A couple of days ago there was a post up on Twitter / X showing an old Aiwa stack system asking “are you this old”. I looked at it and thought “just” but was impressed that it was at least a separates stack system, as in each layer, the twin cassette, the CD player the amp, the radio and the turntable where separate and connected by wires at the back. Mine was not that high end but I could not find anything close to an image of it online, and a looked for too long, it was a quiet day. Before my first HiFi I did have a ‘BOOMBOX’ if you can call it that, a Toshiba RT-120S that kept me and my cassette collection, a lot of which were copies and bootlegs happy, but no CD player.
As I said no CD player but parents came to the rescue in the way parents do they treated me to a HiFi, one that they thought was reasonable , it was a Binatone Laser 1200 which I believe they bought from a Southern Electric high street store in our town. It was all built in, no separates, it had this flap front loading CD, it was basic and did the job for a few years until I had the money to walk into a shop and by an ear crushing Kenwood Stack System.
Surprisingly, the same week as that post and my search I happened to be clearing out some clutter from my parents loft and brought some boxes down. The stereo was long gone but the box had been used to store stuff all these years. The Binatone Laser 1200.
