Very odd radio

i wonder if anybody can help me, I have been given an old tuner, its made by a company called Nikko, it has german writing all over it apart from Made in Japan. The unit is very heavy, and the tuning machancism feels very good quality.

It looks like it should be from the early to mid 70's, but I can't really tell. Does anybody know anything about this tuner?

Also it dosn't have any RCA phono sockets, it just has the a DIN socket. I do not have any DIN cables and I don't want to buy an expensive DIN to RCA cable if I don't know if this tuner works.

Anybody got any ideas?

 

no din leads no proplem,get a cheapo/freeby i/c ,cut the plugs off one end and connect the bare ends to bits of a staightened out paper clip,use these as the din plug.
the center pin of the din socket is normally earth

 

thanks, I guess the earth one should be connected to the turntable earth pole on the amp. Which is the positive, the top pins i.e


left +
-
earth
right +
-

is the right?

Also in the cable itself is the outer shilding the ground (-) and the inner cable the postive?

 

what about a picture?

 

You can get din->phono cables for a couple of quid from Maplins, or for around a fiver Mayware sell a din to phono adaptor, available from all good Naim dealers.

-- Ian

 

photo yep, good idea. I will take one now.

Yeah it might be easy just to buy one for the sake of a couple of quid, if the tuner is duff then I can just get a refund from maplin.

 

here it is, sorry the picture is blured, there is somthing wrong with my camera.

 

I'd say '75 ish Nikko were a lasky's own brand ?
The din pins are [correct me if I'm wrong ]

from the top left of the smile

R out .....................R in
.....L out..........L in
...........Ground

If you pm I can send a gash set of din to RCA x 2.

 

Hi

Nikko did seem to sell their stuff in Laskys. The first amp I ever bought was a Nikko NA390 amp. It was 20 watts per channel & it was from Laskys. Thjis was in 1981. It cost me £50.

My mate had the matching Nikko tuner. I would say that the tuner in the photo is from the 70's.


SCIDB

 

Was Lasky's an old electronic stores?

What is confusing me about this particular amp is that the writing is all in german, for example for power button is called Netz.

I wired a plug on it before and powered it up, the it lit up rather nicely, if this works I will seriously regret paying £80 for my Sony tuner, as I have a gut feeling this tuner will sound better than my Sony even if it was a basic tuner from the 70's. When I bought my tuner I just wanted everything to be black and mathing, I don't care anymore though what it looks like, getting good sound for little £'s in my main objective now.

Zanish thanks for the other, I am going into town tomorrow so I see if Maplin have them in stock.

 

AT, given that you could probably find a Denon TU260 for £30 now, it would walk all over that Nikko job m8- in my car boot sale days, they always used to crop up- about the standard of Tandy's 'Realistic' jobs, so no, its not going to outclass your tuner (STSE300??)

some chappy on HFC (if u can get on it) is selling a 'high end' Pioneer tuner at a ton...

 

I was getting excited then, also looking its not full length so that probably indiciates it was designed for midis if they had them, its bigger than midi though, its about 400mm wide.

Oh well I tell my sister's is a great quality tuner so she can have on her her new 1980 seperate system.

My tuner dosn't sound that bad either to be fair, its just I have a crappy arial but everytime I listen to it do I think it sounds better than I imagined.

Its just if you look inside in any modern sub £150 tuners they are empty boxes, but I guess thats the same with most modern HIFI stuff.

Edit: Yep my tuner is the STE300, I used to have the Denon 260MKII it was 1 year old, my mate was desperate for a tuner that night that matched his Denon 255SE UK amp that he gave £100 for it (even though it was 1 year old, it cost me £80 at richers) so at that price I couldn't resist.

RS at the time had WHF's current favourite tuner the STE300 at £80 and me at the time believing WHF said I bought it. It sounds a bit safer than my Denon did, but in my current thats no bad thing, also its easier to use than the Denon. It even puts all the station names in alpabetical order.

 

i listen to all radio thru freeview- have u tried this mr AT?
btw- just replied (again) to your other NIkko thread on HFC, in case u wonder who 'Rozzar' is

 

Hi,

Laskys were a big hifi chain in the 70's & 80's. They had branches in most major towns & cities. They sold a range of stuff from rack systems, mini & midi systems to separates to high end stuff. They also dabbled in computers (Apples, Commodores, Sinclairs, Oracs, Ataris etc).

I did buy a few things from them including an AR turntable with my student grant. I think the company went belly up around 1988/89.

Nikko were a Japanesse company. It looks like you have got the German version.

SCIDB

 

yeah I realised the connection when replying to the first to your first reply when I noticed you had celestion speakers. I've not got a freeview box yet, I am waiting for safeway to get them in at £39.95, there is currently a war on between Safeway, RS, and Argos, its like the DVD wars of 2 months ago but now with free view boxes.

I suppose freeview won't sound much worse than a good digital radio box now that the compression rates on DAB are so high.

EDIT: HFC is down again, I would imagine they have more than two people on the site at once so their 386 server cannot cope. I believe they are thinking of upgrading it to a 486 DX2-66 running WIN95.

 

well no harm in checking ur coverage anyway...
www.freeview.co.uk
www.ukdigitalradio.com

the latter shows u what stations u'd pick up- they vary from place to place.

from my philips freeview into my dac, at least the bbc channels sound very good indeed- not quite cd quality, but not that far off- i'd say there was negligible compression tbh
the rest of the london ones (kiss, smash hits etc) are FM quality but are improving.

oh and u get bidup.tv which is a larf.

 

So if any of you out there in " ether land " or are radio heads
owning a Denon TU260l, I've some very nice tweaks for it.

I 've drawn them up in booklet form so you'll need to pm me....
I'm hoping "Penance " will do a nice [warts and all] write up.

He's had a book and a kit of parts to go with it.

 

Good links, still no Freeview here [Market Harborough], but its a price worth paying to live here!
Interesting - on that digital radio link does "British Asian radio" and "New black music" constitute racism?

 

Knotty question , my none pc answer is that racism is only white against AN other colour.

Some of the most rascist people I've met have been white,
and others have been a different colour, intrestingly some of the least racist
people I've meet are sub continent asians. But I don't think racism is limited to any particular
ethnic group, its to do with fear of the difference between peoples.

As to the radio channel just think what would happen if you started a white british music
station !!

 

Thats somthing I have often wondered about. Its the same with anything though, its like gay clubs imagine what would happen if their were straight clubs? Or if their was a pub that said no students allowed.