to produce surround sound from analog sources… not that many people bothered to hook them up to their TVs and DVD players anyway. ↩
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In retrospect, that was a waste. My parents’ Aiwa system got ditched when the carousel-style three-CD changer broke (although the speakers were briefly pressed into service by my sister). Whereas I have a similar vintage Pioneer receiver that’s still kicking ass. They should have just bought new speakers, but at the time, I had no idea that a 20-year-old receiver would be worth sticking with. ↩
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I ended up with a JVC FS-1000 “executive”-style shelf system (hopefully that link stays up). The executive style systems were generally smaller and had nicer aesthetics. I coveted that stereo for at least a few months before I got it as a birthday gift. It was “pricey” by my standards: $400 or so. There was a less expensive version but it used an ugly veneer instead of the real cherry of the model I wanted. It also had a nice motorized top-loading CD player. It served me well for about six years, and has been in use as my parents’ main stereo for the last six or seven years. It’s still very pretty and if they ever get ready to ditch it I’ll take it to use for an office or guest bedroom stereo—a role currently filled by an RCA knockoff of the JVC system that my sister had (which had the much uglier veneer finish). ↩
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Also in retrospect, I should have probably gone with a Mini Disc player, which was much cooler. I don’t think I realized how easy it was to copy CD to Mini Disc using my stereo’s optical output… although the price of that optical cable would have surely freaked me out in those pre-Monoprice days. It would have been great to have raided my friends’ CD collections with reckless abandon in those pre-Napster days when CD burners were still mythical objects just out of our reach. ↩
