Revox B-203/205 Control System
A two-box Swiss controller that turns a stack of Revox separates into one system you can run with a single finger.
Overview
The B-203/205 is not a source component, an amplifier or a tuner. It makes the others behave. Revox sold it as a pair: the B203 Timer Controller and the B205 Wireless Remote Control, together called the "Revox Easy System." The pitch, as it appeared in the brand's own period advertising, was simple. Press the "CD" button on the B205 handset and the B203 wakes every component in the chain needed to play a disc, and the music starts. Press "Play" for tape and the controller shuts the CD player down and hands the signal to the cassette deck. One button, one finger. Revox leaned on that idea hard.
What separates the B-203/205 from a plain universal remote is the memory underneath it. The B203 is a timer controller, and it will hold a schedule: wake to a classical station at seven on weekday mornings, shut the system down at eight, switch to a favorite CD on Saturday. Owners could stack as many sets of instructions as they liked, and the controller would execute them unattended. For a late-Eighties Revox system, this was the difference between a rack of handsome separates and an actual appliance that ran itself.
Then there is the RS232 port, which dates the unit and also makes it interesting today. Connect the B203 to a personal computer, load Revox's own simple program, and feed the Timer Controller a series of instructions directly. The controller responds, and the whole audio system follows with no button pressing at all. Most remotes of the era were infrared devices with a dozen membrane keys. Revox was building a serial-addressable system controller. Collectors note that this feature keeps the B-203/205 interesting to people who otherwise wouldn't look twice at a remote.
The work is split between the two boxes. The B203 is the brain and the B205 is the hand. The handset holds the source-select buttons, and the controller holds the intelligence and the schedule. Revox's advertising was explicit that the two were a matched pair, sold and described together as a single "Control System" rather than as two accessories. Anyone hunting one on the used market should confirm both halves are present, because the system depends on the pairing.
As Revox told it, build quality was the usual Swiss story. The company's own copy described the B-203/205 as "civilized, solid, smart," built in Switzerland to exacting standards alongside the rest of the line. That is marketing, not an independent verdict, and there is no period test-bench data in the available record to confirm or contradict it. The B-203/205 was designed to sit at the center of a Revox system, and the advertising repeatedly frames it as the thing that drives a B226 CD player and the rest of the stack. Its usefulness is bound up with owning other Revox components of the same generation. Bought on its own, it is a clever box with little to command.
That dependency is the honest caveat. The B-203/205 is a system integrator, and a system integrator without its system is furniture. The RS232 programming angle, the scheduled wake-ups, the one-button source switching — all of it presumes a rack of matching Revox gear wired together. For the collector assembling a period-correct Revox stack, the B-203/205 is the piece that makes the stack feel like one machine. For everyone else, it is a reminder of how seriously Revox took the idea that good hi-fi should get out of the way.
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