Recommend me a good modern audio cassette player

What’s good, and low on surface noise?

Thinking of a “boom box” kind of thing.

I’ve pretty much accepted that whatever I get will a) be expensive and b) not available in a storeX

I think a refurbished nakamichi from the golden days will outplay any newer model

Revive!

I need a cassette player for reviewing and digitizing cassettes. I'm mostly going to be using it with my laptop so form factor is secondary to having a good, solid tape mechanism. OTOH, it would be nice if it was portable enough to fit in my suitcase.

The old Sonys are great but expensive these days, good resale value though

XP - My friend, who knows a lot about these things says -

"what he needs is one of my nakamichi portables, really. or one like them. the 550 is pretty easy to work on, & has this fab history of being the ultimate tapers' deck, with three mic inputs. the prices aren't crazy- both of mine were under £200 & in nice shape."

Then he sent me a pic of a stack of 5 of them in his studio

Nice! Elvis isn't taping so i don't think they need to spend that much.

Since you mentioned portable, I'd pick up a Sony or Panasonic walkman. The models people aren't hunting for can be cheap. Find one at a price you can live with and Google the model to make sure it's not crazy hard to work on. My Sony WM-EX364 was 20 or $30 and just needed a new belt, which was easy to do. No proper line out,fwiw (for that you'd be getting into something like MaresFriend i think). If I was digitizing off of it I'd turn the headphone jack on max and test for distortion. Could need to be turned down a little.

There's really no one making a nice tape mechanism now from what I've seen.

Are tape players generally more durable than CD players? I've picked up a decades-old deck off the curb that works fine, and a CD/tape boombox as well, but the CD portion is kaput.

I think tape players are more durable than CD players, but CDs themselves are much more durable than cassette tapes. (All based on anecdotal evidence, of course.)

it all depends, really

Elvis, do you have a stereo setup that you could hook up a cassette deck to? I think you're going to have issues digitizing cassettes with a walkman.

I use a JVC TD-W209 tape deck, which I got for free, but you could easily find this model or something comparable for ~$35 on eBay (not sexy enough to be collectable)

I have the JVC working through my Marantz receiver and I use a Behringer UCA202 RCA to USB converter to get the signal into my Macbook.

So, that's how I digitize my cassettes!

What sort of issues are you thinking of, budo jeru? Yeah I'd say if these are one-of-a-kind tapes, a home machine would be the best thing. But as long as you have fresh batteries in a Walkman it should do a nice job.

wrt old boomboxes, the first thing I'd expect to go is tape belt. But yeah cheap CD lasers and door issues (can also be a belt) are big too. Who knows.

Oh and when it comes to belts, should invest in a set of various belts like this eBay listing I just found when venturing into vintage cassette decks. Basically just pull any loose/disintegrating belts from a machine, find your closest match from the mixed pack, and put it in place.

There just isn't a way to get the proper signal from your walkman to your laptop. You need an amplifier of some kind, either internally like the Nakamichi 550, or externally like on your home stereo. Otherwise the sound is going to be way too quiet.

I mean, unless you use some kind of preamp thing. I guess that could work.

makes me want to compare the walkman vs my living room Technics lol. Will report back......eventually :)

if it is just weak, normalizing it on the computer after recording should be just as good as a preamp rig.

There are Walkman models with a line out option in addition to a headphones port

I've got a CD Walkman with optical out, even. I don't think any of the cassette ones had that.

OK. Yeah, maybe I was overthinking it. I'm now wondering if the Behringer device I linked above could go directly into a walkman headphone jack (with an RCA > 1/8" converter) or using the line out. In which case you'd only need to spend a total of around $60 for a portable setup

(Not that you'd get a lot out of that with a cassette one, unless the analog-to-digital phase is better than you'd get from an external device. Some home dual tape decks did have optical out)

Yes a headphone jack to RCA adapter would go right into that. Remember when computers just had line-in? If Elvis needs an interface too, I got nothing real useful on that part!

The only thing to mess around with if you lack line out is whether you have distortion when the volume's cranked to max, meaning you have it somewhere in the middle and then normalize in software

Bizarrely, I've picked up two USB pre-amps/DI boxes off the curb as well -- maybe walk around neighborhoods with capricious home audio hobbyists?

Something with proper line level outs into a decent interface would be ideal, a headphone jack output not so much, and normalising a file afterward runs the risk of bringing up the noise floor.

nobody's releasing things exclusively on cassette for good audio fidelity

Basically, the project at hand is that I'm looking at ~400-500 cassette tapes of radio shows, live recordings, and in person interviews that go back to the mid-1980s. All of them are technically one-of-kind recordings, but there's some rare "whoa I've never even seen an interview with this band" recordings that stood out and need archiving. These really rare tapes I'm going to take to a friend who does this professionally, but there's no way I can afford to hire him on everything...

Fortunately most everything is labeled, but I need to sort everything out and give everything a listen to before deciding what to do. I have stereos, A-D converters, pre-amps, and an effectively an entire recording studio on hand - it's the cassette deck. I revived this thread as I was digging into the tapeheads.net forums on the off chance there was a bomb-proof cassette player equivalent to the Technics 1200.

fwiw I have had an Onkyo TA-2027 for like 30+ years and it is an absolute tank, I just clean the heads every once in a while.

not modern tho

ok so you want the cassette deck equivalent of a 1200 that you can use with your recording studio setup ... and it needs to fit in your briefcase

you should get like a refurbished tascam 112 or something

Those Tascam 112 and 122s seem to be what I'm looking for... I have a 2U rack flight case I have for traveling they just bolt into

("I have"x2 wtf?)

you should get like a refurbished tascam 112 or something

Anyway thanks for the suggestion budo, I found a refurbed 122 at a studio liquidator out here. It's the antithesis of portable, but is exactly what I needed.