Casio MT-70
A £199 Casiotone that reads printed bar-code music and plays it back for you. It was the oddest bargain in the 1982 keyboard aisle.
Overview
Dealer ads of the period put the Casio MT-70 at a recommended retail of £255, discounted to £199 by the London shops that moved a lot of Casiotone stock. That is the same money as a decent secondhand monosynth, spent instead on a home keyboard that could read music off a printed card. The price spread, and the gift vouchers dealers dangled alongside it, say where the MT-70 sat in 1982. It was desirable enough to discount hard and cheap enough that nobody bought it as studio gear.
The headline feature was programmable Casio Chord, driven either by bar-code music cards or by manual programming. That is the MT-70's whole reason for existing. The rest of the specification is a 49-note, four-octave keyboard, 20 or 25 preset sounds depending on the source, and a set of auto-rhythms and arpeggio functions. It is a home keyboard built to accompany a singer or a beginner, not a synthesizer in any meaningful sense. The 20-sound count sits below the 25 of the CT-403 it was derived from, which is the kind of trimming Casio did to get a smaller cabinet and a smaller price.
Contemporary dealer literature is blunt about the lineage: the MT-70 is listed as the new MT-size version of the CT-701. Start there if you are trying to place the model in Casio's sprawling early-80s lineup. The MT-70 takes the CT-701's concept and repackages it in the compact MT chassis. The same dealer sheet prices the CT-701 at £495, so the MT-70 at £199 was less than half the money for the same family of features in a smaller box.
The bar-code reading is the detail that makes collectors keep these. Printed music cards fed through a reader let the keyboard pull in a programmed performance, chord progressions and melody, without the player needing to read a note. It was an unusual input method for the era, and it is why the MT-70 turns up in discussions of oddball Casio design rather than in lists of forgotten home keyboards. Whether the cards survive is another matter. A keyboard without its card library loses the feature that made it distinctive.
Period coverage was thin. Mix (May 1990, p.182) noted in a roundup that a MIDI interface was praised for its portability, performance, and price. That was the brief, practical kind of notice this gear got rather than a deep review. Being on the same cassette as a Chroma is not a verdict on the MT-70's sound. It is evidence that the E&MM staff thought the bar-code gimmick worth hearing.
Owners should expect the usual Casiotone realities. These are plastic consumer instruments built to a price, and the bar-code reader is the part most likely to give trouble on a forty-year-old example. The MT-70 is not a serious instrument and was never sold as one.
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