Hello ! My name is Valentin, I am from Romania and I have a hobby for cassettes and things related to them. Especially SONY walkmans and portable cassette recorders. I have a small collection of SONYs and other brands which I intend to grow bigger. I also like to repair and restore these devices and bring them to their best condition possible, because they are a piece of history which I consider needs to be preserved. I got into this hobby from the nostalgia from my childhood, when I broke some cassette recorders and was not able to repair them at that time. Most of them went to trash. And it was also the frustration that I never owned a high quality deck, cassette recorder or walkman. So one day I decided to buy one at a local auction: it was a Sanyo M4440 in pretty bad condition. That deviced sparked something inside me and motivated me to buy a second one, identical, but in much better condition. I cleaned it. replaced the belt, lubricated the mechanism, polished the pastic case and I was very satisfied about the result. After a couple of other Sanyos and Pansonics, one day I decided I need to have the SONY WM-D6C, which I wanted for a very long time, but considered pretty expensive. I found one o ebay, in almost mint condition at a fair price and decided to buy it. From then on, my enthusiasm for such devices only grows bigger. I am fascinated by how good can a tape sound (especially with Dolby B or C NR). After some time, I also became intersted in cassettes themselves, as I was curious about how good a recording can sound on different types and brand of tapes. If you want to know something more specific, I'm happy to share with you. Valentin
Welcome Valentin, the best thing about the cassette hobby is all of the different aspects of it and at the end of the day you get to listen to music.
Hi Valentin and welcome to Stereo2go! Collecting recorders is a great, but highly addictive hobby. I started buying them on eBay twenty years ago, when everyone was literally giving away their analog stuff and you could pick up those little gems for next to nothing (often, postage would cost me more than the item itself). I'm glad to have started when I did, because the good stuff is getting scarce and prices have skyrocketed ever since cassette has become fashionable again. A good deal can still be found however. On the photo below, the recorder second from left on top of my display is a brand new, unused Sony PC216A 16-channel DAT-recorder. Back in the eighties, it retailed for a walloping 16 thousand dollars, but as we all know, DAT-technology went out the window years ago, and I recently picked it up on eBay for a mere 100 Euros. I never saw collecting as an investment, though, and still don't. I simply love the way those little things look (especially Sony) and how they managed to squeeze all that technology into ever smaller boxes, even before integrated circuits were invented. Anyway, good luck collecting and be sure to show us what you've managed to dig up!
That was a stunning buy. The automotive equivalent would be getting one of those old Maclaren F1s, undriven, for £3400. I needed the internet and a calculator to work that out. Something that is fascinating about late 20th century electronics is the amount of effort that was put into storing what are now modest amounts of data. The Sony would have been competing against the Alesis ADAT https://www.musicradar.com/news/blast-from-the-past-alesis-adat
It is indeed an addictive hobby. As I have read on this forum and tapeheads.net, even 10 years ago, the prices were down significantly from what they are today. And I am pretty convinced that this is a wave that will pass at some point and the prices will start to go down again, that's why I totally agree with the fact that it's by no means an investment. The only models that I expect to go even higher in price are the limted editions, the TPS-L2 (if it were to became that rare that you could not find one, which isn't the case now). Like it is with the DD-100 Badoo Khan, there is an ongoing auction on ebay with current price 730USD, and a couple of hours to go. But these kind of prices are a bit too much and may be worth only when someone really wants a device like that bad enough. It happened to me recently to buy a first generation WM-3 in mint condition for about half that price (which I still consider to be high), because I wanted one very bad for a long time. And at first I didn't even realize it was the first generation, as I wasn't aware there were 2 generations (as in the case of TPS-L2). But at this end I like this first generation much more; and it also seems to be much rarer than the second one. I also have a couple of DAT recorders (Casio DA-7, Tascam DA-P1 and AIWA HD-S1). I bought them after I saw Techmoan video on DAT and became interested about how good one sound. I was amazed by the AIWA HD-S1 and decided I should buy more and ended up also buying a couples of dozen DAT cassettes also. I would dare to say I consider it better than a CD, given the 48Khz sampling rate and the fact that you can re-record the tapes. But I guess people wanted to move on from tape to a more futuristic technology and that is part of why DAT never took of in consumer market. Your SONY PC216A was an absolute bargain for what it is ! Happy you got it at such a low price ! I like you collection as it focuses on more older devices than the ones I have. Thanks for sharing ! I will make another thread in the near future to share my collection with all of you. I also want to include the Pioneer PK-R7AW, which is extremely rare from what I can see. It will arrive next week and I will do a complete clean, lubrication, adjustments and I'll be taking some pictures in the process also.
