What is the difference between all the AIWA Compo Boxes?

What price did you win yours for?

 

It has a handle and the massive carrying strap wasn't offered. I'm supposing any massive carrying strap would work unless it had the name engraved upon it somewhere

 

Hi, I picked up these yesterday, an A25 / R25 / L30 set, with E1 speakers. Hadn't come across these Aiwas before, but I like microsystems and thought they looked pretty cool. Since then I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole it seems in terms of finding out about the numerous variations on these things. My first reaction when I picked them up was that these were put together from different sets, because the L30 is a lot deeper than the A25 / R25 (and obviously there's the "25" / "30" difference.) But from reading this thread (or searching online for that matter) I can't find any reference to an L25 cassette, so maybe there never was one? Possibly it was too difficult to shrink the cassette mechanism to the same depth as the amp / tuner. Anyway because of the variation in depths the cassette has to go on the bottom, which leaves a choice of whether to arrange the other two so they sit flush with the front or back of the cassette. I took photos of them both ways as I can't decide which works out best.

These seem pretty rare anyway, I can find very little mention online. I think there was one reference to the A25 / R25 earlier in the thread, although I haven't read through every single post so maybe I missed some discussion. One of the more interesting aspects are the prominent front stickers on the A25 / R25 reading "Assembled in the UK from Japanese components." I guess they were trying to have their cake and eat it a bit, as Japanese hifis tended to be considered superior here, but at the same time people did like to buy British too to support the economy. Anyway this way you could get the best of both worlds in theory!

 

I have the repair manual for the M-101 set, which included the RB10. It also says NP4-6, but I don't have mine to hand right now (only the cassette deck, which I'm working on). I did open it to have a look to see how easy it would be to replace. I want to transport mine on an aeroplane, and I anticipated they wouldn't allow them...so I was contemplated removing the old ones and buying new ones at my destination.

However, since the output is all about 12V (the input on my L10 says 13.2V), I couldn't help but wonder if it wouldn't just be better to replace them with a modern equivalent - ie rip the guts out and put a 12V Lithium based battery, and charger in the same case....actually, I just found that there are supposedly some Lithium based batteries designed to be direct replacements for the NP4-6...so maybe. The advantage I'm expecting is that they would be a lot lighter - the Lead-acid NP4-6 batteries are very heavy. No...I have no idea what I'm doing, so don't try this at home and then blame me

 

Has anyone seen a video (or even photos) of the inside of the SD-L10 (the cassette deck for the M-101) - or perhaps even one of the models higher up in the range?

I'm trying to get mine working again, but something's not quite right with the belts/etc. I suspect I might even be missing a belt, or perhaps a pulley is slipping or something.