Am besten vesteht man das, wenn man die Historie von Superscope mal zusammefaßt. Die drei Brüder Tushinsky waren in der Filmbranche aktiv und hatten eine Idee mit einem speziellen 35mm Breitbild-Format, sehr ähnlich zu dem Cinemascope Format aus Hollywood. Und von dem Namen bzw. der jeweiligen Firma Superscope gibt es mehrere "Lebensgeschichten".

Superscope Technologies web site (July 9, 2009) :
2004 marked the 50-Year milestone of the Superscope brand. Superscope Technologies acquired the rights and assets of the Superscope brand in 1993. Superscope Technologies Inc. is about to celebrate its 15th anniversary as a privately held company.

Today, the company offers a line of innovative, easy-to-use music practice and recording tools for musicians and music educators worldwide. Superscope Technologies Inc. continues our legacy of providing high quality, reliable audio products under the Superscope brand.
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Many people remember Superscope's rock solid tape recorders from the 1970's. In fact, you'll still find owners of those Superscope tape recorders; many have elected to recondition and repair their trusty old recorder over the years. What you may not know is that the very first Superscope product wasn't a tape recorder. It was a trademarked process for producing wide screen motion picture prints more cost-effectively than the competing Cinemascope process.

As conceived and designed by the Tushinsky brothers, the "Superscope" wide screen process had its brief heyday from 1954, when Superscope Inc. was incorporated, to 1957. It was first used on the film Vera Cruz starring Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. Howard Hughes' RKO Pictures used the Superscope process on a total of nine films, including Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Disney successfully reissued Fantasia in Superscope in the mid-fifties.
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In 1957, Superscope's founders, Joseph, Irving, Nathan, and Fred Tushinsky were visiting Japan when they met with the executives of a fledgling Japanese electronics company named Sony. The Tushinskys discovered that Sony had seven stereo tape recorders, the world's first with built-in amplifiers. Soon realizing the potential for the tape recorders for the U.S. market, the Tushinskys within months contracted for exclusive rights to distribute them in the United States. The partnership was ideal. The Tushinskys' understanding of the needs of the American marketplace, combined with Sony's design and manufacturing expertise, propelled both companies to prominence. But despite their mutual origins, they remained separate entities. Superscope continued to expand and grow independently.

During the 1960's Sony released a variety of Sony/Superscope branded reel-to-reel and cassette tape recorders. Even as Sony in 1960 dropped the distributor of its transistor radios, Agrod, Superscope continued to market and distribute Sony tape recorders exclusively in the United States until January 1, 1975, when Sony acquired back distribution rights to its line of tape recorders from Superscope. But by 1973 Superscope, having seen the writing on the wall, was producing its own line of professional portable cassette recorders for the worldwide market.
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In 1964, Superscope Inc. acquired a small but prestigious hi fi company from Saul Marantz. From this acquisition Superscope developed and marketed Marantz high-fidelity audio products, such as stereo amplifiers, receivers, and record players worldwide.
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In 1971, Superscope purchased 50 percent of the stock in Standard Radio Corporation (SRC) of Japan, which had been manufacturing various Marantz products for Superscope. It was the first time an American company had ever been allowed to hold a 50 percent stake in a Japanese public company. In March 1975, SRC changed its name to Marantz Japan. Superscope continued to produce and assemble Marantz products in its U.S. plants and other Asian facilities.
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In 1980, Superscope sold its shares of Marantz Japan Inc. to Philips of the Netherlands.
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The Superscope C-101 portable monaural cassette recorder featured a rugged metal body, a built-in condenser microphone, push button controls, and auto shut off. Its price was $44.95 when introduced in 1973. Superscope followed up the C-101 with the C-201, a stereo, 3-head tape deck. Several Superscope tape recorder models were eventually introduced.

