3-piece led meter 10-d lighted tuner graphic equalizer soft-touch-controls dual-antenna hiquality 8-inch woofers flywheeltuner Fisher PH-492
The Fisher PH492 is a huge, very heavy 3-piece boombox from 1981 with lots of metal trim. It's nearly identical to the PH-490 except for different speakers grills, and a different tape door too. It measures 30.7 inches long, and it has 8-inch woofers marked "709610 15W 8Ω" and 2-inch tweeters marked "709500 15W 3.2Ω". And inside the speaker cabinets is a metal plate for reinforcement, a foam pad for acoustic damping, and a small rear bass port.
It has a really cool tuner light that lights up for a few seconds and then automatically shuts off. Another cool thing is the tuning meter, which tells you when you have achieved the best reception. The tuner knob is flywheel-weighted, allowing you to spin it from one end to the other with just one flick of the wrist.
I think it's one of the top 5 loudest boomboxes of the 1980s. I would rank it #4, below the Panasonic RX-6400, Panasonic RX-A5, and Conion C-100F. It sounds very good, but for quiet listening it doesn't provide much bass at the lowest volume levels. You need to crank it up to get good bass. There is also a slight boxy flavor to the sound, due to the huge plastic speaker cabinets. You can reduce this by adding some Dynamat inside.
The amplifier consists of a pair of Sanyo LA4125T chips. The service manual claims the output power is 2x12.5W at 10% distortion. Electronics Australia magazine measured the frequency response of the tape deck, and found that it responds within +/-2dB between 30Hz and 15kHz, dropping by 8dB at 17kHz (this was when using TDK SA and MA-R tapes). That's a pretty good frequency range for a boombox tape deck.
The most common problem with this model is missing metal trim plates, especially the one above the tuner and the one surrounding the VU meters. These plates are simply glued on, so they often fall off and become lost. Also, the speakers on mine were making a metallic rattling noise when shifted by hand, so I opened them up and discovered that the woofer bolts needed to be tightened. So either they came loose over time, or the previous owner had fooled around with them.
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