Hiya everyone! My name's Mattias, i'm 21 years old and have recently gotten quite interested and fascinated by old Walkmans and other similar devices! I have been reading the forums a lot lately and gotten quite a lot of help from that actually! I'll be posting my recent purchases and questions here on the forums and i'm looking forward to your responses! Kind Regards Mattias
Hello Mattias and welcome to Stereo2Go. When I was your age I was fascinated by old valve/tube radios and bought quite a few of them. I wasn't the only person who was collecting them as this photo from my one visit to Sweden in 1998 shows. What is now surprising is that at the time when the Walkman had first come out, most of the "antique" radios were only about 25 years old. Nowadays it is old Walkmans and Boomboxes that are collectable and many of them are approaching 40 years old.
Do you have any sort of collection and stack of tapes yet other than the TPS-L2 you purchased or did you just start off? If so, we like to see photos of what other people got here on Stereo2Go, feel free to post your collection or open a thread for it. Been meaning to do that myself.
Actually no, i have my dad's old collection to browse and borrow tapes from. But nothing of my own I will however be looking to pick up a lot of tapes now that i have a decent player to use! Woah! You were in Sweden the year i was born I haven't had any interest at all in radios or walkmans whatsoever before a couple weeks ago when i started reading about old walkmans and totally fell in love with them
No worries, starting off in a similar way as I. Things will go forward pretty fast from now on! I started (or started again) with recording mixtapes just last year when I got a new walkman. Our entire old tape collection (and portable cassette player) succumbed to a water damage 6 years ago. However, I managed to regain two tapes (original, well kept) that I've missed a lot since then, this year even. The aforementioned loss kicked off a desire and passion I've tried to keep low and partially even forgot about for a bit, and then it just got bigger and bigger and I started out with using a minidisc walkman and a handful of recordable MDs we still had and went semi-back to tape once I found a fair price (I'm cycling through my different media rather than sticking to one). What was it that made you fall in love with them by the way? The charme of the spinning tape, the hiss of analogue recordings, the tiny (and impressive) mechanisms?
Honestly, i don't know. Maybe it's the "nostalgia" from my childhood of listening to my dads tapes in the living room and spinning them back with a pencil because the rewind on our cassette deck was broken, or just the fact that they are really cool little machines! I just really like them, though i prefer vinyl over cassettes. Listening to analogue media and watching the mechanics of it work just amazes me, and oh the background hiss and the crackles and pops. I just love it! I've considered buying some blank tapes to record some mixtapes but haven't gotten around to it
Yeah I can relate to that, it's got character compared to a simple file, there's just more visible magic going on. I actually started out with vinyl earlier in this decade before reexploring MD and tapes, which was before the vinyl trend really hit on around here, so I could get a fair share of used LPs for 1-2€. Over here you can still buy Maxell UR90 in some shops. The bigger shops removed them from their shelves last year, but smaller ones still have them. Sure, they're not exactly high quality tapes (type 1 and seem to be inferior to original Maxells of these types), but they're good enough for practicing and "cheap". Small idea I had last year I thought might be worth sharing: I've composed mixtapes in Audacity and burnt them on CD which is then used to record onto tape (my recorder needs CDs for recording). Each side is one track to have continuous play during recording without any potential tiny breaks on track change and making the most use of the 45 (and about a half) minutes per side. It's just a bit tricky in getting 90 - 91min on a CD (size limitations), though that's how I have to do it due to a lack of a recorder I can connect with my PC's audio output. The plus side of this is though: Once I get better equipment, I will still have the source file. I can (re)adjust fade outs, transitions, positions of tracks, level volumes, cut out what I don't need and get exactly the length of one side at any time - and since they're also on CD, if my tapes happen to jam to death (which didn't happen yet and I hope won't happen anytime soon) I can easily rerecord them from this source. And don't worry, if you fear it might lose the charme of stopping a song "just in time" and then starting the next one, it's also a lot of work still.
Sounds like a lot of work, however i would probably find it interesting and fun to do! I'm looking into getting a recorder i can hook up to my PC through either USB or just an ordinary 3.5mm plug as an input! However they seem kind of hard to come by I'll keep looking though!
