Cool stuff for sale mega-thread.

Lol! That GEC is 1000% a cloney machine! Same as so many of the time although I have to say that it was a very good design & sound quality for the price! Everyone was jumping on the badge engineered bandwagon by 1981 & this player sold in it's 1000's bearing tons of AKA's

I still love the Triumph brand from Curry's which petered out around 1985 when the last models went on sale!

As for Matsui VCR's - (& Triumph) these were built by Orion in Korea I think & were amazingly well built, the later 'Midi' sized VCR's sold well up to the late 90's! Very reliable indeed with minimal stock faults! I rarely had any of them on the bench for repair that's why I liked them - Just very good value & performance!

All that came to an end with the demise of the audio cassette & VHS video A sad time in my life for sure........Both VHS & audio cassette had been pushed to the very limits of the technology & beyond!

I am out of the boombox world pretty much now I sold nearly all my machines as a job lot, keeping around 15 of my favourites - I guess I just moved on from constant repairs & collecting!

I still read both forums although I prefer this one as the other place has a few to many unsavoury folk I'd rather avoid!

I wonder what Orion make now......they have been around forever, they made the quite famous Waltham W-104 shoebox cassette recorder, my first cassette machine in 1976!! I have an unopened brand new one here! Opened only to test it's a time capsule!

Maybe I am a bit disillusioned with this modern world & would like to return to 1981 & do it all again...........

 

Unfortunately nothing. Apparently they went bankrupt in 2015 and again in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Electric
There isn't any money to be made in traditional consumer electronics there days.

I recall the amazement when Dixons started selling VHS VCRs for just £200. I paid £340 back in 1984 for my first one complete with wired remote control

I'm surprised about your comment on "Stock Faults". A bloke who I have known for thirty years lives near here in very nice bungalow, paid for by doing TV and Video repairs in his garage. I used to send quite a few people his way, commenting that his standard price was £60 for a repair. I'm sure he would have been very pleased to get £60 for fixing a stock fault. A friend was delighted when he fixed her Aiwa Midi system with a blown amp module. The shop she bought it from had kept it for a month before recommending that the best thing she could do was buy a new one for £250. Of course the problem is that now you could pick the system up for £15 at a charity shop. No wonder there are so few repair places these days.

 

Real shame to read that about Orion! Yep those Sub £200 Matsui VCR's were Orion built & as long as you avoided the dreadful VHS LP mode, they were great machines! LP was no good really even on the JVC/Panny's of the day either, picture quality was just unwatchable to these eyes!

Technical journals were the way to really learn about TV/Video/Audio in the 1980's & 1990's - I subscribed to a cpl of them for many years & learnt how to service & repair just about anything related! What a great life I can look back on - although active mainly in the car trade since mid 80's I always did repairs & teaching myself to do what I really love & that was repairing consumer stuff, that was all I ever wanted to do! I may be very restricted with what I can do now due to this horrible illness, but I had a very active & hectic life doing the things I love & getting paid for it (Apart from the many friends who I did it for free for)

Golden age was the same as Boomboxes 1980 - 1985 & Hi-Fi separates 1980 - 1989!

VCR's did improve with the astonishing VHS HiFi sound in the mid to late 80's & by the early 90's I was hooked on HiFi sound from my VCR & the analogue satellite services! Free music channels from all over Europe with a simple motorised dish & 'Other Services' from Scandinavia with a D2-Mac decoder! Then digital was forced on us all in the late 90's & I missed the analogue TV & radio channels enough to lose interest in sat TV

Suddenly the HiFi VCR was no longer wanted by the masses & VHS quietly bowed out..............

I still have my Panasonic NV-HS950 Super VHS VCR used to transfer to digital, no longer the heart of my HiFi system as it was in the 90's! Happy days for sure!

 

Here are a couple for the Mini System and MiniDisc fans

JVC CA-MD70R
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MUSIC-MI...973776?hash=item3440978f10:g:JPYAAOSwbgVft7DT


JVC MX-S5RMD
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/JVC-MX-S...248167?hash=item217ffd9da7:g:2QUAAOSwJHlf0ej1

Both for a fraction of what they must have cost new.

