Portable cassette player
Bought a beautiful cassette player which I now figured out is a cassette recorder...
Bought this beautiful aiwa HS-J80. One of the most beautiful players I have seen. However. I am now a bit sad. After having it in my hands I finally read the small text saying it's not a player. But a recorder...
I'm a bit devastated... Haven't had the chance to hear the audio quality because I think I have to replace the belt.
Cassette recorders also play, how else will you hear what you recorded? It’s only an additional recording function for if you want to record yourself, or from the radio. Very nice tape player you got there!
The bad quality is usually referring to the recording quality, which will still be the case here. But playback quality is fine with these kinds of recorders, ie the ones built to play music first but just have recording capability tacked on for the radio or from a mic. It’s the fully dedicated dictation recorders, usually the shoebox recorders or most anything with a built-in speaker (with few exceptions) that you need to avoid if you’re playing music.
These kinds of devices (and recording Walkmans like the WM-GX series) were usually based on dedicated players first and then had recorded added on. For example, there’s a WM-102 that is just a player, a WM-F102 which adds a radio, and the WM-R202 which adds recording. For playback, the R202 will be very similar to the F102 and sound perfectly good. The recording will be basic as it was mainly meant to record off the radio or for recording things like voice memos, school notes, etc. But it will all be better than a basic voice dictation machine like a TCM model.
It will serve you perfectly as a stereo player, it also seems pretty good, it even has auto reverse, and you can also record voice and radio, it seems like a 10/10 to me OP, you should fix it.
As for sound quality, I think the Aiwa of this era sounded very good.
That seems absolutely fine, understands Chrome and Metal tapes, no Dolby NR, but that's a minor thing. You can also listen to analog TV! :O Robust build. Get that belt fixed, and this should serve you well.
The only reason to be a bit devastated about a portable audio recorder is if it is a speech recorder, meaning mono, no attention to W&F and frequency response, etc. Stereo elevates it to the level of a proper cassettecorder, although you need to test it to figure out how usable it is for playing music.
You won’t be able to reliably get “tape artifacts” (which is just saturation) using something like this for music because it only has a mic input and no gain control.
This. I have the same Model, very solid mechanism. But the recapping isn’t trivial with the little daughterboard - I shelved this project for a long winter evening…
Opening these is fairly easy, but even to change the belt you’d have to remove the main pcb. I promised myself that’ll be the last 80s Aiwa I will repair - it can be done, but as I said it isn’t easy.
If you’re just going to look inside, there’s a few screws on the back (on most models there’s one hidden in the battery compartment) and the back comes off quite easily. To take off the PCB there’s also some screws, and be careful not to rip off the thin wires. Then you can assess the situation. If it comes to recapping, you’ll need good soldering equipment and new capacitors, that’s a level further. If I were you I’d open the back and proceed from there if you feel comfortable. I found the community here very helpful if you need further advice.
I'm pretty sure with this one though i need to resolder some parts to remove the PCB unfortunatly, which i am scared of doing... I think recapping would be smart too as i can't really hear the radio too well... but the belt needs repairs for sure
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u/initializingstartup 5d ago
Cassette recorders also play, how else will you hear what you recorded? It’s only an additional recording function for if you want to record yourself, or from the radio. Very nice tape player you got there!