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Due to its business connections with the Occupation Forces, Totsuko decided to work on a magnetic sound recorder.
Masaru Ibuka had always wanted to produce something that would directly benefit the general public, who's needs were quite different from the government and other institutional customers. But it was not just any product that Ibuka wanted. Radios had already been introduced by large companies. Akio Morita was then also looking, purely from a business point of view, for a product with which Totsuko could expand its sales channels beyond NHK. It was then that the wire recorder caught the attention of both Ibuka and Morita.
The Totsuko engineers acted quickly once they had made up their mind and research got under way immediately. Masanobu Tada of Nipon Electric Co.(NEC Corporation) was kind enough to bring in a wire recorder unit, saying, "You might find this interesting." It had been used by the Japanese Army during the war. Totsuko disassembled the unit at once and studied its recording and playback mechanisms. Around the same time, a friend in the United States gave Morita a Webster's recorder kit that used stainless steel wire. The kit had a simple reel winding mechanism with a recording head. It was Nobutoshi Kihara(now President of Sony-Kihara Laboratory) who completed the kit assembly with an amplifier. The first thing they recorded was NHK's news broadcast of a Japanese swimmer Hironoshin Furuhashi setting a new world record at an all-American aquatic championships meet at Los Angeles.
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 | | Totsuko employees on a recreationnal trip(Morita and Ibuka in the front row, first and second from right, respectively). |
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Incidentally, Kihara had been one of Ibuka's students in the electricity course at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Waseda University. Prior to graduation, Kihara noticed a Totsuko help-wanted ad at the school. Out of fun and curiosity, Kihara went for an interview, the only form of employment examination at the time. His resume listed special skills related only to electricity and stated, "I can make shortwave receivers, five-tube superheterodyne radios and hi-fi amplifiers." Going over the resume Higuchi, the interviewer, said to Kihara, "You can handle electricity, yet you majored in mechanical engineering. You are a funny person."
This "funny" man who had come to Totsuko out of curiosity stayed on, destined to work on both the wire and tape recorders.
While still working hard on the wire recorder, Totsuko heard of a machine that could reproduce sound on tape. At that time, Ibuka and Morita frequently visited the Occupation Forces headquartered in the NHK building. One day, a member of the Civil Information and Education (CIE) section showed them this tape recorder. The sound was remarkably better than that of a wire recorder. "This is it.This is what we ought to produce for consumer market. It has great potential. Let's do it with tape," said Ibuka. The wire recorder was thus completely forgotten.
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