Akai X-350
A four-track stereo Akai that sold in Britain for 190 guineas — and the price list tells you exactly where it sat in the shop.
Overview
What makes the X-350 legible today is a single surviving price list from a British tape dealer, reprinted in Studio Sound (February 1967, p.18), which ranked it against everything else on the shelf. In that table the X-350 appears at 66 pounds 10 shillings deposit, 11 pounds 1s 8d in twelve monthly payments, for a total of 190 guineas — the same dealer also carried the Akai X-355 at 239 guineas and the Akai 1710 at 79 guineas. In other words, this was not the cheap end of the Akai line in Britain in the mid-1960s. It sat roughly in the middle, well above the entry 1710 and comfortably below the automatic X-355.
The same dealer advertisement that carried the price list describes the X-350 as a four-track stereo/mono machine with two built-in speakers, two VU meters, two speeds of 7½ and 3¾ IPS, a 6-watts stereo output, sound-on-sound, auto-stop, and vertical or horizontal use. That is the clearest contemporaneous description of the machine's feature set that survives in these sources, and it reads like a fairly serious domestic deck: twin meters rather than a single shared one, built-in speakers so it could be used without an external amplifier, and sound-on-sound for overdubbing. The two-speed transport keeps it out of the professional half-track world, but the presence of sound-on-sound and twin VU meters puts it above the simplest consumer machines.
Owners should note that the 6-watts stereo figure is the built-in amplifier output, not a statement about tape performance — it is a domestic listening figure, appropriate for the built-in speakers and for driving efficient external speakers, not for a studio. Similarly, the two speeds cover the standard domestic formats but not 15 IPS, which is where the professional machines of the period lived. The X-350 is a home machine pitched upmarket, not a studio recorder.
What the surviving record does not tell us is just as important. There is no reliable published figure in these sources for wow and flutter, frequency response, signal-to-noise, or head configuration beyond the four-track stereo/mono description, and no confirmation of the exact production span. Collectors chasing a specific serial range or a documented service interval will have to work from the machine itself, because the paper trail is thin.
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