Kenwood - The masters of desirable yet attainable Hi-Fi

in this one we've got to be looking at Kenwood HiFi now this is a bit of an odd mix of a video it's all over the place to be honest I mean there's a bit of history in here and then there's some product demonstrations but it's all focused around CAD word so that's the thing that ties it all together and this all came from a message I received on patreon from one of the people who supports me on there called Duane and he wanted to know if I knew anything about a feature called CCR s that was on some Kenwood cassette decks it was designed to make the copying of a CD to a cassette a foolproof system he wanted to know how well it works and if I knew anything about it well I didn't but I thought I'll look into it and that also got me thinking about Kenwood themselves you see back in the 1980s I think it's roundabout 1987 my brother decided he wanted to buy a new hi-5 system it's a couple years older than me now he'd previously been the victim of Amstrad by that I mean in the early 1980s he was taken in by amstrad's hi-5 systems that looked a lot better than they were but of course what she got the revenues and you realize they were pretty awful things a majority of them anyway this was known by abstract themselves Alan sugar who read the place called these things of mugs I fall by that he means it was cheap components started up to look better than they were so people would often compare them and go well oh it's got two cassette decks it's got a graphic equaliser record player and I compared to like a pioneer ago it's half the price it's must be the same thing of course they regretted it later well my brother regretted it but by 1987 he got a job and he got saved a bit of money so he decided he wanted a new mini system and all the wardens still he didn't want to do with sappers so he asked me to look into this for him he knew I liked looking at things like this because I always had all the sort hi-fi magazines I got all the brochures when I went to the shops I do all about this kind of stuff so I said his budget was about 700 pounds see what the best world I could get for 700 pounds so I went looking through all my things I came back and I said right I've looked through all the best value for money is this Kenwood system and left it with you a couple weeks later he got his new system and it was by pioneer why did you get the kenwood he said hit him once a high fire that was made by someone that made food mixers no those are two separate companies like Kenwood in the UK was formed in nineteen forties by a chap called Kenwood surprisingly enough nothing at all to do with the other Kenwood high fire company but you can't choose your family can you perhaps if we could pedia was around in 1987 to clear up the confusion but brother might have ended up with her Kenwood HiFi after all but this story is really about how at that point in the 1980s it was Kenwood who were making the most desirable hi-5 MIDI system well at least as far as I was concerned it wasn't Sony or techniques or pioneer Kenwood were making a decent product packed full of features and selling it at a fair price they weren't aiming these things at hi-fi audio files or bargain basement shoppers they were one of those high-end companies that were trying to make an entry-level product by stripping things down or a low income he tried at South except to sell it for more money no they worked in the middle this was their marquee they were unattainable and yet aspirational brands for the average person who just wanted a consumer electronics device rather than a hobby and for me they were king of the MIDI system now in order to make this video I've had to go shopping for some Kenwood hi-5 from the past not an all-in-one MIDI system but just the separate components I need to be able to demonstrate this CC RS feature amongst other things now we'll be having a good look at those in a minute but before I get to that let's just do a brief recap on the slightly convoluted history of Kenwood the first thing that might come as a surprise to some is that Kenwood started off as an American company in California established in 1961 by two american-born Japanese chaps called Bill kasuga and George our itani now both men had shared very similar but separate experiences during World War two we're like a hundred and twenty thousand other US citizens of Japanese descent they'd been placed in internment camps now both eventually managed to find a way out by volunteering to teach Japanese to US intelligence personnel because of course they were both bilingual they're kasuga stayed in the army until 1958 and that went on to work as a sales manager for a cub the imported Japanese audio equipment for Radio Shack in 1961 he teamed up with our attorney who by this point had formed the popular Mikasa brand of Japanese made chinaware and together they started a new company to distribute Japanese made horrify in the US which they called Kenwood electronics incidentally here's a connection that you might not have spotted look at the logo formic acid does that seem familiar yes it's the same or pretty much the same as the original Kenwood logo but why the name Kenwood well it was made up of two words Ken because that was both the Japanese and an American name and it had also worked well for Sears with their Kenmore house brand of kitchen appliances and wood well it was a