Fisher 400B
The archive cannot yet authenticate this model number. That is the whole story so far.
Overview
The Fisher 400B is a research problem, and the Vintage Technology Archive would rather say so than dress it up. No verifiable documentation has been located for a Fisher receiver with this exact designation. There is no confirmed production year, no original list price, no power rating, no tuner sensitivity figure, no chassis description, and no owner testimony. That is not a thin file. It is an empty one. Contemporary coverage of the era's Fisher receivers does survive in the period press - High-Fidelity (April 1971, p.59) surveys the mid-Fifties wave of integrated control-center designs and lists the Fisher 500 among them - but no such source in the archive names a 400B.
What the archive does have is a pile of documents that use the "400B" string for entirely different products, and none of them belong to Fisher. A 1966 Harman-Kardon advertisement in Audio touts an SR-400B Stratophonic receiver at $309. It's a real receiver, but a Harman-Kardon, not a Fisher. A 1982 Mix product listing describes an Interface Electronics Model 400B 10:4:2 mixer priced at $1,500. Later issues of Mix and Studio Sound show a Soundcraft Series 400B console and a Loft 400B quad gate. A 1960 Audio feature on a home installation mentions an Altec 400B monitor speaker. Every one of these is a false positive for a Fisher receiver. Collectors searching auction sites for a "Fisher 400B" will run into the same mix-up.
The Fisher brand itself is well documented in the archive. The 400-R, 400-T, 500-C, 800-C, and 600-T receivers all have established pages, and the 400 designation in particular is a known Fisher receiver family. Whether a "400B" variant ever existed alongside those models is the question the archive cannot yet answer from source material. It may be a mislabeled listing, a regional variant, or a model number garbled across decades of secondary references. The unit may also be real and simply undocumented in the material available here. Neither possibility can be confirmed without primary evidence.
Owners, dealers, and repair technicians who have a Fisher 400B on the bench are the missing link. So is a service manual, an owner's booklet, a catalog page, or even a clear photograph of the rear panel. Until that material surfaces, the archive will not speculate on wattage, tube complement, tuner specs, or anything else. Guessing at a Fisher receiver's specifications from its siblings would be worse than saying nothing.
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