These days, when even the most bare-bones miserable econoboxes come with at least an AM/FM/CD player with triple-digit output wattage, it's hard to imagine the staggering price tags that once went on car audio gear. Yes, car manufacturers charged more than $100 for an optional AM radio in the 1970s, and thieves actually put effort into stealing those rackety Delcos and Bendixes. If you wanted aftermarket head units, amplifiers, or equalizers to crank your favorite Peter Frampton tracks back then, you needed to be ready to shell out quite a few of your rapidly depreciating dollars, as we see in this 1979 Sanyo magazine advertisement.

You could get equalizers with more than seven sliders, of course. Sanyo

In this progression from Superb to Outrageous, we see Sanyo's $219.95 FT646 cassette deck (about $789 in 2017 dollars), complete with Dolby noise-reduction and auto-reverse, followed by the $149.95 PA6100 amplifier and its mighty-by-1979-standards 50 watts per channel ($538 in 2017). If you really wanted to impress the passengers in your new Fiat Strada, though, you needed to add the Sanyo DQZ6200 7-band graphic equalizer, which was just the thing for some Doobie Brothers.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Did Susan Anton roll with Sanyo audio in her Triumph TR-7? You bet she did!

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io