 

...i wonder what he's smokin':

https://www.ebay.de/itm/Apollo-Ster...ab15:g:q6YAAOSwFj5f1kcR&LH_ItemCondition=3000

 

Back at a more realistic price level, this weekend has been the first when non-essential shops have been allowed to open in the U.K. After going to a Department store (Debenham's) whose closing down sale was interrupted by the last lockdown, HMV where I bought the Kylie "Disco" CD having decided if it was time to support them, I went to my favourite local charity shop and saw this
Proof that there are still bargains to be found, at just £7.50 complete with speakers, remote, instructions, but a non working cassette deck. Twenty years ago it would have been a bargain at ten times the price. After thinking how far away I was parked and whether I actually needed another mini system I decided to leave it there. My only purchase was a new TV aerial flylead for £3 which is something I actually needed.

 

I still have this one, Sony SLV-685HF........was it one of the "good" ones? It does say Hifi on it, but I probably didn't even know what that meant, lol. Paid like $400 for it in 1992. Still works fine.

 

HiFi sound was much much better on the sound front than the linear sound tracks on earlier machines and is said to approach CD quality. It always puzzled me that VHS music tapes weren't more popular as to me they often seemed better value than CDs and often had more tracks. I guess most people had cheap VCRs with poor quality linear sound so to them they sounded like a Type 0 cassette.

Not the people I bought my first house from. They had one of these which cost about £600 back in the mid 1980s.

Having a mortgage to pay, it was six years before I could justify the cost of a HiFi VCR for myself, buying the first machine I saw below £300, and that was an ex display Akai.

Now I have four SVHS machines, but the most expensive of those was a JVC costing £110 brand new but from a clearance outlet. That was in about 2004 yet the box had lots of stuff about JVC being a sponsor of the 2002 World Cup on it.

 

One for fans of Minis and at a good "Buy It Now" price

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/303830360019?hash=item46bdb35fd3:g:w3UAAOSwDgtf7SSY&LH_BIN=1
I was trying to work out where the tuner was before I realised it is digital and on the cassette door.

 

On the subject of Technics I was surprised to see this when searching for Technics cassette decks

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/194062573254?hash=item2d2f07dec6:g:6C0AAOSwwLhgevw5

The styling shows it came from the same design team as the far more common Panasonics but Technics were always more upmarket.

For the person who wants to go very upmarket and has lots of space check this out

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/333911249695?hash=item4dbea9531f:g:pacAAOSw1qtgQqLn

To me it looks like the sort of system James Bond or one of his baddies would have had in the late 1970s.
Amusingly the only other item the seller has listed is a 2006 BMW --- at less than half the price of this.

 

Not surprising. German cars plummet in value after the warranty expires. I had a 2006 BMW that I sold for only $2800 last year.

 

Here's something 'cool' I found for-sale the other day:



It's a 'Walkman' style cassette player rebooted to seem more hip to a zoomer techy audience. Created by Nimm labs, it has apparently raised about $85,000 on kickstarter. It sells for US$89 after hongkong dollar conversion. Available in three colors:



Now, It's really cool to see the cassette making a comeback... and it does my heart good to see any new cassette players on the market... BUT, this player looks real cheap. That mechanism looks super flimsy, and I just hate the design. I mean, the backside of the motor is visible, and the branding on the clear lid gets easily lost in the rest of the design. Even with bluetooth 5, I'm not convinced.

You can buy it/check it out here:

IT'S OK Cassette Player | NINM Lab

So, I just thought this was kinda interesting, and sorry for the skepticism, but I just seem to find it hard to like it.

 

I wonder if it is even stereo ? I think that VWestlife and Techmoan have almost given up reviewing machines like these.
Here is one that is readily available in the U.K.


With most of the personal stereos they have reviewed it is often possible to find the same machines on Alibaba for about $10 each if you buy ten or more.

 

These devices are not designed for people like us (members of this forum), but for a younger generation who has never expericed listening to cassettes and considers them cool.

Buyers don't care about build or sound quality at all: they just buy it for the cool factor of it. They only use it with pre-recorded cassettes, which are actually better than the device itself. Techmoan illustrated this in his last video about a boombox built exactly like this.

@Longman Given the target audience for these devices it really doesn't matter if it is stereo or not (I would bet on mono). I'm sure the wow&flutter is all over the place, the sound lacks bass and treble and it's hissy. But probably that adds to that "cool factor"...

 

Do any Zoomers even own cassettes? Or would they just buy them for this device specifically? So they can post it on Snapchat to prove to their friends how sufficiently "steampunk" and "ironic" they are, lol. Complete with hashtags saying #okboomer.