ADC Accutrac 4000

Launched when automatisms were becoming an important marketing goal, the Accutrac 4000 was a first. It was advertised at length everywhere, even in Japan, and sold... ok.
It was huge and bulky and sported a wooden enclosure - technoid black looks were for slightly later years.

However, it wasn't a technological first : Toshiba in the very early 1970s had a model capable of "seeing" the different tracks on the LPs. And it also had a cool bowl / ball / bulb receiving the remote control's IR codes. Yep.
Said bowl / ball / bulb is by the way the one thing everybody remembers about this first (fairly) successful techno turntable.

The USA ADC was owned by british BSR, the former in New Milford (CO), the latter in Cradley Heath (Warley, West Midlands) - BSR built the Accutrac for ADC.


A later model called Accutrac +6 featured the same remote/receptor set but a more somber base ; one of its three available versions had remote volume control and six-disc changer features. It didn't make coffee, though. Nor tea.

For those erribly superstitios, the maximum number which one can program the Accutrac 4000 with is... 13.

Apart from fairly banal sub-tags like "Seeing is Believing" (which also was the title of a demo LP sold with the Accutrac 4000) or "The turntable with eyes", I'll quote here the main 1976 advertising tagline for the Accutrac 4000 (which Kenwood recyled a few years later) :

Its mother was a turntable, its father was a computer.

(I challenge anyone to add anything after that).