Consumer Products

Audio

The following are some of the landmark audio products designed and manufactured by the Pye Company

For a comprehensive and descriptive listing of Pye Consumer Products by year, please select this link

1953 - Pye Records


Pye entered the record business when it bought Nixa Records in 1953 and Polygon Records in 1955.

The best known artists were: -

• Lonnie Donegan (1956–69)

• Petula Clark (1957–71)

• The Searchers (1963–67)

• The Kinks (1964–71)

• Sandie Shaw (1964–71)

• Status Quo (1968–71)

• Brotherhood of Man (1975–79)

The company entered the budget-priced album market in 1957 with Pye Golden Guinea Records, priced at a guinea (one pound and one shilling).

1954 - The Pye Black Box

The Black Box valve record player was launched in 1954 under licence from CBS.

C O Stanley was so taken with the handsome lines and quality of sound reproduction that he demonstrated it himself to dealers. This endeared him to the shop keepers that Pye depended upon for sales.

Contrary to its name most Black Boxes were in mahogany finish. This example is a Chinese lacquered Black Box available at extra cost.

Mahogany finish Blackbox

Chinese lacquer finish Blackbox

1954 - Provost HF25 HiFi Amplifier and Proctor HF25A Preamplifier/Control Unit


The HF25 amplifier and matching control unit were launched to address the burgeoning interest in HiFi.

It was an extremely well engineered unit with 25W Power Output with harmonic distortion of <0.1 at 15 watts and <0.3% at 25 watts.


1956 - Record Maker




In 1956 Pye launched the Record Maker. This was a record player that could play conventional records but could also record onto magnetic disks using a special magnetic record head. It came complete with a microphone and a magnet which could be used to erase the disk if required in order to re-record.

Since it could record disks it did not attract purchase tax due to the tax rules at that time.

Some Pye Radiograms at this time were available with a Record Maker option.

Recording head above and conventional pickup head below .

Magnetic Recordable Disk.

1958 - 1959 The Pye “Mozart”



In 1958 Pye launched the HF10 Mozart Mono HiFi amplifier and a year later the HFS20 Stereo amplifier.

There was also a matching FM tuner, the HFT10.

The amplifiers were rated at 9W per channel with 0.2% total harmonic distortion at 8W.

They used a single ended class A output stage.


1964 - The Pye Achoic Record Player

Pye launched the Pye Achoic stereo record player. This was designed in partnership with CBS Laboratories in the USA.

The amplifier was a solid state, transformerless class B push-pull 5W/channel design using transistors made by Newmarket Transistors.

There were 3 loudspeakers per channel.

The special Pye ‘butterfly’ pickup was designed to operate at a very low tracking weight of 2 grams in order to reduce record wear.

1964 - Transistorised Pye Black Box



In 1964 Pye launched a Transistorised version of the Black Box record player using Newmarket transistors.