SANSUI

Sansui Electric Co., Ltd. (山水電気株式会社) was founded on 3 June 1947 in Tokyo by the engineer Kosaku Kikuchi as a maker of radio components; Kikuchi had already set up a small transformer plant in December 1944, and transformer work would remain the firm’s technical foundation for decades. From 1954 Sansui shipped do-it-yourself kits for building stereo preamplifiers and power amplifiers, and in 1958 the company introduced what it claimed as Japan’s first commercially built tube stereo preamplifiers and power amplifiers. By the late 1980s Sansui began to lose ground in the United States under pressure from Sony, Pioneer and Technics. From the late 1990s the Sansui name was being licensed to other video-equipment makers; the head office in Shin-Yokohama was closed in 2001, by 2010 sales had shrunk to just ¥40.4 million, and in 2014 Sansui Electric went out of business altogether. Since 2014 the Sansui name has been held by Doshisha for the Japanese domestic market and by Nimble Holdings of Hong Kong for export - neither of which has any direct continuity with the Showa-era Sansui.

The defining Sansui identity in the Showa era was high-end amplifier engineering. The firm started in transformers - output transformers for tube amplifiers were its first specialism - and the AU line of integrated amplifiers in matte-black finish, launched in 1965, ran as the core of the brand right through the rest of its history. Sansui developed and patented its proprietary α-x balanced circuit for high-power amplifiers and worked extensively on direct-coupled DC topologies. By the start of the 1980s the line had moved through the Definition AU-D family and into the AU-D EXTRA series of January 1982: the AU-D907F EXTRA flagship at ¥175,000 ran the Super FF circuit (Full Flat, a direct-coupled DC design with extended bandwidth) together with a Diamond Differential input stage on diamond-arranged transistors, backed by the AU-D707F EXTRA at ¥113,000, the AU-D607F EXTRA at ¥76,000 and the TU-S607 EXTRA tuner at ¥43,500 on a quartz PLL synthesiser.

Sansui’s catalogue ran on three main letter codes: AU for integrated amplifiers (the matte-black line dating back to 1965, running from the AU-D607F EXTRA up to the AU-D907F EXTRA by the early 1980s), TU for FM/AM tuners (the TU-S607 EXTRA with its quartz PLL) and BA / CA for the top separates of power and preamplifier. In 1970 Sansui also sold a line of console “Separate Stereo” cabinets under the APS name - self-contained floor units packing an FM/AM tuner, a belt-drive turntable and a pair of loudspeakers into a single wooden case. The APS-2600 flagship at ¥189,500 ran Multi-Dynamic Sound (マルチダイナミックサウンド) with six separate amplifiers totalling 108 W and MD Multi-Direction, a layout that angled the drivers off-axis to widen the stereo zone. Alongside the amplifier programme, Sansui developed QS - a matrix quadraphonic recording and playback system that competed against JVC’s CD-4 and Columbia’s SQ through the first half of the 1970s.