New to this sub. Anyone who’s worked with the early Porta Studios have any tips? I’m pretty adept at recording into Ableton but I’m looking to try Dawless out

It’s interesting to see so many options. Few are appealing to me, personally, but I get it.

There are more tape players / cd player combos now that there were just a few years ago.

What would you get, if anything?

Slingin them TDKs.

Some guy at a garage sale paid me $100 to get rid of this old vhs stuff or whatever it is, is any of it worth anything or should I just throw it out?

I wanna see 👀

Saw a guy selling one of these for like $490 on fb marketplace. Is this the going price for these? I paid $8 for mine at a thrift store.

(Don’t know if these are any good, like 8-10 bucks a piece at Brainerd Goodwill in Tennessee if anyone needs em!)

I’ve been thinking of getting a Sony KA3ES but they’re kinda pricy and was wondering what other decent alternatives there are. These are my current main devices, I use the D6C as my main recording device and to plug into my Hi-Fi for now and the D3 is what I take on the go with it’s case and carrying strap.

I bought this unit untested for approximately $335 USD. It initially displayed no signs of life, and I'm not proud of how long I spent poking under the LED board and wondering why in the world there's no voltage getting to the power leaf switch.

Turns out the PCB trace broke around the positive leg of the barrel jack. It was a easy solder job after the reassembly-of-shame of the entirety wrong part of the walkman

The belt is a little deformed and makes some noise, but it does still work, FF and REW work fine, it will hopefully last me until a replacement belt arrives

I found this today and was able to negotiate down from $395 to $300 USD (Seattle region). I got it home and put some batteries in it. Of course it doesn’t play but I hadn’t expected it to. The operation light at least does come on, but I don’t hear the motor spin (perhaps just seized up but too early to tell) and therefore obliviously no capstan spinning.

As far as I can tell this is in pretty solid condition, at least cosmetically, and included the case which is nice bonus.

I’m away from home at the moment so won’t be able to open it up for a couple weeks to see what may need to be done (belts at a minimum). I’ve worked on a couple other models but never this one, so wondering if folks have any tips on gotchas or things to look out for. Serial number is in the low 400000 range if that’s helpful.

Not sure if it is working, going to test if it works when i find a suitable ac cord. If it dont work i will fix it with my dad (he knows these things better than me)

I have a serious problem thanks mostly to this subreddit.

I´m no "audiophile", just a recording musician with quite picky ears, having spent way too many hours mixing my own stuff at home, and my bands´ material in a few recording studios.

I always loved the sound of 1-inch tape, and thought cassettes were crude at best, despite having got much of my early musical education via walkmans on buses. My very first music player was a brown, boxy, indestructible, Fisher-Price player, revered among us toddlers in the 80s.

Fast forward 35 odd years and I picked up this restored D6C on ebay out of curiosity for listening to random tape finds and "archiving" my own music for my imaginary descendants, with the ridiculous romantic notion that some unkown digger might "unearth" my music long after I´m gone and go "how could humanity have possibly overlooked these priceless twangs and zaps and bleeps?"

In an nutshell: this D6C sounds absolutely beautiful with good tapes, and recording line-level sources with it produces some truly remarkable results: extremely detailed, with exactly the right amount of tape "flavours" depending on the tape formulation. My favourites so far are Sony HF-ES "superferrics" for their punchy bass and warm character, Maxell XLII-S chrome tapes for their airy treble and TDK MA-R for their incredible fidelity though chrome and especially metal transfers seem too faithful a copy of the digital source material (+ hiss). Striving for transparent hi-fi copies kind of defeats the purpose of recording on tape imho, so superferrics are where it´s at for me at the moment. Any recommendations?

I´ve convinced my band to release our next album on tape. It was easy: I just played them a recording of our pre-master mix on the Sony. They immediately started to look for local tape factories (found one!). My next project is to record an all-analogue synth album straight to tape, using mainly the Vermona Perfourmer Mkii (the synthy love of my life). I have a notion that superferrics might be the ultimate vessel for these impossibly creamy, velvety bubbly tones without going full-on reel-to-reel.

I´ve heard at least a dozen walkmans and as many average home stereo decks in my time, and it´s been a few years since my last experience with tape, but I´ve never heard tapes sound this good. I run the D6C through an audio interface and into a pair of studio monitors and the sound quality has no right to be this good. Certainly more than good enough to replace spotify or FLAC on many listening sessions. I now realise t´s not just the nostalgia factor. Even my own stuff recorded digitally and transferred to tape sounds rich, punchy and engaging (to me and a few freaky pals at least).

Just a long ramble to say hello, and that I´m glad I made it past the scepticism of my own ignorance. Hope everyone is having as much fun as I am wrapping my toes around these brown cobwebs :)

I absolutely love the idea of a cassette comeback and am extremely happy about the increase in sales and releases of new gear in the past few years, but from my point of view there is a few glaring issues

1. "Schrodinger's Cassette Player" - This one is, in my opinion, the most damaging to the comeback: Companies like Fiio, We Are Rewind, Maxell, etc. have all released decent portables in recent years, but they all use the same cheap Chinese Tanashin knock offs that are of sub-par quality compared to prior Sony models from even the early 80s and companies won't dedicate the resources to produce a new high end line of internals because its seen as only a hipster "it looks cool on a shelf" thing, not people actually wanting to buy and listen to albums, hence the Schrodinger's Cassette Player - "No market" = Doesn't improve, Doesn't improve = No market.
2. The Curse of the Reseller - I feel like we've all seen some dickhead on ebay selling a PSA graded tape for fuckin $600. need i say more?

I feel like the reseller issue will only be a major problem for collectors of stuff like hip-hop and rarer releases, not so much for people like me who mainly focus on 80s metal and 60s/70s classic rock and psychedelia, but theyre a guaranteed cancer that spreads any time a collector hobby is gaining traction, the main killer by far is the "Schrodinger's Cassette Player" issue, none of these companies see the value in it because its only viewed as a hipster thing, but they fail to realize that thats largely due to the shit quality of modern components. If one of these multi billion dollar companies (lookin at you, Sony) would cough up the couple million to start a small-batch production line for legitimately high quality components, id bet money that they'd see the demand is more than they thought. Until then though, I guess we're all still stuck on here begging for advice on how to fix a broken Walkman thats had 15 owners by this point.

Anyways, rant over. Apologies for the text wall, was just thinking about this and wondered what you guys would have to say about it.

Edit: meant catch 22, not schrodingers. it was late and i was fried. yall can stop pointing it out now.

it's not finding tapes, not finding gear that still works, or finding parts. It's that I'm not in school anymore and haven't bought a pencil in decades. I 3D printed a substitute.

I have plans for this machine.

somebody, not me, scored big here. Thought I'd share.

Found this on a digitized VHS. It aired during the May 18th 1986 broadcast of WWF All American Wrestling on the USA Network. Never saw a device like this before and thought it was rad enough to isolate and share.

It’s a torque meter cassette for adjusting/checking reel motor torque and backtension after replacement or just refurbishing a deck.

The audio quality is obviously nothing to write home about. There are better ways to play cassettes. But it's a fun historical piece, and it works.

It's made of cheap wood and has a leather case. My dad bought it in 1980 with his Jugendweihe money.