Hi I've recently gotten into cassette tapes because I've grown disillusioned with streaming services and constant subscriptions. I wanted to own my music for once. When I was on holiday in New York a few months ago, I went into a vintage music store and found whole racks of tapes and fell in love with them. I bought my first ever tape, ABBA Gold, before I'd even gotten a way to play it. A few days later, I found a very cheap plastic clear cassette player. I put my new tape into it and, my god, did it sound terrible. But I didn't care, because I owned it. Unfortunately the tape broke soon after, likely because of the cheap player, and I've been wanting to get myself a tape deck to record ABBA Gold again on a blank tape. After that, I bought a Fiio CP13 and it sounded great. After getting home from America, I bought a Sony WM-EX314, which worked for a little bit but has started showing some issues even after replacing the belt. The addiction to cassette equipment has clearly started haha. So as you can tell, I'm very new to this but I'm hoping to be able to build a collection of tapes and vintage tape players. The one I've really got my eye on right now is a Sony WM-EX672, which unfortunately I'm really struggling to find. Hopefully I can find some help on here for that. Thank you for reading this
Welcome to the forum. Obviously we love cassettes and equipment around here, you've found the fun side of finding equipment and music which makes it even more exciting. Unfortunately some of the equipment is very complicated and needs maintanance. Broken tape is easy to fix, you can still find splicing kits that have a razor and tape to mend the break.
Cool story. I purchased a couple of .flac files of music and even an album (Cybotron 1976) in once, hoping to get higher quality versions. But other than that managed to stay away from streaming services.
Thanks! I'm still a newbie when it comes to the anatomy of tapes, but its not the tape itself that's broken (sorry, should've been clearer). I noticed that suddenly it wasn't playing anymore, and it looked like a little piece of plastic had broken off, one that seemed to have been holding the tape to the reels(?).
Most tape reel hubs (the inside roller) have a piece of plastic (key) that slides sideways out. It's used to hold the inside edge of the tape on the reel, maybe it slide off?
Nice story anewtaper. Welcome! Hope you find the coveted Walkman soon. Just keep looking patiently and it will probably come along eventually.