are aiwa decks good? need info

[Shakedown]

The Aiwa will be interesting because it has more Dolby NR options and it's bias fine tuning adjustment that lets you select each brand of tape.

I'm not sure home much of a gimmick this setup really is though. Apparently it's supposed to light up depending on which tape type is being optimized. I'm not sure if this is just a normal bias knob with a fancy sticker or if Aiwa actually optimized each adjustment for each brand of tape and the deck knows which brand you are playing. I'm going towards the former but I need to do more research.

This model the AD-M700BU black model. I will tell you it looks very nice and am anxious to hear if it sounds as good as it looks.

 

[skywavebe]

Many people like this brand and I am sure I have worked on them but when you go looking inside the most of them you can see that there was no thinking involved in the construction and there are wires everywhere making for a good rats nest. This then brings you to the subject of where to get a unit fixed- well if a lot of good technicians refuse to work on them being a rats nest then you might end up owning a broken down deck. I had a lot of them sent to me that were all messed up by guys who should have never been in it. One drilled new holes in the chassis to mount the transport as he could not get it in position that it should be- that is insane if you ask me.

 

[Bone Yard]

I'm still kicking myself for not picking up one of the nicer AIWA's years ago when it was a couple bucks but I only had room for some many full size decks. That's a nice looking deck Shakedown, AIWA is one of my favorites, my old neighbor and one of the smartest people I ever knew, always told me AIWA Tape Decks were super nice so I picked them up when I found them.

Sony had partial ownership of AIWA starting in the late 60's, in the early 90's they gained majority control and aiwa had it's best sales ever, mostly due to the crappy little mini-stereos they were pumping out. This continued until the early 2000's when declining sales made Sony shelf the name for a few years, now it's licensed out and you'll see different products from many countries. I cannot find any historical information regarding information sharing between Sony and AIWA. Also remember that Superscope (Marantz) was very tight with Sony Tape Products until 1978 when the contract ended. My personal feeling is all of these companies didn't like sharing anything until it was marketed, several of the Marantz PMD Tape Recorders competed head to head with Sony's Offerings, I'd be pretty pissed if I was Sony and my USA Distributor/Manufacturer had a similar product.

Personally I have an FD-810 in rotation right now but it's sitting really close to a TPR-950 and a TPR-910, I have a thing for mid-70's AIWA Boomboxes, talk about a rat's nest of wiring and a million screws.

 

[skywavebe]

Aiwa was a deck that a lot of people bought but then they are not Technicians and once you get into one then you find out how they are built. Personally I would stay away from such a thing but there were some nice upper models like the XK-S9000 but then I let my associate work on them. A Nakamichi BX300 is a better choice for lower end decks.
I think they went wrong at the models like ADF models as these always took a lot of time to repair- no sooner would you fix one thing as another popped up due to the rat nest wiring they had.
The single knob bias control is a marketing item and they rarely did anything accurate or good- most all of them are a joke. Even on Nakamichi decks they brake due to cheap pot and it is just better to use the internal adjustments and not fool around with gimmicks. The deck like the Teac/Tascam C-3RX, 122 Mk II and Mk III do have real external left and right adjustments for bias and levels the way they should be made.

 

[Hobie1dog]

Since this thread was started back in 2013, the question is.....did the OP get an Aiwa deck?

 

[Shakedown]

Sorry folks. Decided to cancel the test and cut my loses and have since sold it.

I had a choice to sell the Kenwood or Aiwa and chose to keep the Kenwood. I want to eventually invest in a Dragon or Marantz because I love the NAAC system. I have a ton of tapes recorded on a wide variety of machines. I can say though the Kenwood KX-1030 is significantly better than Aiwa. I was getting S/N ratio of 40dB and high frequency dropoff at 18KHz. On the Kenwood I was getting close to 70dB using Dolby B. Was a very cool deck to own for a short while and very cool for a collector of Aiwa decks, but there were better decks made and better out there.

It wasn't even worth comparing these two models I come to found as they are completely different decks. One likes metal and one likes chrome.