One Of THE Zaniest Box Designs I've Ever Seen, The EXPO E-7900

[Gluecifer]

Found this at a local second hand market at a vendor that regularly sells average boxes for large prices, but being my birthday and the friend with me saying it'll be my birthday present, I couldn't resist. On further inspection this box has surprisingly high end features and some marvellously ridiculous gimmicks.

Here she is in native form:



The design, overall, is rather bizarre from the outset. The layout is like it's been cleaved from some in-car dashboards and then reconstructed. The colour is actual a glossy light gray, not silver, and the darker colour is a gun metal. The first thing that caught my eye were the twin V LED meters, I've never seen this kind of thing on any box. The left hand side has power on the left and tuner signal strength on the right and the right LED meter is for power output. They're very nice looking meters.

The sound is actually really nice, quite a bit of punch. I doubt this was a cheap box as the construction feels very solid and few corners were cut on the overall design. The inclusion of features like sound going to the speakers without the need for the wires, full featured alarm clock and a recording function on the walkman deck leads me to believe this wasn't a $100 cheapy.



And yes, the top deck is a walkman, but not only the that, the tuner is also removable!!



They both take 4 AAAs (so with the battery in the clock and the 8 D's it takes this amounts to SEVENTEEN batteries total, which has to be a record) and have their own independent volume and features. The walkman is a tank of thing, and the radio looks like something from the mid 70s when removed.




Needs a bit of a tidy up with a rebelting and such, but nothing major and she really has some impressive volume and presence. Theres a bit of a lack of midrange, but it's forgivable.

I find myself constantly marvelling at the design of this box and how the gimmicks have been implemented. Even though the colour and layout makes it seem late 70s this has to be a mid 80s + box with the features it has, I imagine if it were all black it'd betray it's vintage more. It must've been released elsewhere, surely theres an AKA somewhere. I find it hard to believe this is the only model.



Rock On.

 

[redbenjoe]

jeezum crow --what a prize

 

[Beosystem10]

Wow! Weird. The only box I ever saw with the same bizarre layout is a club book one, and that carried the "Triumph" name which was exclusively used on club book electronics, in that case from the Grattans book. This means that there are probably other club book branded versions over here such as Spinney (Littlewoods) and Silver (Great Universal) since the makers tended to supply the same machinery to all of the books, under brands that would be unique to each.

It looks very good in terms of quality, so almost certainly a maximum allowance per week for the rest of your life type of purchase from your local club book agent.

Are the louvres decorative or are there tweeters hiding behind these?

Wireless speakers are an upmarket thing, the only examples I've seen in the flesh are those on my Technics SAC05L, though I recall a member posting images of another box that had this feature recently.

 

[superlew]

What a thing! What a crazy thing!
"Zany" really is the perfect adjective.
I love it.

 

[jimmyjimmy19702010]

Wow, that's cool and unique. I can see a little hint of Marantz in the control text font.

Congrats,

James...

 

[Gluecifer]

Ah no tweeters, but we get this lovely hyperbole on the back of the speakers:



Hopefully more of these will surface under their other guises.



Rock On.

 

[Beosystem10]

Hopefully, yes. Maybe some UK members will have copies of their, or their parents' club books from the late '70s and early to mid '80s that could be scanned in some form of industrial grade scanner that wouldn't shatter under the weight of all those pages.

 

[JustCruisin]

I like it!

 

[stynger007]

Liking the VU meters ..cool looking unit nice find..

 

[MKS]

Wow, that thing is crazy.
Really like the tweeter grills, remind me of a pair of 80's home steroe-speakers.

 

[Ghetteaux Les Fabulous]

Wow! Weird. The only box I ever saw with the same bizarre layout is a club book one, and that carried the "Triumph" name which was exclusively used on club book electronics, in that case from the Grattans book. This means that there are probably other club book branded versions over here such as Spinney (Littlewoods) and Silver (Great Universal) since the makers tended to supply the same machinery to all of the books, under brands that would be unique to each.

It looks very good in terms of quality, so almost certainly a maximum allowance per week for the rest of your life type of purchase from your local club book agent.

Could someone explain the 'club book' concept to us folks over in the States?

 

[Brutus442]

This is awesome!!

a rare bird indeed...I've never seen anything like it. Well done!!

 

[Beosystem10]

Could someone explain the 'club book' concept to us folks over in the States?

Yes, gladly. These books were a way of buying lots of items that people couldn't otherwise have afforded at ridiculously inflated prices on easy terms, usually a couple of percent of the weekly income of the purchaser. More expensive items would be bought over longer time periods or, if the buyer earned more, at a higher weekly rate than the cheaper items.

