So…. yeah. I thought I’d jump into this 1980 Pioneer KP-6500 car stereo. I mean, it sort of worked, I had one channel of audio. GREAT. Let’s open her up and see what we can do about hat.
OH MY GOD. I repeatedly iterate the point in this video how much of a royal pain in the ykw this thing must have been to assemble at the factory. Everything is crammed together and interwoven with brackets upon brackets, wires run through said brackets and then hard soldered instead of using any kind of connectors. Just, ugh.
I gave up. I might try again at another date, but I got so frustrated just trying to even get *into* the audio section of this radio. Let alone try and think about putting it all back together in working order. So it sits in a box in the closet whence it came.
The variable inductor tuning I guess was kind of neat. Not just one, but SIX ganged variable inductors in there. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a superior design or not, but that combined with the trippy little universal joint mechanism on the tuning knob.
The entire thing was just entirely over engineered and overly complex. Was this expensive in 1980? I couldn’t find much info about it.
If you want the thing, I’ll send it to you for the price of the ride. I honestly can’t even look at it right now. I’ll even throw in the service manual that didn’t even hint at what a pain this thing would be.