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Nikko Audio
A division of the Japanese company Nikko Electric Works that specialises in manufacturing electric and communications equipment, company established in December 1948 and the audio division was closed in the early 1990's. Their line of hi-fi was noted for excellent value for money and in particular their electronics (i.e. amps and tuners) were considered extremely impressive on a value basis, however the company never got the hang of the glittery marketing tactics that other Japanese brands used and only gained limited distribution, mostly confined to North America and Australasia, the audio division was also know as ASTI Pacific. There is an highly unusual twist to the company's history, so unusual that I am going to include it here even it happened after the company left the audio business, when the Asian markets started to slump due to the "Asian Flu" of the mid 90's Nikko's chairman and principal shareholder Goto Tsunemoto was one of the first Japanese CEO's to try western methods to in responding to the slowing sales, he initiated a series of layoffs that were done without consulting employees and unions in stark contradiction to local tradition. This backfired spectacularly when the employees used a novel method of revolting, as collectively they owned just over 10% percent of the company due to bonuses and such, and under Japanese commercial law a shareholder with 10% or more of ownership can request a liquidation of the company the employees forced the company into bankruptcy protection even though the finances of the company were basically sound, so in 1998 Taunemoto-San was forced to resign from the company's board and it was taken over by a investment company controlled by the Rotchilds later that year. Please note that the company never made televisions or suchlike, the sets and video recorders that appeared with this name in North America were sold by someone that appropriated the trademark.
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Although I can't speak for the complete line of Nikko, I can say that during my tenure there, we have made some awesome products. The quality of the front panel metal extrusions and the metal enclosures were much beefier than the standard receivers of that era. The Alpha III MOSFET DC amp was only 80wpc but if you had efficient speakers, it was the cleanest amp you have ever heard. If you wanted more power, we had the Alpha VI, which was rated at 300wpc (for a measly $1400.!) that was great for driving speakers like the AR LST or the Bose 901's. Both amps had high slew rate and excellent square wave response while maintaining extremely low THD and TIM distortion. The Beta III had a direct coupled phono preamp coupled with its high speed circuitry. The Gamma V FM tuner had selectable IF bandwidth with amazing tuning accuracy. We also created the ATD1, which was Nikko's version of the Audio Pulse's and Advent's time delay processor. I also presented a white paper at the AES convention titled "Application of gyrators in graphic equalizers" for the development of the inductorless graphic equalizer called the EQ1. A little history behind the company:
Nikko started off as a circuit breaker manufacturer and their main customer was JNR (Japan National Railroad). The company chairman's daughter married a true audiophile and the chairman started the audio division to fulfill his son-in-law's interest. The son-in-law cared very little about marketability of the product and basically, it was his pet project to crank out audiophile type products. I certainly am not knocking the son-in-law because he truly had golden ears and he designed products like the Alpha V, which was a true class A 100 wpc power amp that sounded awesome but it was not marketable due to the insane price tag of the product. Because the revenue from the audio division was so small compared to the circuit breaker division, we were eventually phased out to consolidate Nikko's efforts in their main business. By the time we developed the 19 series (NR-1019, NR-1219, etc.), we could not compete against the giants like Marantz, Sony, and Pioneer who had an immense price/unit advantage over us. The strange thing about Japanese manufacturers in that era was that they were stolidly against outsourcing the manufacturing outside Japan. Perhaps, if we subcontracted the production to Taiwan like NAD did, we would have had a fighting chance for survival.
With warmest regards,
Tom Ishimoto
Northridge Electronics [Designer]
