Their products became a lot more "plastic". A lot of funky case designs and no real improvements in the "guts", where it counts. All flash and no bang. The user interfaces became a lot more clunky. You would have to push wierd combinations of buttons or go through a whole string of menus to change a simple setting like programming a channel or changing the color.

There were a lot of quality control problems like boards dying for no appearent reason. The picture would go black or would have black lines all across the screen. The customer would show me in the store and I would write up the repair order and send it in. Two months later it would come back marked, "C.N.D.P". (Couldn Not Duplicate Problem.) The customer would take it home and a week later I would be speaking to an irate customer on the phone.

After a while I started actively steering people away from their products. Some people would think I was trying to "upsell" them and buy it anyway. I would be talking to them on the phone a month later... "Why doesn't my remote work?"

It applied to almost all their products. TVs, VCRs, stereos, CD players... the works. Boom boxes were the worst.

The only thing worse was this one model of Aiwa mini stereos with a 6-disk "elevator" mechanism. Disks were ALWAYS getting stuck in them. Of course people would have to send the thing in for repairs, disks and all, only to have the thing be in the shop for 2 months. Then 1/2 the time they wouldn't get their disks back. It got so I would take the thing in the back room and extricate the disks myself.

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Phillips had just taken over when I signed on... I got to see the crummy circuitry and underrated parts that were in the Fort Wayne designs that helped kill Maggotbox. At first, Phllips seemed to be an improvement, but over time, everything has gone downhill. Starting with the C8 chassis, they went with a weak "switched mode power supply" that would take-out a load of parts when it failed. This was on the TV lines.

Here's what I was told about the Phillips lines:

Phillips- High end/ high price
Magnavox- Nice cabinets
Sylvania- Glitzy and high tech looking
Philco- Loss leader (bottom of the line)

Funny. They all used the same basic chassis from year to year....

The reason that Magnavox VCR's were so good is that they were built by Matsushita (Panasonic) for years. Now most are by Funai.

I have a lightning-struck Mitsubishi TV that I fixed and gave to my parents. It runs great.

The AIWA remarks are dead-on. That is some of the worst junk to hit the consumer markets. I know. I've repaired many of them.

Just try to get replacement speakers for a boombox!!

Favorite Brands:

Mitsubishi
Toshiba
Hitachi (for their Ultravision PTV's)
JVC
Panasonic

WORST:

RCA has its good days and its bad days.

People used to ask me things like "What's the BEST brand to buy?" My stock answer (being a SALESMAN and all) was, "If you stick with a name brand, you can't go wrong..."