Hi guys,

Although I'm not in boomboxes as in walkmans, recently I received at home my old loved boombox that I've had when I was a teen: the CSD-SR6. This unit is the best boombox I've ever seen and heard that could be bought outside Japan (there was another higher model only there: the CSD-SR8, that I already explained in this article).

It has a huge lot of features that represent the one of the most advanced (if not the most) boombox made in the 90's (outside Japan, again). It includes:

- double quick autoreverse deck, metal compatible, rotating heads.

- PLL radio with 30 presets.

- 15W DIN with 10.000cc resonance boxes each and bass reflex ducts (the biggest resonance in those years).

- Dolby B (for recording also)

- Syncronized computerized CD recording to tape (does ALL: analyze CD, adjust recording level, records two sides, erases cropped songs at the end of each side...)

- full wireless remote with so many functions.

- Motorized volume pot

... and many other...

This beauty was at my father's home for many years, collecting dust far from me. This is how it looked one year ago:

Not bad, but if you look close, you will notice the dust:

And take a look inside:

So finally I received it a few weeks ago and started to deep clean it. I fully dissasembled it. After some brief clean, this is how it looked:

So, I removed every cable and electronic board and put it in the shower and started to deep clean it. It's definitely a rare shot to see such thing here: 

Once cleaned and dryed, started to put things. First, the internal power supply:

It's curious to see the internal ribs to prevent vibrations of the speaker panels:

Then, the speakers:

Here is the internal electro-mechanic block, with the two decks after cleaning and demagnetizing:

So finally, I could assemble all and adjust the azimuth to finish it. Now, this is how it looks:

OF course, both grids as well as speakers were carefully cleaned too, to get bak to the clean original black look:

It's curious that it has the common 'Bass & Treble' pots as seen in many HIFIs. The BASS pot goes from 'Narrow' to 'Wide'.

Not the heads look completely different, and they have excellent sound!

Here you see the Deck 1 playing:

And the radio:

The back:

Hope you enjoyed!

         ^^^^^   Still got your name tag on it after the deep clean.

Good job cleaning "all around the HUGO sticker"

Ha ha. You guys have fun indeed

Well, I didn't care about that sticker.  Reason why that sticker is there is because we had two of these monsters at home back when we (my sisters and I) lived together as teens. One of my sisters have another SR6 like me. In fact, it was me who recommended it and she followed my recommendations. I guess that she still have her boombox. To differentiate them, I put a sticker on it

BTW: I always had a problem with this boombox as well as with many others: when recording a modern CD (released more or less after 1992), the recording level was always very high, and the result, always saturated.

This doesn't happened with older CDs. I remember that since that date, CD started to have some "extra-loud" sound. Like a dynamic range compression, to keep the signal near the top.

After some research, I realized the problem was 95% this and tried to find a way to adjust the record level in my loved SR6.

And I found it! It's in two internal adjustments in the internal boards. There are two for two channels. I made a hole to access them from the outside

You are a good sport to suffer our cruel comments

Looks like AIWA didn't foresee the loudness wars when it calibrated the recording levels at the factory for the SR6. But at least they had the foresight to allow manual re-calibration for compressed CDs.

That, is what you call superb. Nice one.

Thanks Plop. You're a true british sir. Don't worry, we're here to have fun with all these :-)

Yeah, looks that AIWA didn't mind about those 'modern' CDs. I'd like them to add a small pot for recording level, like Panasonic did with their gorgeus DT9, and it will be almost perfect...

BTW: I've just added the 'My thoughts about boomboxes' article to my website.

All you need now, is, the victor rc-x999. AO, loves these .

I don't know which one is that. I'll search a bit...

Oh, now I see it. Do you know the specs?

Thar she blows. Those tweeter things, are motorised. There is a blue version, which, i think, is gorgeous.

Are those tweeter 'satellites' motorized? Do you mean that they go up?

What are they for? Just a tweeter slightly separated from the main resonance box?

Thanks retro!