The sweet spot for home turntable enthusiasts on a budget seems to be the $200 mark. This might be the best of the bunch.
One can only imagine the sake-fueled club hopping that led to the development of the Seiko Frequency drum machine watch.
Japanese Retro Televisions
By James Grahame
Retro Enterprises in Tokyo now offers an interesting lineup of vintage televisions. They replace the innards of stylish boxes from the 1950s and 1960s with brand new color TV components. The result is a remote-controlled vintage TV with state of the art picture quality. The lineup includes funky models from Toshiba, Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sanyo and others.
The star of Retro's lineup is the 168,000 Yen ($1450) Model RT-39 (above) with a way-too-modern 15 inch Fujitsu LCD screen. It has VGA, S-Video and standard inputs and receives both NTSC and PAL transmissions, ensuring worldwide compatibility. As with all of Retro Enterprises' updated TVs, you'll have to use the remote to change the channel and volume -- the ancient front panel controls aren't connected to the modern internals. Owner Tak Kohyama speaks English, so email him with questions if you're interested.
Reincarnated classic televisions (In Japanese, but lots of pictures)
Retro Enterprises' English home page
