c. 1965 STANDAR TOKYO "TR-10 SPECIAL"
Horizontal coat pocket, thermoplastic cabinet
6 3/16 x 3 1/2 x 1 9/16 inches / 158 x 90 x 41 mm
MW, six transistors, two large tubular 3v batteries
Made in Italy
It's "SPECIAL"! This is another great example of a "radio cantinara" ("basement radio") produced in Italy in the mid-1960s, a unique breed of transistor radios intended to cash in on the Japanese transistor radio boom across Europe by posing themselves as being Japan-made, often using corrupted variations of typical Japanese radio manufacturer names: "Sonny" (Sony), "Crwon's" (Crown), and here "Standar", for Standard. These radios were produced by small, low-budget firms across Italy, and they quickly gained the nickname, "basement radios". Lello Salvatore has written a wonderful article about these radios and their makers, available here and I really recommend you take a look at it!
A gift from a friend who knows how much I like these sets, I think this is my favorite basement radio. Most of these sets shared the same basic cabinet body, differing one from another mostly by the graphics on their faces, and my favorite graphic here is the preposterous Japanese flag that wasn't the current national flag at the time but rather a military flag more familiar from World War II. And I admit, the saxophone with musical notes pouring out of it is actually a pretty nice decoration.
Also, this radio labels itself twice! on its face as, "TR 10," a designation found on many other basement radios, the clear implication being that these were 10-transistor radios, when clearly none of them were -- this STANDAR has six transistors in its circuit. Also, as with most of these basement radios, the STANDAR sported a superfluous telescopic antenna. In his radio cantinara article, Lello Salvatore notes that while the circuit components were mostly of low quality, the circuits themselves were quite decent. As with most of these "basement" radios, this set was powered by a pair of really big 3-volt batteries -- see the photo below.
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