the biggest irony is the sound comes from early Japanese transistors being prone to noise, distortion and intermodulation of the signal, something viewed as a great nuisance in any other piece of equipment such as a radio receiver or hi fi amplifier. This caused designers (at least in Europe) to reject the entire 2SA/B/C series as “poor quality”, in favour of European low noise ones like the BC109 etc. Americans however used Japanese transistors in a lot of kit as well as their 2N series as thy were cheap.

I vaguely remember Roland trying to make (or making) a new version only to find that Toshiba etc had long since stopped making the transistors as they weren’t popular due to the other problems!