Sony CFS-85S

The Sony CFS-85S was introduced in 1979. It’s a fairly hard boombox to find and they don’t come up for sale that often. It has a distinct vintage look to it with it’s wood grained side panels, not real wood, and is also one of the only boomboxes to have removable speaker grills. It has the following features:

• LED Peak Level Indicators that blink in harmony with reception or audio source
• Built-In Stereo Mic’s
• AM/FM/SW1 and SW2
• 3-Way Speakers
• Tuning and Stereo LED’s
• Sleep Timer
• SW Fine Tuning Knob
• Line In/Out
• External Ant. Terminals
• Phono Input
• External Speaker Jacks
• 1/4 inch Headphone Jack
• ISS 1 or 2
• Mix Mic Jack
• AMS Automatic Music Sensor 1-2-3 Program
• Cloth Speaker Grilles
• Mic Mix Fader
• Manual/Fixed Rec Mode
• Operates on 8 D Cell batteries
• 110/120/220/240 VAC or External 12 VDC Wall Transformer.
• 21W x 13H x 6D, approximately 15 pounds

Interestingly it also has a dual volume control so you can control the volume on the left and right channels independently. You’ll see the Sony CFS-85 referred to as a Zilba’p boombox sometimes. I’m not exactly sure what the origin of the name is but it seems to have been used for a number of electronic items marketed by Sony. It’s actually a acronym for Zoo Intelligence Learning Body Action Playing which makes no sense. But perhaps the meaning is lost in translation from Japanese to English.

Given their mild rarity they sell for a decent premium when in good working condition. One of the only sales I’ve seen recently was a unit in excellent, fully working, original condition that sold for $350.00 in April of 2011. That would be top of the line so an average unit may go for around $200.