In 1975, Superscope's product line included eight portable tape recorders, six portable cassette radio products, seven Hi Fi receivers, two tuners, three amplifiers, five stereo tape decks, six speaker models, five compact music systems and eight microphones.
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Superscope Inc. reached its apex in the mid 1970s. In 1976, the company operated worldwide facilities totaling 1.25 million square feet in four countries. It grew internationally by establishing international distribution subsidiaries in France, Germany, the UK and merging its Japanese distribution subsidiaries into Marantz Sales Company.
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Superscope Inc. completed the construction of a massive headquarters building in Chatsworth, Calif., spanning 13 1/2 acres. It consolidated its corporate offices, warehousing, and North American manufacturing in this one facility. At the time this building had the largest footprint of any building in Southern California.

The manufacturing plant, employing hundreds of workers, produced Marantz amplifiers, Superscope stereo music systems, and Superscope speakers. The company initiated rigorous quality control procedures, invested in then state-of-the-art computer data and phone systems, focused on logistics efficiencies, and vertically integrated its marketing and publicity.

Superscope's annual report from 1976 boasts of the 600,000 sq. ft. building having 77 exit doors in its mile-long perimeter, 350,000 cubic yards of concrete, 18 miles of pipe, a 300,000 gallon water tank, and centrally controlled heating, air conditioning, fire sprinklers, and security alarms.

During this era, Superscope pursued a strategy of marketing Marantz as a premiere brand of quality consumer audio products, and Superscope consumer audio products as its budget line "made by Marantz." Naturally enough, the two brands became intertwined in consumers' minds. Superscope also manufactured Imperial speakers.
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The Superscope Pianocorder Reproducing System was launched with much fanfare in the late 1970's. It was also available factory-installed in the Marantz Reproducing Piano. The Pianocorder system provided a modern alternative to traditional player-piano rolls. It used ordinary cassette tape as a storage medium, encoding in 128-bit frames, at a rate of approximately 35 frames per second, a piano performance. The playback system did not load this data into any kind of memory but instead played it directly from commands stored on the cassette tape.

Superscope created a fairly extensive library of material for the Pianocorder system, available on over 30 ten-cassette volumes. A large portion of these recordings were made by converting reproducing piano rolls to Pianocorder format. Several famous pianists, including Liberace, George Shearing, and Oscar Peterson, produced recordings directly on Superscope's Bosendorfer concert grand piano.

In 1987, the Pianocorder Division was acquired by Yamaha. Yamaha developed its own competing Disklavier system and discontinued sales of the digital cassette-driven player piano one month later.
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Superscope also developed the popular Superscope Story Tellers / Tele-Story books. These books came with an audiocassette tape of music and narration. A wide variety of titles were published in the 1970s and 1980s.
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• A Changing World

• By the 1980s, with competition fierce in the consumer audio marketplace, this industry giant sold off many of its assets, including its giant Chatsworth facility, which it then leased back for a time. The company then changed its name from Superscope Inc. to the Marantz Company. In 1987, Joseph Tushinsky retired as chairman when the Marantz Company was purchased by Dynascan Corporation (today's Cobra Electronics Corp).
• By 1990, Cobra had sold the Marantz brand to Philips Electronics. In the process, Philips negotiated an agreement so that Cobra continued to market Marantz Professional products in the United States. In 1993, an executive from Cobra created the new business entity of Superscope Technologies, and obtained the rights to the Superscope brand, as well as distribution rights for Marantz Professional products in the Americas.

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Incorporated as an Illinois company October 1, 1993, Superscope Technologies has grown steadily over the past decade, as it successfully launched a full line of Marantz Professional source and recording equipment. Parallel to this growth, Superscope Technologies worked on reestablishing the Superscope brand worldwide. Superscope Technologies introduced a series of audio/video presentation and security products, before establishing its current line of music practice tools, which includes the popular PSD340 and PSD300 CD recording systems.

In 2002, as Marantz and its competitor Denon combined under D&M Holdings. Superscope Technologies sold its Marantz Professional business to the newly-created Marantz Professional division of Marantz America.

Today, Superscope is focused exclusively on its own brand of audio products. Superscope is rapidly gaining a reputation among a new generation of customers for providing high-quality products that address the needs of musicians and music educators. We like to think that today's Superscope embraces the best qualities of Superscope's rich 50-year heritage.
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