hard wearing resilient material and also formed part of the word Hollywood now kasuga thought the most Japanese products would junk with the exception of trio he thought that those were good quality so that's what Kenwood imported now trio were a brand of Kasuga Muhsin Kogyo kasuga radio : they'd started back in 1946 Kenwood sold trio products as both Kenwood and trio outside Japan but they ended up doing such a good job of it that in 1975 trio in Japan renamed themselves as trio Kenwood and over the next decade Kenwood became the more dominant of the two brands so in 1986 the Japanese company bought out Kenwood and renamed the whole thing else Kenwood so that kind of messes up the timeline a little bit as Kenwood can say both that they started in 1946 in Japan and in 1961 in the US and both would be correct now both George and Bill continued with keyboard for many years later they were very well respected active philanthropist for Japanese American causes and they both passed away in 2013 at the grand old ages of 95 and 98 and just to bring the history section up to date Kenwood and JVC merged in 2008 to become the cleverly named JVC Kenwood and of course you can still buy Kenwood branded products today the name is being used most commonly on car stereo equipment which i think is the thing that they were perhaps best known for back in the day but it's HiFi components that I'm going to be exploring today by picking up a couple of things from their heyday to see just how good they are and of course also to figure out how well this CC RS thing works for Duane so to find my components as usual I went shopping on ebay now CC RS is a system that simplifies recording tapes to CD so I'm going to eat both a tape deck and a CD player and of course got to be compatible with this system now nobody was going to mention CC RS in the title so it involves him to look deep down into the auctions and looking at the photos in particular just to see whether or not the machines have the right buttons and connections on them and this is the cassette deck that I ended up picking it was located in German it cost me about a hundred and thirty pounds total including delivery to the UK it was a little bit more than I was expecting to have to pay but it looked like a decent machine as well and the seller said that it was working fine so next to find a CD player from around about the same time with the appropriate system connections I ended up finding a machine with a six disc changer for about 83 pounds here in the UK looking back through old catalogs I found that the CD player dated from around 1991 and the cassette deck dates from 1990 the tape recorder was Kenwood's next to the top of the range model for that year and I believe it costs around about 360 pounds or four hundred and seventy dollars in the CD player originally sold for 259 pounds or three hundred and twenty nine dollars it all starts off with the cassette deck it was well packaged and arrived in good condition the only thing that wasn't included was the original remote which I knew was missing but it isn't necessary as all the buttons are on the machine itself and he also didn't include a control cord to connect it up to the CD player for some reason when these were originally sold they didn't include those for the machines that were sold in Europe but look just like a standard 3.5 millimeter stereo mini jack cable but in case it was slightly different in some way I ordered a pair of the original cables online I also downloaded the manual from the hi-fi Engine website very glad they had it on there because some of the more advanced features of the machine are detailed in the manual and they aren't obvious from looking at the machine I'll show you some of those later the back of the deck has the usual inputs and outputs the only non-standard thing here is the system control connectors but over the years Kenwood you two different standards for communication X R and X s and the switch on about determines which type is to be used however for the moment I'm just going to connect up the record and play just to check everything's working properly and now it's happy to see it was working fine it's quite a simple deck there's no wall to reverse there's no track skip it's belt-driven rather than direct drive but it's closed-loop dual capstan and most importantly it's a three head system three heads of course always better than two when it comes to cassette decks because it means you can monitor the quality of a recording while it's being made the tape passes first over the erase head then across the record hair down then finally onto the play head so if you're recording pressing the monitor button cycles between the audio from the source and the audio that you've just recorded on the tape that comes back through the play head so this lets you compare the two and you can hear how accurate your recording is while you're making it on a two head deck you'd have to wait until the recording was complete then rewind and play it back before he could find out if you'd done something wrong and on this occasion that feature enabled me to determine that there was a little bit of a problem I noticed that one of the channels was coming in louder than the other on record but I'll play about the imbalance was reversed now of course you can go some way to compensating for something like this by adjusting the record balance on the machine