1987 was the 250th anniversary of Antonio Stradivari's death, and DENON marked it with an eight-page A3 image catalog that photographs its gear next to real, named Stradivarius violins: Sunrise (1677), Dancla (1710), Oppenheim (1716), the Emperor (1715).

The whole thing runs on one pun. 名器 and 名機 are both read meiki: the first is a masterpiece instrument, the second a masterpiece machine. Every spread uses the same parallel headline - "a masterpiece instrument has a romance polished by history, a masterpiece machine has a romance passed on by word of mouth" - over three pages of dense text about Stradivari, who kept building violins until he was 93, leaning on his two sons at the end.

Then the equipment: the DCD-3300G CD player in champagne gold, the DAP-5500 "digital preamplifier," the 62kg SC-R99 speakers (¥168,000 each, about $1,160 then and \~$3,200 today - the catalog admits several people at the speaker factory hurt their backs building them). The odd one out is the PRA-2000ZR, a pure-analog phono preamp with three phono inputs, printed in 1987 with the line "wishing for a Stradivarius-length run, we stubbornly bet on PHONO." CD had already won and DENON knew it. They ran the page anyway.

In 1987 DENON built an entire catalog around a pun that only works in Japanese