Yamaha CT-800

A Yamaha tuner that turns up in the classifieds at $170, and in the period press under a name that isn't quite its own.

Overview

The Yamaha CT-800 is a tuner, and that is close to everything the record establishes. The Archive's research file for this model came back empty. There is no spec sheet, no production years, no original price, no circuit description. What survives is a single classified line in a Bay Area musicians' paper offering a "Yamaha CT-800 Tuner" at $170, and a period review that may or may not be about the same box.

That review needs careful handling. High Fidelity (March 1984, p.39) ran a test report on something it called the "Yamaha YCT-800," described as an AM/FM/cassette front end with tape equalization, Dolby B noise reduction switching, automatic reverse, and automatic eject when power is turned off. The same report gives dimensions in the inches-and-fractions style of a car-audio installation. The chassis front is 7 by 2 inches, 5¼ inches deep, with main shafts at 5 or 5¾ inches on center. It lists connections for ignition, battery, power antenna, and ground, with a 3-amp fuse in the ignition line and a 1-amp fuse in the battery line. Price: $600. Manufacturer: Nippon Gakki. HiFi-Stereo (January 1984, p.25) covered the same YCT800 in a car-stereo roundup. It noted that disconnecting the car's battery erases the station-preset memories and that the unit has an adjustable loudness control.

Whether the YCT-800 and the CT-800 are the same product is not established. A dashboard cassette receiver with ignition wiring and preset memory is a different animal from a home component tuner, and the Archive will not conflate them on the strength of a shared number. The classified listing names the CT-800 as a tuner and nothing more. Treat the YCT-800 literature as adjacent evidence at best. It shows that Yamaha was building tuner front ends under a near-identical model number in the mid-1980s. It is not a specification source.

The $170 asking price in that classified tells you little, but something: by the time the listing ran, a used CT-800 was changing hands for roughly the cost of a modest new cartridge. That is the market for unglamorous Yamaha tuners. They sell, they sell quietly, and they sell for less than the shipping on a CR-1020. Nothing in the available documentation describes the CT-800's sensitivity, selectivity, distortion, or dimensions, so any claim about how it pulls a weak station would be invention.

The honest position is that this page is a stub with a caution attached. The Archive has a name, a type, one secondhand price, and a period review of a possibly-different model. If a service manual, owner's manual, or original brochure for the CT-800 turns up, this entry gets rewritten. Until then, the CT-800 is a reminder that Yamaha's 1980s catalog was deep enough that plenty of model numbers slipped past the review press entirely.

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Yamaha CT-800

Overview

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