National Panasonic

A friend at the time recieved one of these either for his birthday or for Christmas, but it was more 1975 rather than 1973. Things moved quickly back then with design. If the date on RadioMuseum is to be believed then this was a quite advanced design compared to the RF-7270 of 5 years earlier.

(Having looked at it more closely, it probaly is 1973 as it has the uppercase logo of the late 1960s, which makes this all the more remarkable.)

The unit itself is now quite disapointing, even for an entry level unit. I remember it sounding and recording well, this particular unit does neither, although it is a cut above the Rambler tape chewer that I had. Frequency responce of the cassette is limited and the speaker sounds thin. However, it is not particularly distorted. But then my ears have been trained on Luxman levels of sound quality.

It's a very basic unit. With automatic recording level, not a problem when we only had AM radio! The tuner is the most basic of AM types seemingly lifted from National Panasonic's clock radios.

Nonetheless, it was a very good entry level unit for a 15 year old in 1975.