JMI and Eagle Products, 1964
In the 1970s "Eagle International" was a big name in the world of budget hifi, its amplifiers and tuners stocked by Lasky's, Comet Warehouses, and many others. Most who were schoolboys in Britain during that decade will have had an "Eagle International" something or other.
The company began life in the late 1950s as "Eagle Products", based on Coptic Street, just down from the British Museum, and traded under several other names: "Relda Radio", and "B. Adler and Sons (Radio) Limited", the latter being the controlling entity.
Some fun was clearly being had as "Relda" is "Adler" backwards and "Adler" is "Eagle" in German.
By the early 1960s, a sizeable proportion of Eagle's catalogue comprised of imports from the Far East, particularly from Sacom Electronics in Japan. Eagle evidently made secondary distribution arrangements too. The items listed in the JMI pricelist below, posted earlier this year (12th September), are actually Japanese-made "Eagle Products" gizmos. Tom as ever was keen to diversify. Whether JMI added its own badge (as it had some years earlier to Italian-made Meazzi echo units) is unknown.
In view of what is said about the Japanese origins of the circuit employed in the JMI microphone mixer - see this page - it seems highly likely that the model copied by the Jennings engineers was a unit made by Sacom.
It may be, now that names are known, examples (or at least illustrations) of the items listed can be identified.
Pricelist 1964. IThe suggestion made earlier this year that the items listed were made by Westrex, which entered the field of portable transistorised PA units early on, must be put to one side.
Detail from an "Eagle Products" advert, November 1964 - the CA512.
The Megaphone
The transistor megaphone - model ER305 as listed in the JMI pricelist - was actually manufactured by the TOA Corporation of Japan (and doubtless imported to the UK by Eagle Products). An example can be seen in the picture of Dick Denney at the Vox stand, "Association of Public Address Engineers" show, March 1965.
A detail of the pic of Dick Denney at the APAE show, March 1965. The whole can be been below, entry for 20th December.
A TOA ER-307 to give some sense of the colour:
Eagle Products advertising
Below, a fairly standard "Eagle Products" advert placed in "The Gramophone" in late 1963 at the start of its year-long promotional campaign in the hi-fi and classical music press. Thereafter (from late 1964) its ads tend not to be illustrated.
Detail from an "Eagle Products" advert, late 1963
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