Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Optimus STAV-3100 A/V 100WPC receiver from 1990.
This was made by Sherwood for Radio Shack and is a nice full featured unit. It’s second to top of the line for its model year.
Has power meters, antenna signal strength indicators, subsonic filter, high filter, -20db muting, mono switch, triple tone with defeat switch, and remote control. Also has a surround switch, which turns your speakers “B” into surround channels. 
It’s an AV unit so it will switch composite video.
Most people may not particularly care for this type of receiver and could consider it black plastic crap but I would strongly disagree because it really has a lot of nice features which would start to disappear a couple years later.
What features would disappear in the upcoming years?
-The types of controls you can only use a remote to change. So you would be screwed without the remote on certain things
-Displays which are extremely minimalistic and barely show anything.
-Lack of little added features such as the LED on the volume knob.
-Lack of lots of buttons, which let you do a lot of things.
-Lack of features I mentioned above, which are nice. If you use a turntable, the low filter is nice as well as the audio muting button with the needle drops.
I’ve opened this up and cleaned it out. I only paid $40 for it on the Facebook marketplace a year ago. I like having it in the collection as it’s a little minimalistic, but action packed when you look at the features. No internal adjustments such as bias or DC offset.
I don’t know a lot about Sherwood in these days because they fell out of existence but this unit appears to made very well with discrete transistors, and great heat dissipation.
Have a good rest of your summer everyone!
Optimus STAV-3100 A/V 100WPC receiver from 1990.
This was made by Sherwood for Radio Shack and is a nice full featured unit. It’s second to top of the line for its model year.
Has power meters, antenna signal strength indicators, subsonic filter, high filter, -20db muting, mono switch, triple tone with defeat switch, and remote control. Also has a surround switch, which turns your speakers “B” into surround channels. 
It’s an AV unit so it will switch composite video.
Most people may not particularly care for this type of receiver and could consider it black plastic crap but I would strongly disagree because it really has a lot of nice features which would start to disappear a couple years later.
What features would disappear in the upcoming years?
-The types of controls you can only use a remote to change. So you would be screwed without the remote on certain things
-Displays which are extremely minimalistic and barely show anything.
-Lack of little added features such as the LED on the volume knob.
-Lack of lots of buttons, which let you do a lot of things.
-Lack of features I mentioned above, which are nice. If you use a turntable, the low filter is nice as well as the audio muting button with the needle drops.
I’ve opened this up and cleaned it out. I only paid $40 for it on the Facebook marketplace a year ago. I like having it in the collection as it’s a little minimalistic, but action packed when you look at the features. No internal adjustments such as bias or DC offset.
I don’t know a lot about Sherwood in these days because they fell out of existence but this unit appears to made very well with discrete transistors, and great heat dissipation.
Have a good rest of your summer everyone!
