Panasonic

Panasonic Corporation (パナソニック株式会社, head office in Kadoma, Osaka) is a Japanese multinational electronics corporation. The firm itself was founded in 1918 in the Fukushima ward of Osaka by Konosuke Matsushita (松下幸之助, 1894-1989) as Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works, and took its kabushiki kaisha form in 1935. The Panasonic name appeared in 1955 on audio speakers and lamps exported through Matsushita Electric of America; the word is a compound of “pan” (all) and “sonic” (sound). From 1961 the same name carried Matsushita’s television exports into the US market, because the firm’s main Japanese-domestic badge, National, was already a registered US trademark held by another company. A separate hi-fi sub-brand, Technics, was added in 1965. On 1 October 2008 Matsushita Electric Industrial formally renamed itself Panasonic Corporation, and by March 2010 the National brand had been retired from the Japanese domestic market for good. For the predecessor name of the same corporation see the separate National page.

Through most of the Showa era Panasonic was first and foremost Matsushita’s export label, used where the National trademark was either taken or weakly recognised: inside Japan audio mainly ran under National (mass-market) and Technics (hi-fi). The Panasonic name reached the Japanese market in its own right only at the end of the 1980s, in the niche of all-in-one digital integrated audio systems. The line that drove the move was Intelligent Compo (インテリジェントコンポ). Its D-series launched in August 1988, headed by the D9000 at ¥278,000 - a system with a Digital Signal Processor, an optical Digital Link from CD player to amplifier and inputs for three digital sources (CD, BS satellite tuner and DAT), backed by the D7000 at ¥219,000 and the D6000 at ¥185,000. The components inside Intelligent Compo were Technics-made, and the two parallel lines of the period ran side by side: Technics Intelligent Compo (D5, D7, D8, D9 in a floor-standing form at ¥350,000) and Panasonic Intelligent Compo (CD370, CD470, D5000, D7000, D9000).

The key Panasonic audio technologies of the late 1980s were Digital Link (デジタル光リンク), an optical link from CD player to amplifier that kept the signal in the digital domain right up to the DAC inside the amplifier; ATLS (Automatic Tape Level Setting), which set tape recording level automatically from source dynamics; Edit Guide (エディット・ガイド), which auto-marked programme breaks when dubbing from CD to cassette; and magnetically shielded speakers (防磁設計) intended to sit next to a television in the typical AV-room layout of 1988. Panasonic also claimed “3 Digital” capability on the 1988 D9000 - one of the earliest mass-market integrated systems built to handle three independent digital sources simultaneously. After 1996 the Panasonic name slowly displaced National across Japanese audio, and by 2010 the National badge had been wound up entirely, with all the corporation’s consumer electronics moving to a single Panasonic identity.