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.
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.
