HiFi Classics - Sony FH-7 MkII

I've been into consumer electronics for as long as I can remember but back in the 1980s in the days before the worldwide where but even before the gadget magazines finding out about latest and greatest products actually required a bit of legwork you had to go and look around the stores to see what new things they'd go on display so every few weeks I'd take the bus to my local town and have a wander around the electronics stores there perhaps the best one they had was a Dickson's now every now and then a couple of times a year I'd get the opportunity to go to my nearest city and they had a few more stores most notably for me Lasky's which was like a more upmarket Dixons they had some better quality things in there and they also had a Boop's sound and vision department their boots is a chemist and most people nowadays just know it as that but back in the 1980s they sold music and computer games and electronics amongst other things and in this catalog here which by the way I picked these up just to have my own little version of the Internet I suppose when out visited the stores these were like a momento and I'd go home but I'd look through these very closely thinking one day I'm gonna own one of these well one day has come now because this 1985 catalogue on page 23 features the thing I'm going to show you today it's the sony fh7 mark 2 and 33 years after I picked this catalogue up I finally got one so let's take a look at it [Music] so here's the pager to that 1985 catalog and you'll see at the top left there they've classified these compact hi-fi's as shelf systems the fh7 mark 2 is the one at the bottom right whilst just like the other devices on the page it is a compact high 5 does one thing that other ones don't and that's that it's designed to be portable it comes with a handle although the fact it's got a handle doesn't mean it's the kind of thing that a B bar is going to be carrying around on their shoulder along with a rolled-up piece of liner under the other arm because this is a heavy device if you look at the bottom there the weight is 15 point 1 kilograms which is approximately 33 pounds so whilst it's portable it's only portable in the sense that you lift it up and lug it to another location at which point you then plug it into a wall power supply however if you really wanted to power it away from a plug socket you could you just have to buy this optional DC power supply unit that enabled you to run the device from either a car battery or this would hold 12 D cells could you just imagine the weight of that when combined with the rest of the HiFi now this unit would swap out the existing power supply on the bottom of the HiFi and if you're running off batteries it would output at a lower volume to conserve that energy you can see at the top there the maximum output that's listed is one of the big selling features of this it's a very loud little high fiber yes if you're running off batteries it would be a lower volume but those batteries would last for approximately 12 hours if there were alkaline zhh you can also see there were a couple of additional colors available we've seen the black one and the silver one on the left there the red one on the right I think they only sold that in certain territories you're much more common to see either the silver or the black now going back to that 1985 catalog it's the most expensive HiFi that the store sold at the time you can see at the bottom here it's 420 pounds approximately so let's see what that converts to with inflation nowadays and it comes out at about twelve hundred and eighty six pounds so you can see it was a very expensive little HiFi that by the way converts to about sixteen hundred and seventy four US dollars however despite the premium I believe this was a very successful product for Sony at a time and they sold a lot of them but all these years later trying to find one that's fully working and in good condition could take you quite some time it certainly took me quite a while but I managed to find this one for sale in Germany how the advert made it look very good it said it had been refurbished as well so hopefully it's functioning properly and as you can see the guy's done a really good job here of packing it up all the individual components of packs separately is even included this service manual we can see I've got the handle here and the all-important metal brackets for the side which not only hold the speakers to the device but also hold all the components together right so let's start putting this together bit by bit now I've never owned one of these before so I'm looking at the pictures here just to make sure I'm doing everything in the right order we start off with the amplifier at the bottom there you can see this is the cassette deck and on the bottom of here we've got four rubber fee which line up with four indentations on the top of the amplifier so when you put one thing on top of the other they line up perfectly now I think there are some of these components that the device would still work without for example the cassette Det you could get rid of that but this next one you would definitely need one of these this is the graphic equaliser the source selector and the volume control and you can see these ribbon cables are attached into the back of there which connect up with the other devices in the stack now again the next thing is the radio tuner I suppose you could get by without one of these as well it would be a bit of a shame not to include it it's got the proprietary connectors on the back which attach up to those ribbon cables so everything is in a nice stack now let's just attach the things up to each other you can see there's quite a bit of spare ribbon cable here and the reason for that is you don't have to have everything in it's all stack you could separate these components out and have them side-by-side you might notice that on some of the pictures earlier on now this ribbon cable came inside the box each part of this is labeled up for the components it plugs into so the top it says SD 78 that's the stereo tuner at the top and the next one goes into the graphic equalizer and source selector and it goes down to the bottom and into the amplifier and you can tidy the ribbon cables away these channels which have got a clip at either side just to keep everything nice and neat so the next thing I'm going to do is put the metal brackets on this side so these have the two jobs holding it all together and also these are the things that you hope the speakers on - I was glad to see the chap who sold this to me kept the screws for the brackets in the components themselves so they couldn't