Sony TA 1120

The Sony TA 1120 is a transistor integrated amplifier, and almost everything documented about it is promotional. The technical record is thin. What survives is a run of striking full-page Sony ads from late 1966, plus one short lab report. In those ads, placed in Audio (December 1966, p.31) and High Fidelity (December 1966, p.31), Sony claimed to have developed the finest audio transistors yet made, and offered the TA-1120 as the proof. The copy described the front-panel control layout as a sensible arrangement for versatility and ease of operation. It also claimed these were the first great transistor power amplifiers. That's advertising, not a review. It does show how Sony wanted the TA-1120 positioned: as the model that proved transistors had finally arrived in serious hi-fi.

There was at least one genuine lab report. High Fidelity (April 1967, p.65) covered the TA-1120 in its equipment reports. The surviving excerpt deals with the amplifier's behavior under a fault condition, specifically if the speaker leads were shorted, which suggests the TA-1120 carried some form of output protection. By August of that same year, the model had already become the benchmark for its successor. Sony's ad for the TA-1080, rated at 90 watts IHF per channel into 8 ohms, called that new model the modestly-powered heir to the highly-regarded TA-1120 (High Fidelity, August 1967, p.85).

Beyond that, the record is mostly empty. No verified power rating, frequency response, distortion figure, original price, dimensions, or weight for the TA-1120 was found in the sources available here. The 1966-1967 dates come from the period ads and the review. Some later listings claim the model stayed in production into 1969, but that is not documented in the material on file.

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