Panasonic RX-F35

The RX-F35, which was also called "Love Call" in Japan, is very popular with boombox collectors. It isn't very big or powerful, but it sounds good and looks great, with four speakers displayed prominently across the front. It was available in at least 3 different colors that I know of (red, white, or black). It also has some very cool-looking LED meters shaped like dots. The service manual doesn't have a date on it, but there's a Supplement dated May 1983, so it's pretty clear this boombox came out in 1982 or 1983. It measures 418 x 220 x 110 mm, and it takes 8 C-cell batteries. The speakers are all the same size (9cm) and the same impedance (6 ohms), but the lower ones have bigger magnets. The power amplifier has the code number RVILA4505, which is the equivalent of a Sanyo LA4505. It has separate bass and treble, Loudness, and TPS music search. Most of the other controls are hidden under a door mounted on top.

Don't let the small size fool you though. For such a small boombox, it is quite rich in features, many of which are even missing on large boomboxes and found only on higher quality boomboxes. The deck door not only houses the cassette chamber but it also includes a micro tape counter, the smallest I've seen. It also houses the LED indicators for the TPS feature which is panasonics version of music search. It can search up to 5 tracks. The deck itself has soft touch controls. Under the hidden compartment on top are separate bass and treble controls, in addition to mixing level, balance controls. A tape/radio/line-in selector and a beat-proof switch rounds out the controls under the hidden panel. And a line-in selector is for, exactly, an auxillary line-in function! External jacks include left/right microphone, RCAs for both line-in and line-out, headphone jack, and external speaker jacks. As already mentioned above, it is a fantastic sounding unit and would be hard to beat in a "best boombox of it's size/class" contest.