and then the playback balance on your amplifier but it's not very convenient so I decided to open the Machine up and see if I could find some pots to twiddle now the first thing I noticed what I opened it up was that it's very neat and sensibly laid out the transformer being located well away from the other components to reduce interferences well big Kenwood chip in here but there's a number of other chips from companies like Sony and they're the ones also responsible for the Dolby decoding and encoding chips and I also appreciate how everything is well labeled in here because it made finding the pots I needed to adjust for the record level in the play bar level very easy and they've also got the right and left labeled as well so to get that levels rebalanced I fed a 1 kilohertz tone from a digital audio player it's the inputs on the back and well I was listening back to that and looking at the display on the front I adjusted the pots to get the levels balanced both the left and right stereo and also match the record and the playback levels so with that sorted let's talk about a couple of features of the deck you can see that there's been a bit of care in a tension pone here for example whether you put a cassette in it automatically rewinds it a tiny bit just to take up any slack to avoid any snags or tangles next like many decks made around this time it also detects the tape type between normal chrome or metal type one two or four now this of course isn't an uncommon feature but just to briefly explain how it works there are four sensors or fingers in the top of the cassette compartment that push down into the corresponding holes on the top edge of a cassette so from the edge of the cassette up to the center these sensors detect the write-protect knock State whether it's a chrome tape whether there's any cassette inserted at all and now finally in the middle that's the one that tells it whether or not that's a metal tape if you're wondering about tape type three well they have the same notches as type one so they can't be also detected but they aren't a common type of tape anyway and if you did happen to have what it would record just fine if you treated it the same as a type one the rest of the machine it's all pretty standard stuff although you might have spotted that this one has a real-time tape counter I always find these quite useful or not perfectly accurate but they do give you an idea of how much tape remains from how much has been used if you do want to get the best recording activity you're always supposed to adjust the bias to suit the particular tape formulation of the cassette you put in there for me an auto calibration system takes away the guesswork with this deck I just have to pop the tape in press the auto bias button and then it fast forwards 15 seconds and then records a short test tone on the tape while simultaneously listening back to the recording and adjusting the bias for the optimum results and then rewinds the tape back to a position before the tone and you're ready to go other features are HX Pro which is always on as standard because it improves high frequency response of recordings but then you've got a choice of whether or not you want but Dolby B or C noise reduction on there's the usual headphone output with its own volume level control and there's a timer switch for automated recordings and from looking at it you'd think that was the law however there are some additional features that you might only discover with the help of the manual there's a command to rewind a tape back to the beginning and then play it all in one go and this is activated by pressing rewind and play at the same time and then you've also got rewind to zero and stop which house you'd imagine now is activated by pressing rewind and stop at the same time if watch could also advance to zero if you were to press pass forward and stop rather than rewind but here's one that you might not discover by accident repeat play you start this feature by pressing fast-forward and rewind at the same time and then this will start the tape automatically playing over and over and each time it reaches the end it rewinds back to the beginning and starts again the counter on the front that advances by one and when that number reaches sixteen for whatever reason they're chose sixteen it stops there and here's another feature if you want to record a four second blank just press the record key twice this is ideal for leaving a short gap between recorded songs and then finally let's talk about the record level when you're recording a track onto a tape you want to get as much signal on the tape as possible without over saturating it so if you make it too quiet the tape piece might be audible during quieter moments but if it's too loud it'll get distorted according to the manual with this deck you want to set a peak of +5 into the read for a metal tape but with any other type of tape you set it so the loudest portions hit that Dolby symbol the only issue with this is that sometimes you can set a record level it seems right at the beginning but later on in this song the volume of it increases so that now you're recording way too hot and things are getting distorted well as yet another hidden command for helping you to do a do-over if you press rewind whilst it's recording that then takes the tape back to the points at which the current recording started so you can then