Joe Tushinski founded Superscope. As such he was offered the exclusive distribution of Sony reel-to-reel products in this country. The story goes that his chief financial officer kept kicking him in the shins to get him to accept the offer while visiting Sony in Japan. Sony Superscope is a term heard often, but neither owned the other. Marantz became a division of Superscope and Pianocorder became a division of Marantz. It was my understanding that Yamaha did acquire the copyrights to the pianocorder library but chose to have a business relationship whereby QRS would market them and pay royalties. Pianocorder paid royalties to some of the celebrity artists of ten cents or so and Yamaha felt the bookkeeping wasn't worth it. QRS was already set up for that kind of business, so they could easily take this on. Prices have gone up substantially in the last few years. I suspect there isn't a big market anymore. Carl Meyer Assoc. PTG Santa Clara, California cmpiano@attbi.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "D.L. Bullock" <dlbullock@att.net> To: "Pianotech@Ptg. Org" <pianotech@ptg.org> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 9:36 PM Subject: Re: Pianocorder and Sony > Joseph Tushinsky owned Sony Superscope Marantz and is responsible for buying > rights to and manufacturing Pianocorder which was a system developed by > folks at Teledyne. The reason Pianocorder did not take off as it should > have, is the Japanese Yen to Dollar ratio just about ate his lunch at the > time he was poised to spend $5 Million for advertising. The advertising > never happened and the Pianocorder languished until it began to really take > off just before the time Yamaha bought them, or as we heard Emerson bought > them and Yamaha then bought them. Yamaha wanted the tape library very badly > but found out once they purchased the company, that the recording rights > still belonged to QRS and they could not have them. > > D.L. Bullock > www.thepianoworld.com > St. Louis >
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