Casio CT-101
A budget Casiotone that British mail-order shops kept knocking down to £125 — and the accessory list tells you exactly who it was for.
Overview
The CT-101 is one of those Casios that survives mostly in the margins of dealer adverts rather than in the spotlight. Contemporary British mail-order listings describe it plainly: 25 sounds, built-in speaker. That's the whole pitch. No arpeggiator, no sequencer, no split keyboard — those belonged to the CT-1000P sitting a few lines above it in the same advert. The CT-101 was the entry point, and the dealers knew it.
What makes the model interesting to collectors now is less the instrument than the paper trail around it. In the pages of the UK trade press, the CT-101 turns up repeatedly as a loss-leader and a bundle anchor. One dealer listed it at £145. Another advertised it at £125. A third — Thamphus, in Cambridge — quoted an RRP of £255 against a selling price of £225 and threw in £40 of free accessories. That spread, from £125 to £255 for the same keyboard, says everything about how Casiotone was sold in Britain: the list price was fiction, and the street price depended entirely on which shop you rang.
The accessory catalogue is the more revealing document. Casio's own hard case for the CT-101 — the HC-A, shared with the CT-403 — was listed at £40. That's a case costing roughly a third of the discounted keyboard it was built to protect. The same list offers a domestic stand (CS-H) at £35, a black stage stand (CS-P) at £25, a second keyboard extension (CS-E) at £14.95, a volume pedal at £6.50 and a sustain pedal at £5.00. Owners were clearly expected to build a small rig around a very cheap instrument, and the case pricing suggests Casio saw the CT-101 as something you'd actually cart to a gig rather than leave on a bedroom shelf.
One dealer's copy in the period press is worth flagging for what it doesn't say. A "CASH 'N' CARRY BOOTLEG TRADE DEALS" listing prices the CT-101 at £145 alongside the CT-202 at £195 and, further up, a Moog Source at £556.80. The CT-101 is the cheapest keyboard on that page by a wide margin. Nobody was pretending it competed with the polysynths. It was the thing you bought first.
A separate dealer advert carries an odd fragment — a "Professionals CT-101" heading followed by OCR noise and a price of £225 by Securicor — which reads like a trade-in or contractor bundle rather than a standard retail listing. It's hard to reconstruct what the offer actually included, and it's a good reminder that the CT-101's documentary record is patchy and frequently garbled.
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