SONY, September 1988 CDX-A20, XK-R808, EV-DT1M - full lineup

An A4 saddle-stitched booklet, 40 pages - a complete Sony Car Audio catalog - everything one could invent and even more for September 1988. From the first spread it puts forward the importance of digital sound (for the Japanese, CD players and discs had already been selling hard for six years), then a detailed SYSTEM CHART - the main device blocks, model variants, and how they can be combined in a car. After that each group is shown on its own, and each has its own flagship - the CDX-A20 CD changer, DIN control heads or decks, amplifiers, and speakers in versions for Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes. Separate spreads go to internals - a cut-open CD transport and the F-II cassette-deck drive mechanism. The new XK-R808: the catalog calls its voice synthesizer a first in car audio, with an equalizer whose 247-dot spectrum fills the panel. Car AV takes a few pages at the end: the EV-DT1M television with an 8mm deck in one body - the ideas are already good, but the technology still lags; CRT screens are essentially the only mass format for showing a TV/video picture, and proper liquid-crystal screens are still a decade away. The last page has a head-unit fit table for Celica, Silvia, Integra and Mercedes 190E. Those were the days when car audio was 90 percent an enthusiast’s job and did not come ready-made from the factory.