Pioneer FEX-95 Centrate
A tuner/cassette head unit with a dial that flips down to cover the tape slot. It was priced as a flagship.
Overview
Seven hundred dollars. That's what the FEX-95 cost new, and another hundred bought the optional remote control so the people in the back seat could help with the tuning. For a car stereo - a tuner/cassette unit that mounts in a DIN slot - that was serious money, and Pioneer knew what it was charging for.
The party trick is the faceplate. A dial flips down to reveal the tape slot and the subsidiary controls tucked behind it. Audio (May 1985, p.87) marveled at the ingenuity of the design team, noting that they had crammed an enormous amount of control capability onto a front panel containing barely six square inches. The FEX-95 is a knobless DIN-mount chassis that hides its complexity behind a clean face and asks you to flip it open to get to work.
Behind that dial sits a genuine Supertuner III front end, with presets for 12 FM and 6 AM stations, two-way scanning, and a radio program timer with two settings (plus a built-in clock). The AM section is not an afterthought. It uses auto-variable i.f. bandwidth, and Audio (May 1985, p.90) reported that the set would change a listener's habits - you'd find yourself listening to AM radio once again. Car AM was widely treated as a talk-radio afterthought in this period, so that's a notable claim. The same review measured the AM section against a reference tuner and found the FEX-95 pulled in ten stations as clearly as the reference and eleven more clearly still.
The tape section is equally loaded: auto reverse, music search and scan in both directions, Dolby B and C noise reduction, and automatic pinch-roller release at power-off. That last one saves the rollers from flat-spotting when the deck sits idle. There's an AUX input too, which in the mid-eighties was the quiet invitation to hook up a CD player. HiFi-Stereo (December 1984, p.20) walked through the logic functions in detail, including blank-skip entry buttons, selection scanning, direction reverse, one-side repeat, and a tiny recessed button that clears all logic instructions when pressed with something sharp like a pen.
The reception was not uniformly glowing. The same Audio review (May 1985, p.88) admitted being more impressed by the tape deck and the AM tuner than by the FM tuner, wondering aloud whether earlier Pioneer car units had spoiled the reviewer. HiFi-Stereo (December 1984, p.21) flagged a roughly 4 dB discrepancy in high-frequency response between the two directions of tape motion on autoreverse. The magazine called that too large for a home system but possibly acceptable in an automobile environment, while noting that even slight head-alignment errors can cause autoreverse decks to behave this way.
Car audio designers of this era were competing on integration and interface rather than raw power, and the FEX-95 shows it. It has the flip-down dial, the wireless remote, and a compact seven-band EQ-003 companion equalizer in the same Centrate line, just an inch high. The whole system treats the dashboard as a control surface. The remote and the flip mechanism are the parts most likely to have gone missing or worn out over four decades of dashboard life. The original price was $700, and the remote was $100 on top of that.
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