AIWA

Aiwa Co., Ltd. (アイワ) was a Japanese audio manufacturer, founded on 20 June 1951 in Taito, Tokyo as AIKO Denki Sangyo Co., Ltd. by Mitsuo Ikejiri (池尻三男), who served as its first president until 1969. The company was renamed Aiwa in 1959. Its ties to Sony run deeper than many assume: Sony took a controlling 52 % stake in 1969 and raised it to 54.6 % by 1982. On 1 December 2002 Sony made Aiwa a wholly owned subsidiary; on 14 May 2008 it discontinued the brand.

Aiwa was a company of firsts. In 1964 it released the TP-1009, Japan’s first cassette tape recorder. In 1968 it brought out the TPR-101, Japan’s first radio-cassette, effectively the first Japanese boombox. In 1980 it launched the TP-S30, the world’s first personal stereo recorder: a wearable player that could also record - a feature missing from Sony’s Walkman TPS-L2 of the year before. Aiwa staked out the recording side of the personal-audio niche, and on the Japanese domestic market its line was sold as CassetteBoy, which became the brand’s signature through the first half of the eighties.

Across the Showa years Aiwa claimed a whole stretch of portable audio: Turbosonic boomboxes with the DSL bass system (CS-J88/77/60/30); Carryin’Compo portable component systems with five-band D.S. graphic equalizers and Dolby NR; CassetteBoy personal players with auto-reverse and slim bodies in dozens of colors; Sky Play wireless headphones; the On Air FMT-1 FM transmitter. In 1983 came the credit-card-thin Stereocard CR-1/CR-2 FM/AM receivers and the Mr. Karaoke KA-100 - Aiwa’s entry into home karaoke. In home cassette decks the brand kept a distinct profile: Active Servo Bias (digital bias-current auto-calibration), amorphous heads and high-speed auto-reverse. The 1984 FF 90 flagship paired Active Servo Bias with Dolby HX Pro, while the compact R50 carried a cover-printed world record - auto-reverse in 0.2 seconds.