They built some thoroughly respected world class stuff in the '70s. My family legally pirated 8-track tapes in the early to middle part of that period (no $$$

They built some thoroughly respected world class stuff in the '70s. My family legally pirated 8-track tapes in the early to middle part of that period (no $$$ to the RIAA, $$$ reserved for ASCAP but they refused the payments), and all the duplication equipment was built on TEAC reel-to-reel tape drives (with the 2 track head and electronics behind it replaced by an 8 track head). Sony made a fabulous direct drive, cast aluminum record player that I got a copy of in the mid '70s that was still working fine and worth an assessed $900 when a tornado trashed it in 2011. Other stuff of course took longer, e.g. their '70s cars weren't too hot, I got a ride in a grad student's Toyoda Corolla in the summer of 1977, but they soon started selling well, "Datsun, we are driven", my sister bought a used one in the early '80s and it was much better although still had a ways to go (and it's hard to imagine how much brand equity Nissan threw away when they re-badged in the early-mid '80s, their out of pocket costs were well over a billion in 2015 dollars). I guess I'm saying that to those of us paying attention in the '70s, we were willing to believe Japan would get there in things like cars, and of course it didn't hurt how well they engineered and built things like the Mitsubishi Zero WWII fighter, WWII still had a big effect on people's minds in the '70s. Hmmm, Sony was not, at least initially, one of the anointed MITI companies, Morita (and it says something that I don't have to mention his given name) had to convince the powers that be, MITI very possibly, to get the authority for $10,000 ($90K in 2015 dollars) of foreign exchange for the rights from Bell Labs to make transistors, came out with the first model in 1955: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-55 Then sometime in the '80s? they moved a lot of production for the US market to Mexico and my family started suffering from cold solder joints. We're rather careful about buying Sony equipment nowadays and don't buy much.