Sony STR-6060FW
Sony's first receiver, and the period press couldn't stop measuring it against its own claims — and finding it better.
Overview
A first receiver that doubles as a flagship is a rare thing, and the period coverage treated it accordingly.
The circuit was no budget exercise. The front end used three FETs, the i.f. strip ran piezo-electric filters, and IHF FM sensitivity was rated at 1.8 µV. Those are the numbers Sony published. The magazine noted that while Sony didn't publish a power bandwidth figure, its own measurements extended from 20 Hz to 45 kHz, and frequency response stayed within 1.5 dB from 20 Hz to 60 kHz — both, in the reviewer's words, better than the published specs.
Power output is where the numbers get interesting. Audio (December 1968, p.47) noted that the receiver didn't reach 1% THD per channel until 55 watts per channel — well beyond the 45-watt figure the magazine was looking past. In other words, the receiver's rated power was a floor, not a ceiling. That's the kind of over-delivery that made the STR-6060FW a talking point in 1968, and it's the kind of thing that still matters to anyone buying one today.
Even the AM section, which the magazine admitted it didn't usually measure with instrumentation, struck the reviewers as particularly wide-band and nearly high-fidelity in quality. The magazine's summary was blunt: such excellent receiver performance at a $400 list price was "not so very common these days."
Behind the panel, though, Audio (December 1968, p.46) found that the outward simplicity concealed everything one could ask for in an integrated AM/FM-stereo receiver. The rear panel used replaceable fuses, and the magazine's review included measurements of FM characteristics and stereo FM separation at 1 kHz and 10 kHz.
For collectors, the STR-6060FW is a document of a specific moment: Sony's entry into the receiver market, executed with enough care that a major audio publication spent two weeks with it and came away calling the experience "very pleasant." It's not the most famous receiver of its era, and it doesn't carry the collector cachet of the big-name American and Japanese receivers that followed. But it's the one that started Sony's receiver line, and the period evidence suggests it was built to a standard rather than a price — even if the price was the point of the praise.
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