KENWOOD | TRIO

Kenwood Corporation (株式会社ケンウッド) is a Japanese audio and radio-communications company, founded on 21 December 1946 in Komagane, Nagano Prefecture, under the name Kasuga Radio Co., Ltd. (春日無線電機). The firm was renamed Trio Corporation in 1960, and in 1963 it opened its first overseas office in Los Angeles and adopted the brand name Kenwood for the US market. The name was coined from “Ken” - a given name common in both Japan and North America, picked to echo the Sears Kenmore home-appliance brand - and “Wood”, a reference to Hollywood and the location of the new American office. In 1986 Trio bought the Kenwood trademark and renamed itself Kenwood Corporation, unifying its domestic and export brands. On 1 October 2008 Kenwood merged with JVC into JVCKenwood Corporation. By the time of the merger the company’s head office sat in the Hachioji district of Tokyo.

What sets the firm apart in the Showa landscape is the parallel split between hi-fi audio and amateur radio communications. The TS-series transceiver line was one of the dominant ham-radio products in Japan throughout the 1960s onward, running alongside the audio catalogue first under the Trio name and then under Kenwood. In hi-fi the company built its identity around circuit-design choices: the KA integrated amplifier line - by 1979 a broad family running from the KA-3100 up to the KA-9900 flagship at ¥200,000, rated 150 W per channel with separate left- and right-channel power supplies - was built on Straight DC (ストレートDC), a direct DC amplification topology that removed coupling capacitors from the signal path. In June 1986, by then under the Kenwood name, the company released the KA-1100D, an integrated amplifier whose output stage used the proprietary New VIG-DLD topology specifically tuned for digital sources: a CD Direct input bypassed the input selector and ran straight to the output stage, and a Dual Rec Out allowed two simultaneous tape recordings.

The audio catalogue revolved around four-letter codes: KA for integrated amplifiers, KT for tuners, KX for cassette decks and KP for vinyl turntables. By the end of the 1980s Kenwood offered a full hi-fi stack: DP-series CD players led by the 1989 DP-X9010 at ¥73,000, KA-V AV integrated amplifiers like the KA-V6000 at ¥65,000 with 5-channel Dolby Surround, KT tuners headed by the KT-1100D, three-head KX cassette decks like the KX-9010 and dual-cassette KX-W decks such as the KX-W8010 and KX-W8310. The mini-system arm carried the ROXY G and ESPACE lines; broadcast-satellite reception was handled by the DT-7010 BS tuner and the digital-cassette format by the DX-2200SR DAT deck. As the market moved toward digital sources in the second half of the 1980s, much of the engineering effort shifted to adapting analogue amplifiers to the output of CD players - the same task that produced both the New VIG-DLD topology of the KA-1100D and the CD Direct input found across most of the KA range.