Also if anyone is interested, I found the backstory to the Prince Bass amps company.
Prince Tsushinkogyo Co. Ltd.
Japanese trading and manufacturing company originally founded in 1950 and based in Nagoya in Aichi prefecture, their name would translate to “Prince Telecommunication and Engineering”, but Tsushin Kogyo, written as one or two words, was until the 60’s a common name used in Japan for what we would call electronic companies today.
Very little is actually known about the history of the company, they are manufacturing musical instrument amplifiers in the 1960’s under the
Prince brand, these include a couple of valve based models but the wast bulk of them is transistorised combo amps. All of their early amps appear to be named although some have model numbers as well, larger amplifiers have names like “Princeton” while small portable practice amps get insect names like “Wasp” and “Beetle” and it is for those practice amps that the company is best known especially in the West. They are in fact rather interesting in some ways, the bulk of these seen are not branded Prince but rather as
Piggy but that is actually not an inference or copy of a the
Pignose brand as is often stated but rather it starts life as a model designation for a small budget combo amp that manages to combine a fairly cheap construction with a rather good feature set for such an inexpensive model, including dual channels and something that a number of the Prince amps somewhat uniquely feature at the time; headphone outputs. The Piggy name then later turns up on other models as a brand although the Prince or Prince Amplifier name is usually also shown on those as well in smaller letters, this is especially common in markets where the Prince trademark already exists, but another Japanese company called Yoshinaga Prince Co. owned the trademark in a number of countries.
The Piggy practice amps were sold in a variety of versions, ranging from dirt cheap models with just an input and gain control and featuring small loudspeakers intended for portable radios and suchlike to quite well specified models that feature dual channels, reverbs, EQ and quality drivers seldom seen on small practice amps, some of their small portable amps could even have optional built in tuners, if there is a T at the end of the model name there is an electronic guitar tuner built in at the back, and a fairly good one at that, something we do not see on the market again until amps with built in digital signal processors start hitting the market. As said before the bulk of their amps unusually enough feature headphone outs but in the latter half of the 70’s the Prince Tsushinkogyo takes that to its logical conclusion by releasing a miniature practice amp that does not feature a loudspeaker, this appears to be the first guitar headphone amps in the world, and was released as the Piggy “My Way”, it does appear to predate the
Rockman by at the least 3 or 4 years, which is quite funny since the Arion headphone amps are universally referred to as Rockman clones although in practice it is the other way around.
In 1980 the company started to brand their products under the
Arion name and goes after the guitar effect pedal market in a big way and very successfully for a time, their pedals were very keenly priced but mainly cut corners in the cases which were made out of injection moulded plastic versus the metal boxes most other makers used, but the electronics were quite similar in quality to what was to be found from other Japanese manufacturers, they also benefitted from having more modern designs than what their American competitor’s offered so during the early 80’s the company became one of the larger makers of pedals and much better known for them than for their traditional tuner and amplifier products.
The company’s fortunes waned in the latter half of the decade, sales of guitars and accessories slowed down as the 80’s wore on and pedal sales in particular started dropping in 1984 when affordable multieffects started to show up on the market, at the time they relied on custom VLSI so large companies like
Yamaha Corp. and
Roland/Boss that already had expertise and finance for development of custom silicon or companies like
Alesis that had access to venture capital and cheap fabrication cleaned up the market while small companies like Prince were in no position to compete. The last we heard from the company was in the mid 90’s and by then the company was a small operation with just over 10 employees and was being run by Sawako Watanabe, but sadly we do not know if she was part of the family that originally founded Prince or if she came from the outside. In 1997 the Arion trademark and product lines were taken over by
Ueno Kaihatsu Center, they continued with the manufacture of pedals and tuners, but the amplifiers were discontinued.
It is rather remarkable how well some of the company’s products have withstood the test of time especially given that most of them were budget priced to begin with, in fact outside of their home market the pricier and larger amps are difficult to find while their main line products are still very common in lower wage counties around Asia such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia and often seen on the second hand market.
