This was in a charity shop for £5 labelled "cassette deck not working". It was still there a couple of days later so I took pity on it. The markings inside indicate it was made in 1996, but it seems to have been made for a few years. Rebelting was no problem. Removing six screws, including inside the battery compartment at the top near the handle allowed the front to be removed. Inside removing another two screws and the tuning scale allowed the entire deck to be lifted out. As I suspected would be the case the belts were very loose Two belts from one of those eBay multi packs restored Performance is about what you would expect from a box this size which is the upper end of minis. Six D cells give a reasonable power. It uses a genuine Mabuchi motor. As an engineer I am impressed by the amount of thought that went into this box to reduce the assembly time (and therefore cost) without adversely affecting operation. A few examples:- The battery compartment springs press directly against the PSU PCB so no wires are needed. The tuning scale is simply two pieces of moulded plastic. There is even a moulded plastic stop to make it easy to align the pointer with the tuning. Where cables are used they have connectors to plug into the boards. The cassette deck has two four pin connectors but they had even gone to the trouble of using different colours to indicate where to plug each one. It might have been a low cost box (although I have yet to find it in a catalogue to get a new price) but "It's a Sony". Buying something like this for such a low price makes me think how lucky kids are today. Sixteen year old me, whose Radio Cassette Recorder was a mono cassette recorder hooked up to an old AM radio would have loved to have something like this. However, Sounds of the 90s presenter Fearne said last night that she recently had to explain to her children what a DVD is, prompting questions from them like "why couldn't you just select it on the streaming TV ?"
Here you find version 202 and 203 ... I assume it's from the same year Catalogo Sony 1991 | Forum di Stereo2Go
Two years out as just found it in the 1993 catalogue on Hi-Fi Archiv http://www.hifi-archiv.info/Sony/1993/ Given the similarities in styling it was probably from the same designer though. Just like the Walkmans there are many similar variations, with a total of 18 boomboxes in that catalogue. Maybe you had to design twenty units before you were eligible for promotion in the design team. From the internal date codes mine was definitely made in 1996 but the circular mould date code had been going from 1993 and was almost full up.
