Warning: not specifically knowledgeable advice about this unit. But anyway - Lafayette was a house brand of Radio Shack components. Of the ones I experienced in the 70's, they were cheap and lived down to their price. 

It was cheap crap then, and it hasn't improved with age.

Lafayette was actually the house brand of Lafayette Electronics, which was a major catalog electronics supplier in the 1960s and 1970s. They also had many retail stores for many years, and competed head-to-head with Radio Shack until the 1980s, when they had financial problems and Circuit City bought them out.

Allied Electronics, which was a similar company, had a house brand called Knight, and also carried Harman-Kardon, Marantz, and Fisher stereo gear. 

I still have some catalogs from them, 1960s vintage.