Sansui Electric — Has Finally Gone Bankrupt…

【Legendary Trio of Japanese Hi-Fi】
Sansui Electric｜Legendary Trio?｜Pioneer｜Merger with ONKYO

This was the big news in the world of fringe Hi-Fi this week.

Sansui Electric Co., Ltd. (capital ¥5,382,158,621; 5-29-3 Kamata, Ota-ku; registered address: 2-23-3 Higashi, Shibuya-ku; representative: Takashi Murokoshi and two others), a former First Section Tokyo Stock Exchange-listed manufacturer of high-end audio equipment, has commenced bankruptcy proceedings. The Tokyo District Court issued the bankruptcy order on 9 July. Total liabilities amount to approximately ¥350 million. → From Teikoku Databank “Major Bankruptcy News” (2014/07/16)

Sansui Electric declares bankruptcy

Sansui Electric was delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section in 2012, but for about the past fifteen years the company had effectively ceased developing any serious Sansui-branded pure Hi-Fi products — it was practically as though they no longer existed. When I first went online fifteen years ago, whispers about the end of Sansui were already circulating widely, so honestly it feels rather belated news; I think most people had already come to think of Sansui as a brand that ended in the nineties.

I apologise, but when it comes to Sansui amplifiers — revered as a legendary marque, the brand having taken on a life of its own and achieved something close to divine status in Japanese Hi-Fi circles — Sansui, one might say, sat squarely at the opposite end of the spectrum from my own sensibilities (which lean towards compact, slim, simple, and elegant…), deep in the heart of a very Japanese philosophy: amplifiers built like tanks, with an overwhelming, almost battleship-grade mass of components. Similar high-end amplifier makers like Accuphase and LUXMAN are still walking that same path today, without ever wavering. Anti-tank as I am, I do find the sound of each genuinely appealing and rather like them. …Unwavering consistency is a virtue!

Sansui was, for better or worse, an amplifier maker in which the values of the Japanese in the 1980s — mass component deployment, craftsmanship, and technical achievement — were especially pronounced. Come to think of it, my piano teacher once had a high-end integrated amplifier, the AU-α907, and I simply couldn’t take to its sound, so I kept recommending British amplifiers — or rather, complete systems including speakers — such as the QUAD 66 and Aura Design. But it had been chosen by the husband of the household, so a replacement was never going to happen…

My own feeling is that the reason Sansui (… and Nakamichi as well) faded so early as an audio manufacturer might be that the gap between brand image and actual sound quality grew just a little too wide — a somewhat explosive thing to say, I realise. Of course, poor management and poor marketing must have played a part too, but there’s something about Sansui amplifiers that appealed overwhelmingly to technically-minded people — or to put it the other way around, they didn’t really face towards music lovers. My impression (admittedly close to pure prejudice) is that many of the people who loved Sansui amplifiers were, before music, in love with the machinery itself. The circuitry was genuinely fascinating, the build lavish, the prices were fair, and there was none of that suspect, over-orchestrated sense of luxury. Perhaps it was precisely that no-nonsense, Japanese-craftsman quality that earned Sansui the deep, devoted support of the technically-minded.

To put it the other way around, compared with Luxman and Accuphase — brands which similarly started out close to being pure amplifier specialists — Sansui seemed to lack a certain brand allure and sonic enchantment. I’m sorry, truly. For anyone who would like to taste the Sansui amplifier experience today, you can find them fairly easily at your nearest Hard Off or on Yahoo! Auctions for jaw-droppingly low junk prices. Being rather old pieces of kit, their condition can’t be guaranteed, of course… But they are sustained by a devoted core of Sansui enthusiasts, so if you have the love and the budget, there are still places that will service them properly ⇒ Search.

My first Hi-Fi as a child was a pair of Sansui speakers.

As for speakers, we had two pairs at home — the SP-30 and the SP-100, I think, though I can’t quite remember the model numbers. Come to think of it, the amplifier, CD player, and cassette deck in my childhood home were all Yamaha, but the speakers were Sansui. The tuner, incidentally, was Trio. Looking back, it’s a rather nakedly shallow brand-worship approach to putting together a system, the sort of thing driven entirely by what the magazines of the day were raving about… ※For what it’s worth, I still think the Yamaha cassette deck with DBX and the Trio tuner were absolutely sublime.

The Sansui speakers we had at home were beautiful in their way, with a classic grille design and a graceful presence, but sadly the sound itself was rather thin and hollow… In the end they became storage shelves and improvised chairs. One thing in their favour: they were speakers into which a small child could not easily poke fingers into the woofer or tweeter. Not that that stopped me poking away at the grilles relentlessly. Sansui produced many different speaker models over the years using this same grille design, so the higher-end ones may well have sounded considerably better…

For a period in the nineties, they reissued a compact model called the SP-K1. Sound quality aside for a moment, that nostalgic wooden-box design is something I would dearly love to see someone carry on and keep making, for a long, long time to come.

What will become of the Sansui brand from here?

Come to think of it, in the UK Sansui had only just released in 2012, under the SANSUI brand, the 201 Series — a slim, budget-priced integrated amplifier with a phono stage and DAC built in (a rare thing nowadays), the SAP201V; a CD player, the CDD201; an FM tuner, the DR-201V; a network audio player, the WLD201; and others — along with a high-quality PCI sound card carrying a dual Burr-Brown PCM1794A configuration.

I had been wide-eyed with excitement at the prospect of a comeback — the price was even more extreme than Cambridge Audio or NAD, and the slim styling was right up my street. But the official website has already disappeared and remaining stock is being sold off at half price… is this going to vanish too? I do think Doshisha ought to handle the after-sales service side and sell these through online retail domestically — it would cost very little to do. At an actual street price of ¥20,000–30,000, these could fly off the shelves — that’s really all I’m saying — it seems such a shame to let them go to waste. The integrated amplifier SAP201V with built-in DAC in particular — if a 100–120V version existed and was genuinely available at the current UK price of £119.95 (around ¥20,000), I would buy one this instant; it was exactly the sort of product I would stamp my feet over wanting. ↓ Remarkably well-specified connections for the price! Well, reading the somewhat lukewarm WHAT Hi-Fi review, the sound is probably nothing like the old Japanese Sansui of years past — thin and rather contemporary, I’d imagine.

Come to think of it, Sansui was one of the “Big Three of Hi-Fi”, wasn’t it. The Big Three of Hi-Fi — a term from the seventies and eighties perhaps? — already feels so thoroughly of a bygone era that I suspect it has been largely forgotten, but the three were Sansui, Pioneer, and Trio (Kenwood). (Continues in Legendary Trio of Japanese Hi-Fi — Some Kind of Delicacy?)

【Legendary Trio of Japanese Hi-Fi】
Sansui Electric｜Legendary Trio?｜Pioneer｜Merger with ONKYO