have another go but that then leads us onto CCR s this is a feature that's designed to make recordings easier by not only synchronizing a cassette deck with a compatible CD player but also helping you to set the optimum record level for the whole CD so of course this is where the CD player is going to come in but before we get to that I just want to take a bit of a break out from this and say a word or two about Brad's recognition now when I started making this video it got me to thinking that I don't really see many people mentioning Kenward on hi-5 forums nowadays and that's probably because Kenward were a little bit kind of mass-market consumer so I'm thinking somewhere in the middle and people on hi-5 forms tend to be more interested in the high-end the collectible the rare stuff but then I also thought what maybe people just don't really think of them in the same way that I do so rather than going standing in the street and asking people that were passing by if they remembered Kenward I thought I'll ask on patreon so I put a question out on there and the question was just named the first five high five companies that pop into your head they don't have to be high end or low end past or present just the first five very quickly and don't read the previous responses either so I thought well I'll get a few answers on here and I'll be able to get a feeling as to whether or not people are still thinking of kenwood in this day and age well I got a lot more than I bargained for because as soon as I put that message out within seconds I got a reply in my inbox and then for the next twelve hours my foe was constantly dinging with responses to that post I got a total of 460 people in the end who gave me five high five companies the first ones that popped into their heads so I started putting those results into a spreadsheet and I was going a little bit cross-eyed by the time I got down to about a hundred responses I was getting a little bit ward with the whole thing and then a nice chap got in touch and said he could date about all the responses and automate the process I think he does this kind of thing for a living and give me the top 20 so he's said so over his results i double-checked the remind it all matches up here are the top 20 most frequently mentioned high five companies from the people that follow me on patreon and kenwood comes in at number seven I think that is probably about right when you look at who's above them their answer Yamaha denim technic Spidey and soley soley way outs at the top they're the number on the right in the blue color are the number of people who mentioned that company in their top five so 264 benches of Sony 61 of kenwood but it shows that people's do still think about kenwood but perhaps not on these forums where they're interested in collecting the best of the best so what I would suggest you can draw from that is that can we and one of those companies are flying a little bit under the radar as far as the collector's market goes and yet they did still make decent quality - parents so if you're looking on say eBay you're not competing against the collector's market who are out bidding each other silly amounts to get a piece of equipment you know buying base in old high five component consumer electronics device and you're paying what that should be worth nowadays okay let's have a look at the CD player our board now there's nothing wrong with this one but just for the sake of curiosity and completeness I've removed the lid so we can have a nose around inside there's a lot less to look at in here though than there was in the cassette deck again there are chips as you'd expect from other manufacturers like Sony Toshiba and NEC and this appears to be a board that could be configured for use in various different machines the pots are still labeled up in this one but there's no twiddling required this time now a good proportion of the space is taken up by the CD changer mechanism I'd imagine that this would be an identical unit to the one that they'd use inside their car stereo systems I'll load this one up with six CDs to test out the mechanism and I also want to put another CD in the plus one tray as well the remote control came with this machine though so I'm going to be a to use that off-camera to operate the disc selector rather than reaching across over the machine to press the front panel buttons overall I think it's quite an elegant mechanism it's quick it's simple it takes the tray that's holding the disc it pulls that out of the caddy and then lowers the CD down into the bottom of the machine where it's played I've got to admire its efficiency really again you can see it's all being built to a certain cost there's a lot of plastic in here but apparently it's not been at the expense of reliability after all this machine is still working perfectly thirty years after it left the factory back in the day you could buy additional empty cartridges so you could have a range of six disc playlists ready to go and of course if you were all in on Kenwood in your vehicle as well as your house you'd be able to swap the cars between each as far as the rest of the machine goes it's pretty standard stuff for a CD player there are more buttons and you usually get though because of course we can select discs one through two six at the push of a button we've got a p button which selects the plus on disc two ejects and we've also