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You're viewing Page Two of our Golden Age section of the Boombox Museum. Click
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This JVC is another typical ghettoblaster for 1985. They system offers
four-band tuner (AM, FM, SW1 and SW2) a fine tuning knob for shortwave, five-band
graphic equalizer, all-silver plastic chassis. These portable stereos
often featured shortwave. We wonder how how the incidence of boombox multi-band
tuning started among these machines--were they included for the European, Asian
and other SWL markets? Perhaps the goal was to include absolutely every feature
possible to meet market demands for visually complicated portables.
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Press Your Luck's Whammy breakdances to a
no-name brand three-speaker boombox.
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No, that's not a CD player, it's a turntable. That's right, this time Sharp
pushes the envelope by including a cassette drive and side-loading turntable
in their VZ-2000. Wonderful array of features--we particularly like the left-right
slide controls for audio controls.
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Another movie boombox spotting--this one is in Barry Gordy's The Last Dragon
from 1985. This scene takes place in the fictional Sum Dum Goy fortune cookie company
in New York's Chinatown. Can you imagine these things flourishing on Canal Street back in 1985? drool...
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We apologize for the poor shot of this Casio KX-101, but pictures of this
are hard to come by. Released in 1984, the KX-101 was one of two portable stereos
that included a synthesizer keyboard. The other was also by Casio, released a year later
(CK-200) and it featured nearly everything the KX-101 did, including shortwave.
Here's
a photo from an advertisement showing the portable stereo-keyboard in action.
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Leave it to Sony for creative styling in a high-quality, feature-packed
boombox. We can spot nearly every color of the rainbow
on this CFS-99.
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You may have seen portable stereos including little black and white televisions
before, but this is one of the originals. Sharps TVMate 3000 offers AM & FM
reception, but also includes VHF and UHF tuning for its little 3" television.
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A unique offering in 1983 from Panasonic. Logic controls, detachable speakers
and a slim design certainly look cool here, but this styling was atypical for the
period--this design became the norm in the latter half of the decade.
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Sony thought of it first, but Radio Shack followed shortly after in 1984 with
this pitiful little thing--a hybrid Walkman portable stereo. It's hard to define this
as a "boombox" or "ghettoblaster" but it was a indicator of things to come. Several
brands emerged in later years with boomboxes that included removeable walkmans, including
JVC, Hitachi and Yorx.
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A common scene in urban and suburban areas alike back in 1984--a breakdancer
performing on a sheet of cardboard to beats thumping from a nearby stereo. Captured
from the 1984 film Breakin'.
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Hitachi wows us with this model--the TRK-8600. We're guessing this was released
sometime in 1981 or 1982. Unusual color scheme--it almost appears to have a copper-colored
finish around the controls. What would you say if we told you this baby is still
available today? Okay, browse
here
and take a look.
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