09-12-2011, 02:37 PM
I've got a number of old cassettes that have music I can't find anywhere else. I'd like to transfer them to my Mac. Problem is that we no longer have a decent cassette player/deck at home.
I'm not wild about spending a lot of money on a cassette deck as this likely be a relatively short-term use. I also don't really want a full-sized deck because they take up so much space. (Minor rant: why do hifi components have to come in such large boxes when they are mostly empty space inside? Especially since most people don't need them to stack with a record player any more.)
One idea is to get a used Sony professional Walkman. Apparently the recording quality on some of these was pretty good. But they seem to be expensive on eBay ($200 range). I'm leery of spending that much on an old machine full of rubber belts, gears and motors. Example:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-WM-D6C-Walk...te_Players&hash=item3f0db11e01#ht_500wt_914
I'm also not impressed by the USB cassette players on the market. There is a TEAC deck at Amazon that looks OK (also plays CDs), but again it's $200.
http://www.amazon.com/AD-800-Player-Cass...B0037VZUPO
I found some interesting info on high end tape decks here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mleone/gdead/tapi...part1.html
but it doesn't look terribly current.
Has anyone looked into tape decks recently?
- Winston
I'm not wild about spending a lot of money on a cassette deck as this likely be a relatively short-term use. I also don't really want a full-sized deck because they take up so much space. (Minor rant: why do hifi components have to come in such large boxes when they are mostly empty space inside? Especially since most people don't need them to stack with a record player any more.)
One idea is to get a used Sony professional Walkman. Apparently the recording quality on some of these was pretty good. But they seem to be expensive on eBay ($200 range). I'm leery of spending that much on an old machine full of rubber belts, gears and motors. Example:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-WM-D6C-Walk...te_Players&hash=item3f0db11e01#ht_500wt_914
I'm also not impressed by the USB cassette players on the market. There is a TEAC deck at Amazon that looks OK (also plays CDs), but again it's $200.
http://www.amazon.com/AD-800-Player-Cass...B0037VZUPO
I found some interesting info on high end tape decks here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mleone/gdead/tapi...part1.html
but it doesn't look terribly current.
Has anyone looked into tape decks recently?
- Winston