Some items were from the big name brands - example: my Aiwa ADF410 cassette deck was bought from a friend who had an agency for a book, she ordered the deck for me, to be delivered to my house, I paid her up in one amount and she added its cost to her weekly payment to the company in whose book the item had been sold, in that case I think it was John Moores. These agents kept a percentage of their total receipt each week as a commission and were also tasked with finding more agents so in that sense, the concept wasn't entirely dissimilar to pyramid selling, but aimed mostly at people who were otherwise not able to obtain credit.

But - and this is where the relevance to our hobby comes into the thing - many people couldn't stretch to the club book prices for the big brand goods so less expensive, yet often good quality items were offered as alternatives at lower cost. These book brands, some of which I mentioned earlier in this thread, were occasionally just high street items where the only difference between the one that carried the (for example) Ferguson (part of Thorn, maker of solidly built if uninspiring audio including boomboxes, sold also on the high streets under the Marconi and Ultra names) label and the cheaper, club book alternative name such as Spinney, etc. was the price. If the brand didn't matter, then although these bits of equipment weren't fashionable like their high street AKAs would have been, they were less costly and this meant that they were available to the people who weren't rich enough to afford the big name.

Even now, many of the club book brands, also known as "catalogue" goods in the more southern areas of the UK, are cheaper on eBay than their famous name equivalents which can throw up some odd bargains.

Another significant social function of these books - whose many hundreds of pages in many dozens of categories included ladies' underclothes and swimwear -was as a source of cheap thrills for pre-pubescent school boys whose parents' books often became the period equivalent to today's proliferation of "glamour" websites.
I had no idea that this was a uniquely British retailing concept, or was it? I'm almost sure that Ryan O'Neal's character in "Paper Moon", that great black & white film from the early '70s about the adventures of a travelling confidence trickster and his young offspring as played by his real daughter; Tatum, had a lucrative line in going door knocking and selling luxury editions of the Bible to people on easy weekly terms that would total far more than the true worth of the items he was selling. That film was set in the '30s, its location; the Midwestern bit of the United States....

The important difference was of course that the club books from the 1970s and 80s in this bunch of small countries in the North Atlantic that makes up the UK were legal, and didn't involve taking the money and disappearing.

 

[Lasonic TRC-920]

Wow...wow...and wow again. That is a great original design. The dual meters are trick and the removable tuner is just wild. 17 batteries absolutely is the record!

This deserves its rightful place in your proud collection.

Now, I have to see it with the triple deck Yorx! Two of the best oddballs ever made!

 

[nz boom]

Wow...wow...and wow again. That is a great original design. The dual meters are trick and the removable tuner is just wild. 17 batteries absolutely is the record!

This deserves its rightful place in your proud collection.

Now, I have to see it with the triple deck Yorx! Two of the best oddballs ever made!

nice score rick

 

[-GZ-]

Wow. I really like that. Think I'd trade you my prosonic for that.

 

[floyd]

got to be the best weird box around. i love the little or completely unknown boxes that are full of suprizes and have something different going for them.

 

[skippy1969]

Thats very very cool!!!!

 

[blu_fuz]

Cool score Glu! Very strange indeed but I like it.

 

[Ghetteaux Les Fabulous]

Yes, gladly. These books were a way of buying lots of items that people couldn't otherwise have afforded at ridiculously inflated prices on easy terms, usually a couple of percent of the weekly income of the purchaser. More expensive items would be bought over longer time periods or, if the buyer earned more, at a higher weekly rate than the cheaper items.

I had no idea that this was a uniquely British retailing concept, or was it? I'm almost sure that Ryan O'Neal's character in "Paper Moon", that great black & white film from the early '70s about the adventures of a travelling confidence trickster and his young offspring as played by his real daughter; Tatum, had a lucrative line in going door knocking and selling luxury editions of the Bible to people on easy weekly terms that would total far more than the true worth of the items he was selling. That film was set in the '30s, its location; the Midwestern bit of the United States....

The important difference was of course that the club books from the 1970s and 80s in this bunch of small countries in the North Atlantic that makes up the UK were legal, and didn't involve taking the money and disappearing.

Couldn't say whether or not this kind of retailing ever existed over here. Just something I've never heard of. Perhaps the role is filled somewhat by rent-to-own places - though none of the ones I've heard of have lingerie and swimsuits on offer.

My late brother used to work for Service Merchandise - a mail order catalog retailer whose stores were known as 'catalog showrooms'. You'd got to the showroom, take an order form, look over the goods on display, write down what you wanted and hand in the form to the sales clerk, who'd have your item(s) brought out of the stockroom for you. The idea was to cut down on shoplifting.

Another retailing thing that seems to have gone away are trading stamps. You'd get the stamps from grocery stores gas stations or other places, fill up books with them to trade with the stamp issuing company - S&H was one of the biggest names - for merchandise. Even though they were still pretty big in the 70s, nobody in our family was collecting them as none of the stores we went to was giving them out.

In our area the last locally owned department store gave out their own stamp, which were only good for items in that store. I still have the few I got from a purchase there in the 90s shortly before they went out of business.