Sharp VZ-3000

The VZ-3000 was introduced in 1981, with a suggested retail price of $750. In Japan it was called the VZ-V3. At first glance it looks like a very large 3-piece boombox, but it's not, because it cannot accept batteries, and there's no way to carry all of it together as one piece. You wouldn't want to anyway, because it's too big and heavy. The center unit measures 597 x 378 x 173mm and weighs 14.6 kg. The CP-V300H speakers photographed below measure 220 x 378 x 220mm and weigh 4.7 kg each. They are ported 2-ways with 160mm woofers, 50mm tweeters, and pressed-wood construction. There were some other speakers called CP-3000VG, but those don't have the nice-looking front stands that the CP-V300H have.

The turntable in this system is capable of playing both 18cm and 30cm records, and it can play both sides of the record without needing to be flipped. This is made possible because there is one needle on each side of the record. They're mounted on parallel linear tracking mechanisms, and driven by a single motor. Thus both of them move across the record simultaneously, but only one of them is actually touching the record at any given time (a solenoid determines which one to engage or retract). Below the tape deck is a door hiding several controls including bass, treble, balance, Dolby, Loudness, Rec Level, Mic Mixing, and tape type.

Electronics Australia reviewed one of these in its January 1982 issue, and found that the turntable's peak wow and flutter was only 0.1% DIN weighted, which rivaled or even beat many home turntables at the time. You probably know Sharp made a couple of boomboxes with this same technology (the VZ-2000 and the VZ-2500). However, with a claimed output power of 2x25 watts RMS, the VZ-3000 is more than twice as powerful as those.

Model variations: VZ-3000E, VZ-3000H, and VZ-3000Z.