Sony Model 155 Playback/Dubbing Stereo Tape Deck
Ninety-nine fifty bought you a second deck, a stack of dubs, and a place in the "copy cat" club.
Overview
The pitch was almost cheeky: for the price of about fifteen prerecorded tapes, Sony would sell you a complete four-track stereo duplicating system and let you build a tape library at a fraction of store prices. That was the hook Sony's own advertising ran for the Model 155, and it's the right way to understand the machine — not as a recorder, but as a playback and dubbing transport meant to sit next to the recorder you already owned. The copy line, run across the audio press of early 1968, invited buyers to become a "copy cat" for $99.50. Audio (March 1968, p.13) carried the same full-page pitch, complete with the "Meet the Copy Cat" headline, and HiFi-Stereo (January 1968, p.122) ran it too — which tells you how hard Superscope was pushing this thing into the pages of the enthusiast magazines.
What the money bought was a transport deck with solid-state playback preamplifiers and no recording electronics of its own. The idea was straightforward: your existing stereo recorder does the recording, the 155 handles playback and dubbing, and the two together give you a four-track duplicating rig. Sony also positioned it as a standalone playback deck — feed it into your components or a package stereo system and you had Sony-quality stereo tape playback for under a hundred dollars, which in 1967 was genuinely aggressive positioning.
The feature list reads like a checklist of things that normally cost more. Three speeds. A special filter for what the advertising called "virtually flutterless" performance. A retractable pinch roller so tape could be threaded one-handed. A stereo headphone jack for private listening. And the flexibility to run the deck vertically or horizontally, which mattered in the cramped shelving of a 1960s hi-fi cabinet. Sony's copy claimed these were features "normally found on only much higher priced equipment," and while that's marketing talking, the combination at this price really was the point of the machine.
Cosmetics got attention too: the 155 shipped complete with a walnut-finish low-profile base, with a dust cover available as an option. It's a small detail, but it tells you who Sony was selling to — someone building a component system, not a casual tape user. The deck was meant to look like it belonged in the rack.
The dealer network behind it was Superscope, Inc. of Sun Valley, California, Sony's U.S. distributor at the time, and the advertising signed off with the line "America's First Choice in Tape Recorders." Take the slogan for what it is. The more useful takeaway is that the Model 155 was part of a full Superscope/Sony tape lineup advertised side by side — the Model 255 Deluxe Stereo Tape Deck at under $179.50, the 250-A Compact Stereo Tape Deck Recorder at under $149.50, the 230 Portable Custom Stereo Sound System at under $249.50, the 200 Portable Stereo Tape System at under $199.50, the 530 Quadradial Sound Stereo Tape System at under $399.50, and the 560 Auto-Reverse ServoControl Custom Stereo Sound System at under $499.50. The 155 sat at the bottom of that ladder at $99.50, the entry ticket into the family.
What It Actually Does
The 155 is a four-track stereo transport. That's the whole identity. It plays back four-track stereo tape and, paired with a recorder, dubs it — which is why Sony kept calling it a "playback/dubbing" deck rather than a recorder. Owners who wanted to record bought one of the recorders in the line; the 155 was the second machine, the one that let you copy.
The three speeds give it flexibility across the tape formats of the day, and the retractable pinch roller is the kind of small mechanical courtesy that separates a thoughtfully designed transport from a cheap one — you can thread a reel with one hand instead of fighting the mechanism. The flutter filter is harder to assess from advertising copy alone; Sony's claim of "virtually flutterless" performance is a manufacturer's claim, not a measured figure, and no independent lab numbers turn up in the period material. Treat it as a design intent rather than a verified spec.
Vertical or horizontal operation is the sleeper feature. A deck you can stand on its side fits places a flat deck can't, and for someone stacking a modest system in a small room, that flexibility was worth real money. The walnut base and optional dust cover round out the package as a piece of furniture-grade gear rather than a bare chassis.
Reception and the Period Context
The period record on the 155 is almost entirely advertising — full-page spreads in Audio and HiFi-Stereo through the first half of 1968, all built around the same "copy cat" conceit and the same $99.50 price. That's worth being honest about: this was a heavily promoted entry-level deck, and the magazines of the day were carrying Sony's pitch, not an independent bench test. No lab review with measured wow-and-flutter, frequency response, or signal-to-noise figures appears in the available material, so any claim about how the 155 actually measured should be treated with suspicion.
What the advertising does establish is the market logic. Pre-recorded tapes were expensive — roughly fifteen of them equaled the price of the deck — so a machine that let you dub from friends, from radio, or from your own recordings paid for itself quickly if you were building a library. That calculus is why the "copy cat" pitch worked, and why the 155 found a place in systems that already had a recorder. It was an accessory that justified itself economically.
Collectibility and What to Watch For
The 155 is an early Sony tape piece from the Superscope era, and that gives it a certain appeal to collectors of Sony's tape lineage — but it's a bottom-of-the-line transport, not a flagship, and it should be valued accordingly. The honest position is that current market pricing, known failure points, and restoration costs simply aren't documented in the available sources, so any figure quoted here would be invented. Buyers should expect the usual issues of a late-1960s belt-and-idler transport and evaluate a specific example on its own condition rather than on reputation.
What the machine does have going for it is completeness of concept. It's a purpose-built dubbing deck with a clear job, a distinctive place in Sony's 1967–68 tape lineup, and the kind of period advertising that makes it easy to date and document. For a collector building a Superscope-era Sony shelf, it's a natural companion to the recorders it was designed to work alongside.
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