Tascam RC-701
A five-kilogram remote control that ran a CD player over a 25-pin cable, and cost more than most people's entire stereo.
Overview
The RC-701 is one of the strangest things Tascam ever built. It's a full-width remote control unit for the CD-701 compact disc player, big enough to hold its own power supply and heavy enough at 5.0 kg to anchor a rack shelf. It isn't a handheld remote in any sense. It's a second chassis, a control surface that connects to the player over D-sub 25-pin cables and duplicates the transport, pitch, and cueing functions at a distance.
That 5.0 kg figure is the first clue that this was professional equipment. The unit measures 370 x 110 x 251 mm and draws 30 W on its own, with its own IEC three-wire AC inlet and voltage-specific power requirements: 120 V AC at 60 Hz for the USA and Canada, 240 V AC at 50 Hz for the U.K. and Australia, 220 V AC at 50 Hz for Europe, and a general-export version covering 100/120/220/240 V AC at 50/60 Hz. A remote control with its own mains transformer and regional voltage variants is not a consumer accessory. It's studio furniture.
The RC-701 gives an engineer hands-on control of the CD-701 without reaching for the player. Pitch control spans ±6% in 0.1% steps, fine enough to nudge a disc into sync with tape or film. Cueing accuracy is rated at 1 frame, or 13.3 msec, which only matters when you're trying to land on a specific moment in a production master. Baud rate is switchable across 1200, 2400, 4800, and 9600 bps, so the RC-701 talks to the CD-701 over a serial data link, not a bundle of discrete wires. The rear panel carries a 1/4" stereo phone jack for headphones and monitor output, a D-sub 25-pin AUDIO IN, a D-sub 25-pin PLAYER UNIT connector, a D-sub 15-pin ACCESSORY 2 port, and the IEC AC inlet.
The headphone output is specified at 1 W max into an 80-ohm load. That's a powerful headphone amp for the era, and it suggests Tascam expected the RC-701 to be used for critical monitoring rather than casual listening. The monitor output is a straight 0 dB pass at 10 kohm.
The RC-701 is not a standalone CD player, and it's not a handset. It's a dedicated control head for a specific player, and without a CD-701 on the other end of that 25-pin cable, it does nothing at all. It also turns up far less often on the secondhand market than the player it controls.
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