Sony FX-300 Jackal: A technological marvel of the late 70s (2021)

If you're in Tokyo, Sony has a nice little product museum with lots of cool gizmos like this. It's not really open to the public on a regular schedule but I just called one morning while on a trip and they said to come over that afternoon. I was the only visitor during the time I was there but it was super fun to see so many products I had or wished I had, as well as many I never knew about.

Sinclair (of ZX Spectrum fame) made a variety of wacky devices over the years, including the crazy C5 electric bike [0]. They also dabbled with handheld TVs. The one I knew about was the TV80 [1] which came out in 1983 when I was a small kid. Apparently in the 70s, they also sold the MTV-1 [2] which also had a TV and radio in a bulkier package.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV80 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV-1

It's a common feeling to think the people that came before you were somehow less smart and talented.

When my now grown kids were younger, I pulled the back off a cassette tape player. The belts and gears and cams and the like were completely alien to them...they'd grown up on slabs of glass.

The miniaturization to get analog stuff to drag tape across a tape head was legendary.

All those push buttons, flip switches, dials and various knobs make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Reminds me of a flashlight I got as a present for my first boy scouts camp in the eighties. It had switchable color filters, lighthouse mode where whole motorized middle section would rotate, lantern mode, three strobe modes with main and/or middle sections blinking, hidden compartment and a compass. As is the case with most of those X in one deals it was crap. Compass being the only thing working well, everything else a victim of compromises like this whole Sony thing..

IMHO analog augmentation is what makes these things special.

In digital, the physical reality is sampled and an accurate measurement is calculated, then this measurement is presented to the user in any suitable form. The problem is, this divorces the user from the physical reality and it's up to the designer to create something that would give back the feeling of being close to the metal.

With analog systems, the default is being close to the physical phenomenon. If the battery has strong enough potential difference it moves the needle. The fidelity is very high, although you loose on accuracy. For example, if you look at the analog voltmeter when you play music, you can observe how the voltage drops with the music frequency or volume which is something you can miss with the digital if the designers have chosen lower sampling rate or smooth out the variations to provide more accurate info on the battery charge. When this happens, you no longer build intuitive understanding of the physics.

My feeling about it is the opposite. Does a lot of things, doesn't do any well.

Since my son's 1996 Buick only has a cassette tape player I've been collecting cassette decks, 'collecting' because you might need to have two or three to have one that works reliably. I got exactly one recording out of a top-of-the-line Sony deck from 1992 or so, I had to try four decks before I got one that works perfectly. So that little mono deck like the one that I tried to use to save files for my TRS-80 Color Computer doesn't impress me.

I can't say I covet a huge CRT TV but Sony's products from the 1990s are impressive in that department too. (Got a 22 inch CRT TV with a built in VHS deck for retrogaming though) From the electronics viewpoint, however, there were some interesting techniques used to generate high voltage from batteries in 1970s era portable TVs, back before switching power supplies became routine.

Damn that's nice. Every control right there, ready for you to use at a glance. We don't make HMIs like that anymore :')

I had a more classic boombox shaped version. It was the same size picture tube, with tape deck. The tube came to the "top" edge of the boom box flat rectangle. I watched "little big man" on it, Custer's charge with full sound, from here (left pinkie) to there (thumb) also Sony from memory

We had a JVC CS-60US or something like it when I was growing up, my mother may still have it in the attic of her home. Looked like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/256143505214

So many for sale on eBay:

https://www.google.com/search?q=ebay+Sony+FX-300+Jackal&oq=e...

I thought they'd be scarcer.

Can't talk about the Jackal without mentioning this mod: https://www.hackster.io/news/tom-granger-s-sony-fx-300-jacka...

Way cool. Those straps look just like the ones on my D-5 battery case: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVWvTR9XkAMXEaN?format=jpg&name=...

I'm guessing it won't pick up TV stations anymore since the switch to digital broadcasting?

This is cool! Now I think I know where the designers of the RED cameras got their inspiration from.

That’s lovely. It’d probably have been too rare for the DAK catalogs of the early 80s, but a lot of similar (cheaper) gear came through them. (The Olivetti branded TRS-80 Model 100 was a prize!)

At first reading the title I thought it was a new camera in the FX line (along the FX-3 and FX-30) and I was very confused to say the least

Sony always made excellent equipment but by the 1970s it truly excelled and started to produce really first-class products. Its domestic equipment verged on professional grade and after it entered the professional arena its equipment was second to none, for example its professional DAT and 1" videotape recorders were used by broadcast stations across the world because they were state-of-the-art and their quality was excellent (so too was their serviceability).

I still own quite a number of Sony devices but I'd like to specifically mention my Captain 55/ICF-5500M AM/FM/SW receiver, my two ICF-2010† and a ICF-2001D† AM/FM/SW receivers and my 100W per channel stereo amplifiers from that era and they all still work perfectly.

What's remarkable about these devices is that their build quality is excellent, in fact they've essentially been fault-free and not needed any maintenance for 50 years despite being in regular operation since I purchased them.

Of particular note is that none of the potentiometers (volume pots, etc.) has gone noisy/scratchy over this time which is quite a remarkable achievement really. Likewise, I've not had to replace any electrolytic capacitors either. (Incidentally, the pots that Sony used in their equipment around that era use a composite conductive plastic that has remarkably good durability—ipso facto my ones are still 'scratch-free'.)

When I bought these devices I had no difficulty in obtaining service manuals for them from Sony's service department for a nominal cost. Unlike these days, the service manuals are excellent and they come complete with comprehensive circuit diagrams. The circuit diagrams for the radios are printed in two colors—important info is overprinted on the black circuit diagram. I still have those manuals despite never having had need to use them because the equipment is so reliable. (When it comes to servicing equipment young people these days haven't a clue how much better manufacturers treated owners back then.)

BTW, whilst both receiver models have excellent performance, the ICF-2001D is exceptional. For a domestic appliance its performance specifications were close to or on par with many communication receivers of their day. It has a FET RF stage with excellent crossmodulation figures on all bands and good IF bandwidth skirts for adjacent channel interference rejection. In fact, some shortwave hackers and AR operators considered the radio so good that they replaced the original IF filter with a proper mechanical filter which definitely put the receiver into the professional class. Another very unusual feature was that the receiver also has an excellent synchronous detector which works remarkably well—if one has interference on say one sideband of an AM signal then one just switchs the sync detector to the other and the interference disappears.

Tragically, Sony is no longer the company that it once was. Gone have most of the high-tech consumer products, gone have comprehensive service manuals, and so on. After Sony's founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita died in the late 1990s the company completely changed direction. It greatly reduced tech manufacturing and development and bought into the US media/movie business. Many owners of this older Sony equipment would now argue that the highly engineering minded founders if still alive would never have allowed this change in direction.

For many, myself included, Sony is now perceived as nothing more than a pariah company with nothing other than profits in mind—profits made on the end of DRM (remember the Sony virus?).

Great shame that once great tech company is no more.

†https://www.cryptomuseum.com/spy/icf2001d/index.htm

https://radiojayallen.com/sony-icf-2010-an-all-time-classic/

Edit: on that first link there's mention of Sony's smaller ICF-7600D. I also used have this receiver too but only the 'D' version. It was a good receiver but didn't quite have the performance of its bigger brother. I used it whenever I was traveling internationally. It was a great companion when in countries where I couldn't speak the language and wanted news.