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]
Originally Posted by Barry
