Hitachi mini components.

These just arrived today. Like the Technics mini components, these are not toys, they are seriously miniaturized components. The amp is an integrated. It's mostly filled with a huge and heavy torroidal transformer. It handles volume and tone control duties, but that's all there's room for inside. The tuner, which connects to the amp with a custom DIN cable, performs the rest of the preamp functionally; source switching (including a phono section), tape monitor etc. The output is 40 real watts per channel. The build quality is very good. This kind of small, jewel-like system was a hot trend in the late seventies. I don't know what the original price was (the Technics stuff was over $1200!), but I know it was high. Like buying a laptop instead of a desktop computer, miniaturization is more expensive. There is a thread on audiokarma about them, and everyone seems to love them. I have the matching plastic speakers as well, and they sound surprisingly good, but the amp is capable of driving much better speakers. As I write it's doing a nice job on the Pioneer HPM-100s.

I took the picture of the Hitachi stuff on top of a Sansui AU-9900 (yes, another one, my current go-to amp) to give you a sense of their size. They're really something.