get lost so what's up unscrewed those I can now put the bracket up against the side of this and it all lines up very nice and neatly and it's just a matter of putting these screws into the top and the bottom and spinning around doing the same on the other side of course once I've got it all in there tightening it up with a screwdriver so just a matter of putting the speakers on there you can see these already have the brackets on the inside of them so those just slide over the top of the brackets on the side of the components and drop into place now the handle serves two functions number one obviously it's a handle but number two once you've clicked it onto the top of here it holds everything in place those speakers can't slide up any more once that handles being clipped down but when you try and lift this up especially in front of you like this rather than at your side you realize how heavy this really is just because it's got a handle on the top doesn't mean it's the kind of thing you'd enjoy carrying but anyway I'll just plug these speakers into here and you might notice there's something a little bit odd going on if you haven't I'll explain more in a moment now I was wondering what was behind these compartments on the back and it turns out it's too leaky batteries I really don't know how long these are being here now I wasn't expecting it to need any batteries because it doesn't have a clock on here and there are no presets for the radio but the reason that it uses two double-a batteries is to hold the last station that you were listening to so that when you turn it on again later it carries on from that frequency anyway I cleaned all that out and I've replaced it with two new batteries and yes they're kirkland batteries and yes they're from Costco and yes we do have Costco here in the UK I'll start it off with something easy we'll just have a listen to the radio okay let's up the Jeopardy a little bit I'll cross my fingers and hope for the best and try the cassette deck well I'm glad to say it's working fine although I'm gonna give it a good clean not just the heads but all the rest of the mechanism as well because I've noticed that these what look like small black hairs in here perhaps this has been in a barbers at some point but it definitely needs cleaning out now I'll show you around it properly in a moment but you might notice there are three buttons on the right here to select different sources we've got the tape tuner and follow our phone but anyway it's for these inputs on the back for a phonograph or a record player what kind of record player well there's Sony PS q 5 and q 7 q 9 for the heart so they're little record player on the top if that looks familiar it's because I've got one of those and you've seen it if you've seen some of my earlier videos quite a few times now in fact that's the reason I ended up getting this HiFi I got it back here think 2014 and I showed it in this 4k video the first 4k video I uploaded onto YouTube just as a demo video and ever since then I've been looking for the high fighter that record players should sit on the top of so now I've got it I can put the record player on it and finally it's in its rightful home so I'll plug this into the input on the back and I've also plugged it into a separate wall power supply the record player doesn't draw its power from the rest of the components you do need to use two plugs to power all of this but it really just sets it all off perfectly this is taking me right back to the mid 1980s I'm walking into hi-5 stores like Lasky's where they'd usually have the lights down a little bit low in the high five section so you can see all these LEDs flashing on the various components and I'll sort you through the components that make up this unit in a moment but before I get to that there's just one more thing that I'd like to try on the top of here you see the point when this was out in the stores 1984-1985 that was when compact disc was starting to take off so as well as this record player that you could buy and have on the top of his sony also released a compact disc player that matched the rest of the components it's the CD p7f now unfortunately I don't one of those I've got one of Sony's other small compact disc players that you might have spotted in one of my earlier videos it doesn't quite match the components here it's really designed for one of the other FH range of mini hi-fi's but it works the same way that you have to plug it into the front there the auxiliary input is on the front next to the graphic equalizer and the photo photo Buttered is also the CD auxilary button so if you do decide to try and run a CD player add a record player on here the only way you're going to be able to switch between them is by pulling that plug out to the front so really you do want to decide whether you're going to use one or the other probably not both though perhaps it's my appreciation for the absurd which makes me really like the way this looks once everything's in this giant stack but of course in reality you wouldn't tend to have it like this you would either have the record player on the top or perhaps the compact disc with them both being top loaders but let's go back and have a look at the difference between the different models you see I've got the fh7 mark - well how does that differ from the mark one well here's a picture of mark one of course it's a silver one so it looks a little bit different to start with but that isn't the difference really it's the features first off the graphic equalizer on the first one doesn't have LEDs in the sliders where it's on the mark - it does I think that really adds something - I know it's only a little thing but still the radio on the first one house FM medium wave and long wave where's the mark - as FM medium wave and two short wave bands the first one also senses between four different types of tape type 1 type 2 type 3 and type 4 by the time the mark 2 came out it's dropped the sensor for the type 3 so just as type 1 type 2 and type 4 there was also an fh7 mark 3 now I haven't seen very many of these for sales so I'm guessing it didn't sell or make as many as they did of the previous ones now the mark 3 has three-way speakers on it that are also angled out a little bit to give a wide stereo sound stage compared to the the previous months which both had two-way speakers but there are another couple of differences I can see from looking at these pictures first off there's a microphone input on this one to the left of the graphic equalizer which has shifted up the CD and auxilary input up to the radio tuner the top there and I've got to guess that that means that the auxiliary