Sherwood Micro/CPU 100 (1977)
Two thousand dollars bought the first computerized tuner in America - and the reviewers said it was worth it.
Overview
The number is $2,000. That was the asking price when Sherwood Electronic Laboratories introduced the Micro/CPU 100 in 1977. Sherwood's own advertising, a full-page spread in High Fidelity (June 1977, p.87) headlined "A Star is Born," called it "the world's first computerized tuner." The pitch was that consumer electronics hadn't seen a genuine milestone since transistors displaced tubes, and that this tuner advanced the state of the art by perhaps ten years. Marketing copy is marketing copy, but the claim had a real engineering story behind it, and the period press largely agreed.
The Micro/CPU 100 was designed by Larry Schotz, who later founded LS Research and whose tuner work would go on to appear under the NAD badge. The period press treated the design as a landmark rather than a curiosity. HiFi/Stereo (January 1978, p.44) concluded that as of that moment the Sherwood Micro/CPU was "the best available FM tuner" - while conceding that with typical broadcast signal quality, many listeners might not hear a difference against far less sophisticated designs.
It used a pulse-count digital detector and microprocessor circuitry. Digital tuning was new in an era when most tuners still moved a dial and a needle. Sherwood's advertising made much of user-programmable station memory, with a programmable call-letter display for up to 48 stations. The front panel was built around that idea rather than around a tuning knob.
The price did not hold. The same tuner also escaped the Sherwood name entirely: Draco Labs sold a similar unit, and Allegro Sound advertised the "DRA-CO LABS Micro CPU-100 broadcast monitor tuner, with the original pulse-count digital detector & microprocessor circuitry (formerly distributed by Sherwood at $2000)" for $995 delivered.
By the early 1980s the tuner had become a used-market staple. Classified ads in Audio from 1980 list a Sherwood CPU 100 at $595 through Audio Consultants in Evanston, and a 1983 Audio listing shows another at $525 - roughly a quarter of the original price within six years.
HiFi/Stereo wasn't handing out its verdict lightly when one works.
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