Sony 252-D
A four-track stereo reel-to-reel that Sony advertised as "the most tape deck recorder for the money" - and at $134.95, the pitch was hard to argue with.
Overview
The 252-D is a compact four-track stereo reel-to-reel deck. Sony sold it as a savings plan. The company's own advertising in the summer of 1969 led with a headline price of $119.50, and by the following year the same ad copy carried $134.95. Audio (August 1970, p.19) and High Fidelity (August 1970, p.107) both ran the "new Sony savings plan" page with the higher figure. It's a two-speed deck, 9.5 and 4.75 cm/s, not a three-speed studio machine.
What that speed range means in practice is a domestic recorder, not a semi-pro one. The 252-D runs at the two slow speeds most owners actually used for dubbing LPs and making party tapes, and Sony built the feature set around that job. Four-track stereo and mono recording and playback, seven-inch reel capacity, two VU meters, a three-digit tape counter, pause control, a record interlock, and separate record selector buttons — the working vocabulary of a mid-line Japanese deck of the period, all present. There's a stereo headphone jack for private listening, vertical or horizontal operation so it can stand on a shelf or lie flat, and an automatic sentinel shut-off that stops the transport at the end of the reel.
The feature Sony leaned hardest on in the ad copy was sound-with-sound: recording on one channel while monitoring the other. Sony pitched it at language learners and at singers and instrumentalists working on diction or technique. It's a modest trick by later standards, but in a $134 machine it was the sort of thing that sold units.
Two mechanical details define how the deck behaves in use. The first is what Sony called the Scrape Flutter Filter - a precision idler positioned between the erase and record/playback heads to suppress tape modulation distortion, a refinement Sony claimed had previously been confined to professional studio equipment. The second is the Retractomatic pinch roller, which permits one-hand tape threading. An automatic tape lifter pulls the tape off the heads during fast forward and rewind to cut head wear.
Sony also made a point of the motor mounting, describing a "floating" shock-absorber arrangement that isolates motor vibration from the tape mechanism. It also described the record head circuit as preventing transient bias-current surges from magnetizing the head, head magnetization being, in Sony's framing, the most common cause of tape hiss.
Condition matters most with a 252-D today. These are solid-state machines from the late 1960s and early 1970s, so there are no tubes to chase, but the usual reel-to-reel consumables apply - belts, idlers, pinch rollers, and heads that may or may not have been cared for. The idler-dependent Scrape Flutter Filter and the Retractomatic threading mechanism are both wearing parts, and a deck that threads sloppily or wows on sustained piano is telling you the rubber has aged. Expect to service one rather than plug it in and go. Don't pay collector money for an unserviced example - the 252-D was a mass-market machine, and plenty were sold.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.