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Between my mother moving house and my grandfather’s passing I’ve been forced to go around the country collecting possessions. In amongst the Spanish and French literature I found a few boxes of cassettes, but of course I don’t have anything to play them with….
So what tape deck should I get?
I’ve also recuperated my vinyl collection, but again I’ve nothing to play them with.
From dave:
I’ve a turntable from http://www.ion-audio.com/ that I have used to convert all my vinyls to MP3. They do tape decks as well. They are mac compatible as far as I know.
Maplins sell them, also I have purchased stand alone vinyl players from http://www.richersounds.ie/.
From Kae Verens:
for the tape deck, I’d go for the ZX Spectrum +2 – play your tapes, and wallow in the luxury of 128k speccy gaming.
From Donn:
I don’t know what is available on the tape front these days, presumably there aren’t too many models being produced now.
I have a nice Yamaha one I picked up a few years ago, it’s been pretty solid, infact I find most Yamaha stuff to be fairly reliable. I wouldn’t touch anything Philips makes with a bargepole. Generally most Teac, Denon, NAD and Sony stuff are reasonably reliable.
I guess it depends on what your usage will be, whether you plan on using it a lot or just want something basic enough to transfer the tapes onto your computer and convert them to mp3 / oggs etc.
I can’t believe Richer Sounds still have the same website they had when I worked there 8 years ago. I did offer to redesign it for them a few years ago but they never got back to me.
From Michele Neylon:
Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.
I’m not 100% sure what I want. I have quite a bit of vinyl that I don’t have on CD or any other format. Some of it was never released on CD (eg. C-Cat Trance’s first album). I’d like to be able to listen to the vinyl and maybe copy it to a digital format. The tapes – similar kind of situation, but I think I’ve replaced most of the originals with CDs at this stage, so it’s not as important
I guess I’ll have to spend some quality time on ebay
Michele
From Phil:
Have a look around some car boot sales, you’ll probably pick one up for minimal cost. You’ll be able to find some dirt cheap vinyl as well.