What do you imagine for new AIWA?

Recently AIWA brand has been obtained by Towada Audio, a communication equipments manufacturer placed in Akita Japan.

Towada Audio is one of the well known manufacture as most of the products are made for SONY. Many well-known radios such as ICF-SW7600GR, ICF-EX5mk2, ICF-801, ICF-SW22(discontinued), ICF-SW77(discontinued), ICF-SW55(discontinued), ICF-SW1(discontinued), ICF-SW100(discontinued), ICF-SW07(discontinued), ICF-J1 and ICF-J40 also seem to be engineered or/and manufactured by Towada Audio.

The new AIWA corporation has already been established in Tokyo this year (2017). The announcement said that though planning and conducting products are done in the Tokyo office, products are manufactured in China. Release date of the products will be this Autumn (2017).

So what do you have image for AIWA? I imagine that AIWA produces higher quality and innovative value than the price tag.

New AIWA has planned to release 4K UHD TV, bluetooth audios, record players and boomboxes. Now let's check the boomboxes which include a CD/SD/USB/Bluetooth radio recorder/player, a CD boombox and a CD/SD/USB/Bluetooth radio player like below;

I used to see some similar pictures for the upper left one.

...oh there!

Almost same shape! This CD/SD/USB radio has already been sold around the world excepting Japan, not new.



From the pictures, it merely seems only to be rebranded Chinese products and I doubt what new AIWA is. Better sound or better features? I think neither. There is no originality.

If the new AIWA sells only relabeled Chinese TV and audio products without sufficient effort, she will be beaten by other products and ceased soon. What on earth is the purpose of resuming AIWA?

Yamazen Released a new Radio Recorder YVR-R304

Yamazen, one of the fabless merchants in Japan, released new radio voice recorder without official notice.

- Product Descriptions AM/FM Radio Voice Recorder YVR-R304 - Qriom - YAMAZEN BOOK(Japanese)

YVR-R304 is an IC recorder that has AM/FM radio, which seems to be an upgraded version of previous model YVR-R303 but some functions of YVR-R304 are inferior to YVR-R303.

There are 7 programmable timer recording functions, 2 X AAA Alkaline/Ni-MH batteries built in, 128 X 64 dot non-colored matrix LCD w/ backlight, 3.5mm stereo line-in/headphones output jacks, up to 8.5hrs continuous radio recording & 11hrs playback, automatic synchronized clock adjustment which works only in Japan, MP3 32KBPS / 4MB built-on memory and micro SDHC card slot upto 32GB micro SDHC card. The inch size is 4.05W x 2.04D x 0.57H, 1.76oz of the weight excluding batteries. The recording format is 32kbps MP3 stereo only. It depends on recording sources. Any external microphone cannot be used.

The coverages are 522-1620kHz on AM, 76-95MHz on FM stereo.


I don’t know what "MP3 32KBPS" built-on memory is, maybe it is missed by Yamazen guys.

USB mini jack of YVR-R304 can be connected only a Yamazen genuine accessory YVR-USB1 but currently not available even on Yamazen Direct shopping sites OMG.

Half of the pdf instruction manuals cannot be read on a computer but the other can. The file seems to be less compatible to some PC.

Sound quality of 32kbps stereo recording not suitable for music and so on for much of the compressed noise. I don't know why 128kbps or higher bit rate codecs not equipped with?



A year ago(in 2015) Yamazen released other voice radio recorder YVR-R600 which was sold on a famous TV shopping seller in Japan. The model also has some software or hardware bugs like YVR-R303, not work the timer recording function properly, recorded files sometimes erased naturally and so on. I think no or few products testing engineers assigned by Yamazen. This is already proven by the YVR-R304, current released product's information.

The price of YVR-R304 is about $93～$95 at the point I am writing this article.

I would recommend other more expensive Radio Recorders such as Sony ICZ-R100, Olympus PJ-35 or PJ-30, or Toshiba TY-RPR1. Unfortunately, those are for Japan only.