and phono inputs operate differently now because the auxiliary inputs being moved to the tuner button on the front there but again there's not an awful lot of difference between all of them although you might have noticed something that's a little bit wrong with mine and it's either side of it and it's the speakers they're the wrong speakers and yes they're not just the wrong color they're the wrong speakers entirely these are the ones that should be on an fh7 mark - with that red logo on there and the black bar across the middle and those are the ones that are on mine and it turns out that my speakers my silver speakers for my black stereo unit are actually off a mark one so what somebody's done here they've got the center part they've managed to find a couple of speakers that will fit by the RF of mark one rather than bark two now initially when I saw the pictures of this for sale how to notice that it all just kind of looked - okay so I wasn't too upset because I still got a decent quality unit and I couldn't live with those silver speakers on there they don't even look all that noticeable from the front but I decided to carry on shopping and see if I could ever find any speakers that match mine and I managed to find some guy selling a broken fh7 mark 2 on ebay but it looked like his speakers are in good condition so I got in touch with him put him an offer in just for the speakers and he sent those to me and then he was able to sell the rest of it all separately and you can see here that the color of the speaker is also extended to the color of the bracket that goes on there as well and looking at the front here they look pretty similar but there's quite a bit of difference between them the mark 2 has a square driver on there whereas the maja one had a round cone behind a square panel having a square driver meant that more of the front of the speaker was the driver unit and therefore the APM oh seven eight the speakers for the bar to go up to 76 watts maxximum the sat sick soul whereas the ones for the mark one they only got 260 watts so I could have potentially I suppose blown the speakers out if I hadn't realized now I did take a bit of a gamble on these speak so I've got no idea whether they were any good and I was hoping they didn't have any dents in the grilles and things and I'm happy to say they don't but they are pretty dirty that's either got splattered with some paint at some point now I tested a bit of this isopropyl alcohol on a spot on the back just to make sure it wasn't going to do anything to the finish and it didn't but it did manage to remove those spots of white paint and you can see here how dirty these speakers are as well by the way they're wood boxes on these they're not plastic speakers like you get on most boom boxes because really isn't a boom box it's more of a small component system but there we go that's what it looks like with the correct speakers in place and I've got to say it does look a lot better now so all the things you've just seen took place over approximately six months but now that I've got everything together I can show you around this in a little bit more detail now given that this wasn't a cheap device when it came out it does have a few premium features on here not too many though it does have auto reverse on the cassette deck so when it reaches the end of one side it will then play the other with a nice indicator light below the reels there to show what direction the tape is moving in if you want you can get it to play when it reaches the beginning of a tape up to rewinding it by holding down the play and rewind key at the same time it's got just Dolby Beados reduction on here though and it doesn't have a recording level control it's an automatic recording level so the vu meter that's on the cassette deck here could be considered perhaps they're just for show [Music] and he goes very low so loud that I could feel the air getting moved by the speakers these tape indicator lights on the left here probably aren't necessary but they just add a little bit of visual flair to the machine so you can see here that's a type 1 tape if I put in a chrome tape which has the notch cut out on the top that will identify as it sight to the radio is perhaps a little bit bare bones but back where this came out digital tuners we're still a relative rarity now the way this one works is you hold down the plus or minus to move through the frequencies slowly but hold the fast button as well to move a little bit quicker although as I mentioned earlier on there are no presets on this one survey songs you don't love and 100 pounds could be your two people your name and a half up to this point in the video I've had they all set up in this vertical configuration with the brackets on the side the speakers clipped onto it the handle on the top but really that's designed more for moving it around I'd imagine if I had this in my house back in the day I would have space those speakers out a little bit more had it all laid out like this and now that I've got it like this I've got to say that looks gorgeous I know you're probably sick of hearing people say they don't make things like they used to but when it comes to things like this they definitely don't I'm not saying that they need to either this is something from the past but I'm just glad that they did make it at one point and I've managed to finally get hold of one anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] now while the fh7 couldn't really be classified as a boombox it's about the nearest thing that are featured to one of those in a video so far although in the future I do intend to feature some boom boxes like this one that leaves a bit of a reverb but this seems like the best opportunity so far that I've had to mention this thing that was sent to me by a viewer recently this comes from Max in Germany and it's a 2019 calendar and each month features a different picture of a boom box located around Berlin now a pram that is only 250 of these being made admired is number double-oh-seven so if you want to get hold of one of these this is just a free plug for him I'll put a link to his website in the video description text box [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,399,552

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Sony, FH7, FH-7, Mkii, Mk2, Mark 2, Sony FH-7 MKii, Sony FH-7 Mk2, Hifi, Vintage, Audio, 1980s, Classic, Cassette, Tape, Portable, Shelf, System, Boombox, Ultimate, High Density, Component System, Mini System, Sony PS-Q7, Sony PS-Q5, Demo, Review, Hi-Fi, Vinyl, Record, Radio, FH-9, Heli compo, Heli, Compo

Id: u2n8Gru7twE

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018