Two from roughly the same time, I also have a National Panasonic RS460SD, this one given as a present to me and Dad back in early 1976 when his friend Mr T. "Al" Arai, then CEO of Matsushita's home audio division, was over for a week's salmon fishing on the Tay by Perth as a guest of Dad's tackle company. This is the original set that was given to us but, to get it through customs at the time, Al had to ditch the box before he flew out and carry it as cabin luggage. It fell into disrepair when I used it in the 6th form kitchen at school and everyone would play their shagged out old tapes on the thing. Recently, I bought another example cheaply on eBay as a source of the spares needed to get "old number four" (as in the fourth one off the line) working and looking well again.
Needless to say, that eBay purchase turned up in the box seen here in the picture with Number 4 but that set was far too good to part out so yet another was bought as a donor and that two were combined into one working example, the parts for the original were bought from Al's son (who followed his now sadly deceased father into the business) instead and so it ended up being restored with split new parts and is as you see it, only the FM aerial couldn't be found in the old Slough stock or from Japan so the one it now wears is from a Korean eBay seller I've mentioned recently in another thread.
A lot of trouble to go to for a box that frankly was never exactly what could be called "high end?" Possibly, but I consider it a tribute to Dad's old fishing buddy from Japan so none of the effort was wasted.
The other box from that era is the best sounding in my collection in spite of its being a mono. It also demonstrates how high-end British manufacturers the Hacker Brothers, were ploughing their own furrow and continuing to build their sets into handbuilt, hardwood cabinets with no concern for the cost of doing so. This Hacker Cassette Sovereign, the RPC1, is a mint example that came to me in unused condition a few years ago from a village roup over in Dumfriesshire. When I got it, the original mains lead was still coiled up as despatched in the battery but I was wanting to play the thing so I swapped in a spare battery from a similar set that was the radio-only version and filled that instead, after a fresh pair of belts and a quick deglaze of the heads in its Nakamichi-sourced deck the set was working perfectly, its massive (8x5") Celestion speaker provides lots of distortion-free bass from the push-pull Germanium audio stage and like any other Hacker of the period, it can fill the house with clean, natural sound from tape or radio. AM sounding just as clear and free of hash as FM thanks to Hacker's insistence on using more tuned circuits in their sets than anyone else was doing at the time in domestic radios. Its favourite party piece is being listened to by visitors who are convinced that what they're hearing is an FM broadcast on my separates system when in fact it's a Medium or Long waveband AM broadcast on the RPC1. And this one weighs almost 3/4 of a stone in spite of its being no bigger than a JVC RC-656, that's down to the wood and aluminium.
I have a video clip but this was taken with the bass-deaf device that is my phone cam so sadly, it doesn't give a fair idea of the Sov's actual capabilities. Have a look in any case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTpd_df_wVg
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