Trio TT-5066

The last one, and the one almost nobody talks about.

Trio was Kenwood before Kenwood was Kenwood — the same company sold this deck at home under the Trio name and abroad as the Kenwood KW-5066. It’s the least-documented machine in this entire collection; I had to piece its specs together from a handful of scattered listings and one blog post. Twenty machines in, that obscurity feels like the right note to end on.

Introduced

c. 1970–72 · Japan

Original price

~$280 (export, as Kenwood KW-5066)

Track config

4-track (quarter-track) stereo

Speeds

1⅞ / 3¾ / 7½ ips

Motors

1 (drive type undocumented)

Heads

4 · Permalloy, dedicated erase channel

Wow & flutter

~0.15% RMS @ 7½ ips

Weight

~10 kg

SECTION 01

The Merits

It’s genuinely well-equipped for a mid-tier deck of its era: sound-on-sound, echo, a built-in 400 Hz test-tone generator, dual illuminated VU meters, a DIN dubbing jack, and manual bias adjustment. This was built for someone who wanted to do things with tape, not just play it back.

The brand history is worth knowing: Kasuga Radio Co. became Trio Corporation in Japan in 1960, and ‘Kenwood’ was the name the same company sold under in export markets, long before the two names formally unified as Kenwood Corporation in 1986. This deck is a small piece of that split-identity era.

The least-documented machine in the entire collection — and after nineteen others, that obscurity felt like the right note to end on.

SECTION 02

The Quirks

It’s genuinely obscure. A forum thread I found is literally titled ‘Kenwood KW-5066 — anything known?’ — there’s less collector discussion around this deck than any other machine in this collection, by a wide margin.

The motor’s actual drive type — synchronous, plain induction, or servo — isn’t documented anywhere I could find. That’s an honest gap in the record, not an oversight on my part.

It was a mid-tier budget deck, not Trio’s flagship — their own TT-50 from the same era had six heads and auto-reverse. Reel-reel.com’s collector ratings put this one at a modest 6/10 sound and 5/10 reliability.

SECTION 03

The Sound

Honest mid-tier, not chasing flagship performance. The feature set — sound-on-sound, echo, test tone — points to a deck built for someone who wanted to experiment with tape, not just listen to it.

SECTION 04

Buying One

Go in with realistic expectations given how thin the documentation is — you’re buying more on faith than spec sheet with this one. That’s part of its appeal to me, honestly.

How mine runs in the Philippines

This is the one machine in the collection where I genuinely don’t know the motor’s frequency behavior — it’s undocumented anywhere I could find. What is confirmed, per the service spec sheet, is a dual-voltage (110–120 V / 220–240 V) AND dual-frequency (50/60 Hz) switch. If that’s accurate and set correctly on Philippine 220 V / 60 Hz mains, it should just work with no transformer needed — but given how little is documented about this deck generally, I’d still listen critically the first time it’s powered up.

That’s the whole collection.

All twenty machines in the collection now have their own write-up. Thanks for reading this far — explore the rest of the collection, or start again from the top.