Hello together, I'm Alex, 20 years old (or rather young for this kind of hobby), live near Munich and I have been using physical media to listen to music my entire life. We always had a proper stereo system out of seperate components from Pioneer, Sony and Kenwood at home and I always liked listening to old cassettes that my parents used to record in the 1980s - 2000s. Since our Sony TC-K 620 cassette deck died in the late 00's, I used what was remaining and that being a Grundig mono cassette recorder + radio and my Sony WM-FX 103 that I sill have. Since this sony Walkman developed a problem with it's pinch roller not having enough grip to properly pull the tape anymore, I got a similar Sony WM-FX (I don't recall the exact model anymore sadly) for 7€ that worked for only a few weeks and then showed up similar issues after cleaning the pinch rollers (it was auto reverse) once. Since I wasn't able to find replacement pinch rollers for these cheap plastic Walkmans online, I instead stored both Sonys away and had a look at some older models from the 1980s instead and also on ones from other manufacturers such as Panasonic, Grundig and Aiwa. I just finally wanted something better than a device with a fully plastic mechanism that isn't working properly. And today it happened: I got myself an Aiwa HS-T06 AM/FM Stereo Radio Cassette Player. I really like it's build quality and feature set and especially it's stereotypical 1980s look with it's funky orange and green buttons and red printings. I definitely want to keep this Aiwa my main cassette player for on the go, since it's tapehead shows absolutely no wear or whatsoever. There was not even a single groove on the pinch rollers! This Aiwa must have been used only a few times in it's >40 years of existance. Sadly, it got dropped at some point, therefore a little piece of the plastic outer shell is broken off, other than that it barely shows any signs of scratches which I think is great. Here are some images of this nice little "Walkman": I decided to sign up here today, since many of the search results for my questions about these Aiwa devices lead to this forum and I hope that I may get some help here for the few little issues this thing has shown up so far Btw. if you are from Germany or a German speaking country, you might or might not already know me from other forums such as the German Tonbandforum, since I already reparied a bunch of hifi cassette decks and other components in the last couple of years... Best regards Alex
Welcome Alex! You're never too young for portable music and we had the best ; ) with the Walkmans. I'm staging my 3d printed wall right now and handling the 30+ that will go on one wall. I love re-checking them out with all the funky knobs and sliders, it was such a great time for manufacturing and I can't have too many hanging off the wall. One of our old members has a very nice blog that's mostly AIWA's and he's finally posting again after taking time off. https://personalhifiblog.blogspot.com/
