Kenwood KW-5066
A four-head reel-to-reel with a built-in bias oscillator. It let owners set the deck up for whatever tape they could afford.
Overview
The KW-5066 showed up when tape formulations were changing faster than most decks could keep up. Kenwood put the adjustment in the owner's hands. The deck has four heads, three speeds, and a front-panel recording-bias adjustment driven by a built-in 400 Hz test-signal oscillator. That let a user set bias for a specific tape instead of taking whatever the factory picked. HiFi-Stereo (March 1971, p.107) called the bias system one of the machine's strong points, since the test oscillator allowed selection of the most desirable bias for full-fidelity recording.
The head complement includes a full-track erase head, and the transport runs at three speeds. Kenwood's own advertising in HiFi-Stereo (July 1970, p.98) billed it as a stereo tape deck with built-in oscillator for bias control. The ad listed the four heads, three speeds, sound-on-sound/echo, a low-noise silicon transistor preamp, and what the company called its "exclusive tape transport system."
Sound-on-sound and echo recording come with a level control. There's also a noise filter and automatic shut-off. The preamp uses low-noise silicon transistors, a detail Kenwood leaned on in period copy. The deck was priced at $199.95 in the Electronics Illustrated notice and at $259.95 in the Audio "What's New" listing. High Fidelity (November 1970, p.111) shows it at $279.95. Pricing evidently moved around the introduction, so expect to see all three figures in old ads.
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