Sony stereo cassette deck, 1974: details and images

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1.		Close-up of the tape heads. The Erase head is in white and removes any signal already on tape, in preparation for a new signal from the other head. This is the Play/Record head, which, as its name suggests, is used to both make recordings and play them back.
2.		The Volume Unit meter shows the recording levels of each audio channel, and helps avoid one channel being louder than another. It also has a red light that flashes if the incoming signal is too high to be clear.
3.		The control panel. Parallel sliders control the recording level. Next to it is a recording level circuit, which could compress signals so loud sounds would not overload the tape and quiet sounds were brought up to the optimum level. This machine worked with CrO2 (chromium dioxide) tapes and standard ferrous oxide tapes.
4.		Rear panel of deck. Recorded sound could be sent from an amplifier to the Line In sockets, while playback emerged from the Line Out sockets. To the right of these is a DIN socket, which performed the same function but had all four signal lines in one cable.
5.		Close-up of the front panel, showing the headphone and microphone sockets. While ubiquitous on recorders at this time, microphone sockets were rarely used, as most owners preferred to record existing commercial material from records or radio.

Rotations and views

A selection of views from the interactive rotations, to view the whole set of rotation images you can download sony.zip (7.7MB) which contains all 36 images.

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