A couple of Ferguson boxes: 3T13 and RC-01

jonny

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May 21, 2016
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I spotted these two 80s Ferguson boomboxes listed together on eBay. The silver one is a 3T13, from around 1980 I believe. The other is an RC-01, bit harder to pin an accurate date on this one but seems to be around mid to late 80s.

Both are badge engineered AKAs of other machines; in the case of the 3T13 it's a lightly restyled JVC RC-656, made in Japan, and it even has JVC printed on the PCB inside. The RC-01 is a Korean built box sold under numerous brands: Seiko WKC 200, Siemens RM 840 and Digital Sound Lab WKC-9640 seem to be the common ones. It's VERY similar in design to various Hitachi 3D models, but I can't find anything that actually ties it in to Hitachi.

The 3T13 is a very well built box. This example needed the switches and potentiometers cleaning up, and a little clutch assembly in the tape deck freeing up. It now works well and has a very decent sound. Notably better quality than my 3T09 of the same vintage; I found an old Argos catalogue page from 1980 which lists these two models together, the 09 being priced significantly lower than the 13 at £66.99 vs £89.99.

The RC-01 doesn't have the same quality feel to it. It's big, but feels flimsy; the casing creaks when you pick it up, the handle flexes easily, and the switches all have that light, loose feel associated with cheaper gear. It's in tidy condition, though, and all functions worked on arrival, including both tape decks.

It did have one very strange issue: switching the subwoofer on actually REDUCED the bass output. Nothing looked amiss internally, so I tried simply swapping the wires to the subwoofer driver, in case it was operating in antiphase. Voila! Bass restored, and quite a decent amount of it too. Makes me wonder if that was just a one-off manufacturing defect, or if loads of these things were sold with a counterproductive subwoofer. Nothing inside suggested that the machine had ever been worked on previously.

Anyway, giving these two a once-over and a clean up has killed a day of lockdown, and resulted in two fully functional, decent sounding boxes.
 

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jonny

Member (SA)
May 21, 2016
55
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8
To be fair, other than the slightly flimsy build quality, the RC-01 is actually not a bad machine at all.

Now that the "super woofer" is working with the main drivers rather than against, it sounds pretty decent (by mid-range 80s boombox standards), and despite being 30 years old it hasn't needed any more than a good clean.

Would be interesting to know if the reversed super woofer polarity was a common problem, as it makes a BIG difference to the sound!

I had a trawl through some late 80s Argos catalogue scans (on Issuu) but couldn't find the RC-01 or any of its AKAs listed. Would like to see how it was priced at the time in comparison with the Hitachi 3D machines that it imitates. Those Hitachis were priced from about £100 to £150 depending on model, so I'd guess that the Ferguson/Seiko/Siemens etc clone would be around £70 or £80.
 

stragulus

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Sep 4, 2014
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My first boombox I got was a cheaper version of the RC-01! It was sold in Germany under the "Soundwave" brand. It looks like it uses the exact same case, but it did not have the subwoofer. Instead, it just had a crappy third speaker in there. Once I was older and the turd had fallen apart (so, 2 years later), I opened it up. It had like 2 2W speakers and maybe a 3W 'woofer'? No tweeters. It also lacked the line-in/out that this one has.

What a piece of junk that was. And my sister got a small-ish Sharp with the twin-deck mechanism that was leagues better than my big plastic turd. I'm still pissed about it :D
 
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