Most people don't realize that Korea had a small booming boombox industry in the very early 80's. Goldstar (now LG) and Samsung are the two biggest brands that contributed boxes. I've heard mixed reviews of the boxes and they don't seem to follow any design cues, in fact most of the early Samsungs look like they might just be rebranded units, without opening up my ST-329, I think I see a little Marantz in it. I grabbed this mid-size Samsung ST-329 a few weeks ago on a hunch, there's very little information on these rare boxes, either here in the US, or on the Japanese Web. Mine is not complete but it's 98% there and it's a working unit, it even came with Minute by Minute by the Doobie Brothers! There is a blemish on the case, maybe an oil product, it looks worse in the photos. One of the reasons I think it might be part Marantz, besides the design, is that the antenna is off-white and has a rounded plastic tip, a signature of Marantz Antennas. This box was made in Korea so they might have bought the basic units from Marantz and stuffed their own Samsung Electronics inside. At 18" this is the prototypical size box for 1979 (manufactured 12/79) but that's where similarities to it's competition ends. The basic box is plastic but the radio bezel is metal, the cassette buttons are metal, with a nice action and positive detent, the speaker grills and tweeter surrounds are also metal. The tweeter surround is machined, with a nice texture, and anodized in copper. This is a full service box with external antenna hook ups in the back (AM/FM only), remote, dual mics, line in/line out and 1/4" speaker outs on the back, it would be cool to see this one all dressed up. Without batteries it's a heavy box, just a hair heavier than it's JVC Competition and it feels more substantial.
Samsung is still making "boomboxes" some of these look pretty cool http://www.chipchick.com/2014/03/samsung-giga-speaker.html
And you old-timers might recognize Jack Berg Sales, he had some cool NOS boxes 15 or so years ago, he still has this Samsung ST-316A in the box, grab them while you can! http://www.jackbergsales.com/electronics/samsungst316a.htm
I think it is more likely that Samsung were making boomboxes for sale by non-descript brands since they were even more non descript themselves. They definitely made products and components for other companies. I was rather surprised to find that Samsung made some of the keyboards for the Sinclair Spectrum (the UKs best selling computer in the 1980s). Apparently they are a slightly different colour and work better than the earlier ones. Looking through Argos catalogues the first sighting of Samsung Boomboxes was 1985 / 86. However, they were definitely the sort of thing you would buy if you couldn't afford the extra £10 for a Philips or Sharp.
Yep, they did have it even serving as OEMs for some "Bigs" like Hitachi. Btw, GoldStar TSR-800 is one of the best classic one-piecers from the early 80s.
That Goldstar is really nice, I think LG and Samsung had a hard time breaking into the American Market in the 80's so we didn't see a lot of that stuff. The Hyndai Cars that they were sending over here would fall apart after 2-3 winters.
Just in case, this GoldStar was better known in the US as a Prosonic PQR-9862: http://www.wikiboombox.com/tiki-index.php?page=Prosonic+PQR-9962
The Fords that were being sold in the UK back then did exactly the same thing so some people decided to save money by buying a Hyundai . Ironically the cars least likely to fall apart in winter were probably the Russian made Ladas "Built to Survive". As this very corny commercial points out underbody corrosion protection was a selling point back in 1980. https://www.motor1.com/news/174247/classic-ads-lada-range-1980/
When I first came to the UK back in 1991 I was sort of bewildered to spot a Lada with a wheel on the "wrong side". Had never seen it before.
They were probably more popular than the Korean cars back then. We actually had lots of things for sale from the USSR back in the 1980s. Zenit cameras, Vega portable TVs, Selena Radios, Rigonda organs and all sorts of furniture. Presumably they wanted the foreign currency. After about 1990 when free market economics kicked in we didn't see anything from Russia. Have a look at this Ebay UK search. https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_...Xselena+radio.TRS0&_nkw=selena+radio&_sacat=0 These Radios were advertised as using the same technology as the Soviet spy ships
We didn't have anything Russian, zero trade between the countries. I had a Russian Friend in the late 80's, he was one of the first to come over here and he used to bring boxes of Russian Watches over. They were pretty cool and very different from what we normally saw. He'd sell those and then buy boxes of CDs and send those back home.
