AWA CD-700 Stereo Cassette Deck
Yes, AWA, not Aiwa! Its not a typo, despite the frequent ebay listings who assume it is and list it as Aiwa branded. AWA stands for Almagamated Wireless Australasia - originally the licensees to sell radios in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, they later branched out into selling all sorts of consumer goods - mostly imported and rebadged, especially as time went on, a trend that this cassette deck is no exception to, having been sold by at least 5 other brands that I've counted so far.
In terms of features and design, its nothing particularly extraordinary - a nice looking 1970s device with a proper stainless steel face and solid wood side panels, and very satisfyingly clicky switches, I thoroughly enjoy using this - but it is just a basic deck, no Dolby (the "Noise limiter" switch is for DNL, a play-back only system that does remove noise, but also makes it sounds like everything else is underwater). It does have an interesting eject mechanism - the top silver door is purely a dustcover that can open while the cassette is still inside. The cassette instead sits on a spring loaded tray, and when you fully eject, that tray angles upwards, lifting the cassette out towards you for easy access. It does so with much enthusiasm, though, and if you press down too eagerly it'll launch the tape out at you like a toaster!
Mechanically its a single capstan, electromagnet erase head stereo deck, the fast forward and rewind are driven by an idler wheel that engages with the spindles - on mine this wheel was worn out, so rewinding or fast forwarding mostly didn't work. At times you could hold the buttons in juuust the right place and overextend the mechanism ever so slightly, giving the wheel the grip it needed to rewind your tapes, and I'm sure this would have done so at an impressive pace if it were properly working. Don't put a 120 minute tape in one of these.
I never looked closely inside mine, however there is rumour that it was produced by Orion Electronics of Japan. At the very least, it is made in Japan, and it wasn't made exclusively for AWA - it was also sold as a PrinzSound STD600, Dart ACD660, AudioTronics ACD660, Grundig CD402, Fairmate C700 and Collaro CCE CD-700. Albeit some of these have slight cosmetic variations - the Grundig has a bit more stainless steel to it, on the buttons as well, and the Fairmate has a white backing on the VU instead of black.
I've since sold it on - it served me well, but issues started to arise, as they do with tired old devices. The fast forward and rewind gave out first, as described earlier, but more pertinently, over time the right channel died too, becoming just extremely quiet. I suspect the issue may have been bad capacitors, but with it being ultimately not a particularly good deck, I decided to just sell it on to someone else who can bother repairing it, and buy something a bit nicer as an upgrade. Ended up replacing it with a Panasonic RS-269US, which is a much more quality model, with styling I very much love, and was not all that much more than I initially paid for the AWA. I'll have to do a photoshoot of that one too sometime.
While the AWA CD700 is no longer in my collection, it is always going to be significant to me both as a glimpse into the forgotten electronics history of Australia, and, for me, my first proper cassette deck - a very good looking and very fun model that I thoroughly enjoyed, but I believe is best looked after by someone more experienced than I. Hopefully the fellow who brought it from me on ebay will take good care of it, either as restoration or simply retirement as a display piece. I had half a mind to keep it for that end myself, but we live in a sharehouse and simply don't have the space.