Akai 1710L
A two-speed, four-track stereo reel-to-reel that British dealers kept steering buyers toward - and that sometimes sold for more than the deck it was often shelved beside.
Overview
The surviving documentation makes clear the 1710L was a working man's Akai, not a flagship. British retailer listings from the period call it a "2 sp. 4 Tr. Stereo" mains spool recorder. That means two speeds and four-track stereo, the kind of machine that filled a living room in the early 1970s rather than a studio rack. The "L" suffix distinguishes it from the 1710W, a sibling that shows up beside it in dealer price tables from the same era.
The prices are the interesting part. In a 1970 dealer listing, the 1710L carried a suggested retail of £109 and was being moved at £89. The 1710W was listed at £109 with an 'our price' of £89 10s. That suggests the two variants were positioned as near-equals in the shop, differing in some respect the surviving paperwork doesn't spell out. A year later, another London dealer was advertising the 1710L at a list of £89 with a cash price of £77 12s, and by then it sat directly beneath the 4000D in the same advertisement. The 4000D was the model the dealer was pushing hardest, though the 1710L's cash price of £77 12s was actually higher than the 4000D's €72 19s in that same advertisement.
What the 1710L actually did, mechanically, is only partly recoverable. The dealer listings confirm the two-speed, four-track stereo format, and the model appears consistently in the "mains spool recorders" category - a full tape recorder rather than a deck needing outboard amplification. Beyond that, the documentation is thin. No frequency response figures, no reel-size confirmation, no head configuration, no dimensions or weight survive in the material available here. Anyone hunting a 1710L should check those details against the machine itself or a factory service manual, not a period advertisement.
Where the 1710L does earn a place in the archive is as evidence of how Akai sold in Britain at the turn of the 1970s. The same dealer copy that lists the 1710L spends its prose praising the 4000D and the 4000, calling the 1710 "surely one of the best complete tape recorder buys on the market today" — a line that reads like the salesman's closer rather than an independent verdict, and should be treated as such. Studio Sound (July 1971, p.44) carried the same dealer advertisement, which is to say the 1710L's contemporary paper trail is marketing, not review. No independent lab measurements or magazine test reports for this model turned up in the sources consulted.
Plenty of Akai reel-to-reels of this generation have thick review histories. The 1710L, at least in the material assembled here, does not. What's left is a price, a format, a sibling model, and a dealer's sales pitch.
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