I have a Spectrosonic 300 receiver that was made in the US by EVI, Inc. I've never heard of either company before. Can anyone shed any light on this? It is solid-state and looks late 60s to early 70s in wooden case.

Spectrosonic was a Pacific Stereo house brand. Some disagreement as to how good it was. My brother owned a very modern looking receiver that I think performed very well. I thought it looked cool, but I was a teenager at the time.

SPectrosonic was a house brand of Pacific Stereo, a chain that started in the 1960s in San Francisco. CBS bought them in the mid '70s and subsequently opened up stores throughout California and the midwest. They went bankrupt in 1986, I believe.

The first generation of Spectrosonic receivers was made in the USA by Electro Voice (of speaker and microphone fame) and had circuit board soldering problems. The second generation was made in Japan by Nikko and were remarkably trouble free. They compared to like-priced Pioneer, Kenwood and Sansui (and Nikko, obviously) products, as far as performance was concerned. They can be identified by the characteristic Nikko red circuit breaker buttons on the rear apron that were used for power and speaker protection.

The Spectrosonic 300 was, indeed, manufactured for Pacific Stereo in the very early 1970s. The 300 was a pretty reliable machine. The real problem we had was the Spectrosonic 200 when matched with Quadraflex 2 speakers (a combination often sold together). There was an impedance dip in the Q2's that the Spec 200 just couldn't handle - we replaced many, many flat pack output transistors because of this combination. John Falconer