One of the tings I remember about the high end Japanese products of the 80's and 90's was the reluctance of many magazine reviewers to acknowledge how good they were, despite the fact that they achieved a peak of craftsmanship and build quality we may never see again and measured exceptionally well magazine reviewers consistently preferred items sold by a guy building them by hand in a shed and charging more for stuff a lot less well built and which measured terribly. Some of the arguments supporting these subjective ideas were basically just xenophobic as the inference was our ears are different and we hear better, yet somehow they got away with peddling such ideas.
The English HiFi press was a multi decade joke, all about protectionist policies for their own 'cottage' industries and UK made gear. The US magazines and reviewers were considerably more balanced IMO, and the Australian HiFi press simply reviewed whatever was being imported by long term advertisers and 'supporters'. We had such a small HiFi industry of our own, unfortunately.
I don't know about the German HiFi press, but judging on the number of awards Japanese gear seemed to get, perhaps they were less biased than their UK counterparts.
The Sony amp I have was marketed in the UK as having a Gibraltar chassis (not sure if they used that idea anywhere else as the idea of Gibraltar as a "rock" of solidity is probably a very British one) and it certainly was heavy and pretty much bomb proof.
Yes, they used the 'Gibraltar' chassis marketing. It is a composite resin (see attached scan) and more rigid and anti-vibrational than anything on any other HiFi gear I've ever seen. It can be cracked though- I've seen some (sad) cases where big amps have been dropped and the G-chassis has cracked in half. With the TAN77es weighing in around 26kg, the transfomer is bolted to two large aluminium rails which are then bolted multiple times to the G-chassis itself.
A lot of the catalogue blurb is just that, but the anti-vibration extents they went to were real and measureable, right down to damping heatsink vanes, power supply capacitors and even the mounting positions for the transistors themselves.
Here you go:
NOt sure Sony knew what STDs were...
The big three had their buzzword chassis names, but they were all about rock solid foundations and no vibrations.
Pioneer went with the pressed/cast "honeycomb" chassis, heatsinks, even the feet were all full of hexagons! The EI power transformers were connected in parallel to lower impedance in some models and resin set into cast-iron outer cases. (Note the Japanese spelling on the transformers : "
casted power transformer" Solid machined knobs, brass shafts and nylon universal joints to the Alps Blue pots ensured velvet smooth operation.
Yamaha went with ToPART (total purity audio reproduction technology), strong subchassis, symmetrical designs and short signal paths, pretty much across their whole amplifier range. They were visually gorgeous inside and were an easy sell.