got an individual direct track access at the push of one button to the first 20 tracks on a disc but of course you can select more than that if you push the Plus 10 button anyway it's hard to connect it up to the cassette deck and see what the two could do when they're linked together one thing to note about this machine is that there's no optical output on the back it's just stereo line level RCA jacks now I love the way that these two look when they're stacked up like this it really does take me back it's a little bit like an old chap looking at a classic car in a museum so do you stuff what are those you know except I never did own a Kenwood but let's move on and finally get to see CRS what does it do well it's all about making it easier to copy a CD to a cassette one issue that are touched on before that you could encounter when copying a CD particularly a compilation like this is that the volume level can vary quite a bit from track to track so you might find out that you set the recording right for the first track and leave it going and then you come back later on and listen back to the whole tape and you find that some of the later tracks were a lot louder and therefore they're distorted so then you have to go back and record the whole thing again well listen what happens when I press the CCR s button it's playing through the entire CD at high speed which has given me the chance to see whether and all the tracks are suitable for the record level I have set and if I do find any of going-over I've now got the opportunity to turn lower the level for the whole recording before I commit anything to tape now when I bought this cassette recorder I was under the impression that CCR s was going to automatically adjust the record level however now it turns out that there were a couple of variants of CCR s and the water by deck is perhaps a lesser implementation that requires manual intervention some of the other tape recorders do have a thing called CCR s one touch record and that's the one that does everything for you at the push of a button so I kind of blew it a bit however the version I have is a completely useless I mean it does help you to set the record level before you start for the whole disc and then it's just a matter of pressing one button which will start the tape recording and the CD playing putting aside CCR s though there are some other nice features that are worth exploring on this CD player for random play as you'd expect you can shuffle a playback of the tracks on a disk however again another feature that might not be apparent is that two presses of the random button change it from selecting tracks from the current disk to all the disks of course it takes a bit longer for the machine to swap load and play a track from a different disk but had a curiosity our timed it and it took about 13 seconds between tracks which I didn't think was too bad but just getting back to the idea of recording a CD to a cassette this CD is 78 minutes long so the whole thing is going to easily fit on a 90 minute cassette however I'm going to have to flip the tape over after 45 minutes and I might end up with a partial track recorded at the end of side ace how to know how many trucks are going to fit on each side but then again if I use a 52 mini cassette it definitely won't fit the whole CD on it so which tracks would best utilize the available recording time well this CD player can work those things out for you so for example I put this CD in and say I'm recalling it to this 60 minute cassette I start off by telling the CD player which of the seven days I'm going to be recording and then how long my tape is and once it's got those two things it then looks through the tracks on that disc reading the length of each one and creates a custom program for the tracks that will go on side a and side B of the tape to best utilize the space and on this one I've told it to put disc five on a forty six minute tape and it's decided that tracks 1 2 5 and 13 can fit on side a which leaves 18 seconds at the end and then it moves onto side B which gets tracks 6 to 10 so a clever little feature but now for a quick audio demo have taken a track from the YouTube audio library recorded it onto a type 2 cassette in two versions one with no noise reduction and one with Dolby C so let's have a listen [Music] the things I've shown in this video I don't think were particularly high and maybe for Kenwood they were towards the upper end but as far as the general - market as a whole they weren't high in components yet after 30 years they're still working well and I think if you're looking for a decent quality hi-fi component from the past for whatever reason it might be a brand that's worth keeping on your short list at least and I think things from this era still have that little bit of magic about them you just don't get on modern day devices but I hope you've enjoyed having a look at this video here today but that is it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,020,753

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Kenwood, Hifi, Cassette, Tape, Cd, history, Hi-fi, Audio, Review, Retro, Vintage, Three head, Mid-range, Test, Demo, Cd changer, Budget, Kenwood DP-M6630, Compact disc, auto changer, Kenwood KX-4520, Ccrs, Recording level, Automated, Dubbing, Retrotech, Bargain, Attainable

Id: 50kWgke-9hg

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 11 2020