Two Sony stories from my days at Marantz, 1979-1981; the Marantz Engineering staff had dealt with all Sony products up to that time, as Marantz's parent, Superscope, had exclusive distribution rights.

1.A product was presented that did not work. One of the engineers, in a conference call (1970s) mentioned that there seemed to be a bug in the product, then went on to discuss the problem.

Two weeks later a polite communique stated that the product had been thoroughly inspected, even taken apart and put back together, and no evidence was found of any kind of insect life.

2.Early Walkman was taken apart in front of a Sony engineer. The Marantz engineer, seeing scores of flying wires connecting two PC Boards that separated from one another for service, said "this looks like it was designed by Chef Boyardee." Predictably, some time later, an inquisitive note came, asking for help in understanding the difficulty, as they had consulted all of the engineering references they could find but had no idea who this Boyardee engineer guy was.


My comment about the Walkman was intended to include an obvious discrepancy of results via a method that can be pretty worthless. They do go off on their own, and make some really stupid products. By this method, however, the Walkman was born. This reminds me of someone's signature here that states something like "you do one dumb thing after another and at the last straw you do something horribly dumb and totally redeem yourself." (If you know the correct quote, I'll probably correct this one here.)