Sony TAE-8450
(may 1974 - 1978)

Not that we'd need all the knobs... but there was a time when engineers were striving day and night to allow the optional tweaking of sound while remaining into acceptable specs: it was far more of a battle than the yearly chips swapping which the consumer audio market has shrinked to since the mid 90s.

As the patchbay suggests (and the literature) this was meant as professional gear, or more practically : "pro-sumer". The included Head Amp was a novelty, as in the contemporary CA-1000 from Yamaha, and its presence even confused High Fidelity Magazine who thought it was tape-related...

Its design, too, was ahead of its contemporaries - perhaps a little too much for many a potential buyer? Anyway, at 285,000¥ (1976), the TAE-8450 obviously couldn't become a best-seller and vanished along the other V-FET/PPM series all too quickly. Companion to the TAN-8550 V-FET power amplifier and TAN-8250 non-V-FET of same.