Been reading for a while. The folks here helped me get my Toshiba KT-VS1 as well as another VS1 and AS1 up and running, so I'm planning on doing a full post about the complications and issues to help any future enthusiast (or warn them away) who decides to take on one of these beasts
Welcome Wisconsin from across the border! Good luck with your repairs, I posted some Walky Ads from back in the day, I never realized how many ads they had but most of those ads never made it to the USA.
Thanks for the welcome! It's even crazier how many of those units never made it over to the US. Browsing ebay for a long time and I almost exclusively see the S1-3 VS1-3 and AS1-2. There were so many more Toshiba units and it's rare to see any of them. It's a real shame because towards the end they started to figure out the mechanism and still make the units quality. Later on they erred more towards the "happy meal toy" side of portable cassette players, but for a while there they were making some real competitors!
That's what really got me excited about boomboxes and Walkmans 20+ years ago. I found a huge AIWA, not the 950 but one of the big ones, and I got on this forum. Back then there was about 10-20 members that knew all the cool models and they were completely different, and much better, than the three-piece boomboxes and entry-level Sportsters I was using as a kid (and the only stuff I ever saw). Luckily the internet popped up right around when people were throwing out vintage audio, thinking it was dinosaur equipment. The stories of I just threw out a stack of silver Pioneer used to be pretty common for me.
I'm always a tinge jealous of folks who got into the hobby at that time. I picked up on (at least in my area) the tail end of it, so for the first year or so as I was learning the ins and outs I could still go find a halfway decent dual cassette deck and receiver at goodwill. In fact my one and only steal of a deal was a Sony TC-K717ES for $10. My area however has caught onto the times and anything even halfway decent is big bucks and only available on ebay or other bidding websites. That isn't to say a deal is impossible now, just much harder, hence the jealousy Either way I've more recently wandered off the well known models, just to see what each manufacturer was putting out when they were really on top of their game. A Sansui SD-5050 reel to reel for example was a bit out there for me as all my experience with Sansui was their black plastic range from later on in their years. The Toshibas I've mentioned as well as the KT-S1 I had for a while were welcome surprises, and most recently I've gotten two Sanyo walkmans for incredibly cheap, a 4430 and an M-G55 both of which offer incredible sound and a refreshingly simple mechanism. The lack of information for these models is the only common issue I've run into
