Aiwa AD-S950

Nearly everything documented about the Aiwa AD-S950 comes from one period test report in Stereo Review (January 1996, p.44). Craig Stark of Hirsch-Houck Laboratories bench-tested the deck. It is a cassette deck with Dolby S, a wireless remote, pause and record-mute, and a switch that lets an external timer power the deck on. Its most distinctive feature was a bias fine-tuning circuit that plays 400 Hz and 10 kHz adjustment tones. The user trims the bias control until the signal-level meters read equally on both tones.

The same report found the high treble ran into the usual tape saturation problems. With Dolby S and a metal tape, though, the loss was only 1.5 dB at 18 kHz, which is a respectable figure. The magazine's January 1996 table of contents (p.9) also flagged the deck as a featured equipment test report.

Beyond that, the record is thin. No production years, original price, or full mechanical specs have surfaced in the archive's sources. The AD-S950 is known chiefly through these early-1996 mentions, and the January 1996 test report is effectively the period reference.