Kenwood 3700-S
A 1964 stereo receiver whose model number is really a street address — and the specs read like they were lifted straight off a dealer's counter card.
Kenwood's advertising of the period placed the company at 3700 S. Broadway Place in Los Angeles, and the same address appears in the brand's magazine placements of the era, as seen in High-Fidelity (July 1969, p.41).
Overview
The first thing to sort out with the 3700-S is the name. Kenwood Electronics, Inc. was headquartered at 3700 S. Broadway Place in Los Angeles, and that address appears at the bottom of practically every Kenwood ad of the period — which makes "3700-S" a slightly treacherous designation to pin down in the record. What the Archive can say with confidence is that a 1964 Audio equipment listing describes a Kenwood stereo receiver at $189.95, complete except for speakers, and that the description matches the kind of all-in-one chassis Kenwood was selling through West Coast hi-fi dealers that year.
The feature set, as listed in that 1964 entry, was the working definition of a mid-sixties receiver: a built-in AM/FM tuner feeding a stereo amplifier, with see-saw switches handling power, loudness, noise filter, mode, speaker phase, and speaker impedance. Inputs covered magnetic phono at 1.5 mV, crystal phono at 20 mV, tape recorder, and AUX at 100 mV, plus the tuner itself. There was a tuning hum balance control on the panel. Hum and noise were quoted at less than 60 dB for phono and 69 dB for AUX — figures that would have been perfectly respectable for a receiver in this bracket, and worth reading as the manufacturer's own numbers rather than lab measurements.
Power was rated at 25 watts total music power, with harmonic distortion under 1% at 400 cps. That's a single-frequency distortion check, not a full-band sweep, and "music power" was a looser standard than continuous RMS — collectors should treat the 25-watt figure as a period convention rather than a modern continuous rating. The unit drew 200 watts from a 110–120 V, 60 cps supply. It measured 16½ by 5½ by 14 inches and weighed 28 pounds net, which is a substantial chunk of transformer and chassis for a receiver of this class. The set shipped with left and right speakers, a stereo phone jack, and a.c. outlets on the back.
The one period citation worth flagging is the 1964 Audio listing itself, which is where the price, dimensions, and input sensitivities above originate. It's a dealer-facing product note rather than a full lab review — no independent bench test of the 3700-S has surfaced in the Archive's sources — so the numbers should be read as Kenwood's published claims, quoted in the trade press, not as measured performance.
Where the record gets thin is everything else. Production years for the 3700-S are not documented, and the Archive has no confirmed service literature, no independent review, and no verified second-source confirmation of the specs. The model number's resemblance to the company's Broadway Place address is a genuine curiosity, but it's not proof of anything — it may simply be coincidence, and the Archive makes no claim either way. Anyone who owns a 3700-S manual or a dealer brochure would be filling a real gap by sending it in.
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