Quote:
Originally Posted by Gulliver
One of the saddest things about the decline of Tandy/Radio Shack was literally watching the quality of their audio gear slip down year by year.
The Realistic brand had acquired a justified good reputation. I mean who else would hit up TEAC to OEM a reel to reel tape deck and specify that it must be *better* than the corresponding TEAC model? Cassette decks made by Hitachi and JVC....amplifiers either genuinely made in the USA or OEM'd by equally reputable Japanese manufacturers.
Then came the mid to late 80s scramble to "black, plastic crap"....their receivers became adorned with lots of flashing lights and the full specifications which had hitherto been given in the catalogue, gave way to dimensions and weight. Though they even stopped mentioning the weight of their loudspeakers as they got lighter and lighter as the cabinet materials used got cheaper and cheaper. Realistic Mach 1 gave way to Memorex 801 or something similar....wholly inferior product.
Now all their products have a dodgy reputation...but it wasn't always so. My "Micronta" DMM has served me well since the late 80s, and continues to do so.
But the man on the Clapham omnibus stopped buying hi-fi....stopped building his own electrical circuits....and Tandy failed to move with the times, as did the parent Radio Shack. Sad indeed.
There's a website with just about every Radio Shack catalog (US) out there.
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Agree with pretty much everything you said there apart from they failed to move with the times. In fairness, they did try, they moved into computers and all the associated paraphernalia, and they did to a large extent stop selling electronic parts to the hobbyist. The trouble was, people who were getting into buying computers had probably by then already taken a dislike to Tandy as a result of their general lowering of standards (hifi etc) and the fact that most of the display stuff seemed to be remote controlled toys and electronic novelties such as flashing disco lights. So it wasn't really cool (call it what you will) to buy a (serious) computer from Tandy. Although saying that, lots of people did. I think they'd come up against a situation where they were constantly chasing and trying to enter emerging markets, but Joe Public saw them as something else. What was once a serious store for electronic audio equipment had become a store for electronic toys and fads.