Techmoan has done quite a few videos on how new audio formats, DAT and then Minidisc were frowned upon by the big record companies who did their best to suppress them. Even Music CD recorders were limited to using special discs which had royalty paid on them. https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/cdr-w-disks-for-audio-cd-recorders-293969/ However, while they were doing their best to suppress new recording formats, Napster and cheap computer CD Writers were sneaking up behind them. Thanks to their mistakes, the music industry is now controlled by the likes of Apple and Spotify.
The prices were down 20 years ago but the supply was also a fraction from what we have today. I waited something like 4-8 years for a Marantz Boombox to show up on Ebay and now there's several at any time. The good boomboxes always went for a premium but there were also wild stories of .99 cent starting bids and equipment was bought for a few dollars. In the old days nobody bid on units with a "starting bid", which would be something like $20.00, we all wanted .99 cents. There's still a lot of this equipment out there, they sold millions of Walkmans, I think most are tucked away in peoples storage waiting for clean out day. It's great that guys like Techmoan are pulling people in, the equipment is beautiful even if you don't use it, there's so many stories of stuff being tossed because either people don't know it has value or it's taking up too much space. A couple years ago I saw a really old Burroughs Adding Machine, lots of brass and moving parts but no one wanted it, I'm pretty sure it got thrown in a construction dumpster. I told the contractor to call some accountants, it would have looked really cool on display in an office.
I hope that's true, but my personal impression is that 70-80% of that milions sold have long gone to trash, especially the low-end and mid-range models, which don't have a lot of value. When I first started collecting walkmans, I was amazed by how many can be found on local auction sites and ebay, but now that I looked more carefully, I can tell that many of them don't sell that easily, some don't sell at all. The biggest request is for SONY models. On the other hand I have seens Pansonics that are on sale for over a year and haven't been sold (listed at decent prices). Also AKAIs, which are extremely rare, don't seem to sell that much. Same with Toshiba and others. And I can personally confirm that although I like SONYs the most, I am interested in other brands as well. I scored 2 Infinity Intimate stereo this year, one for 25$ and another for 50$. One of them came with the leather case and AM and FM cassettes. They needed complete overhaul, as all the small electrolytic capacitors were leaked. And they're extremely rare.
In my opinion, both Mr X and Valentin are right in their assessment on what happened to the little gems we're all searching for. Of all the stuff I've collected over the past twenty years (and this also goes for my collection of analog film cameras), about 95 percent is in mint condition and the remaining 5 percent is brand new. The fact that I didn't need to do much cherry-picking leads me to believe that the people who actually USED their equipment (as a hobby or professionally), simply gave- or threw it away when it broke down, whereas those who bought something on an impuls, or got it as an unwanted birthday- or going-away present, might have just used it once or twice before putting it back in the box and chucking it in a bottom drawer. I've heard many a "I found this in attic, it belonged to my dad, he never learned how to use it, and neither did I"-story. Some stuff never even left the store, like the Dictaphone 4250 voice processor, the only recorder ever made that used the smallest of all cassettes: the Pico cassette. Designed and produced by JVC for Dictaphone in 1985, these incredibly beautiful and well-designed little marvels were so ridiculously expensive, they ended up on store shelves and were later auctioned off on eBay, where they didn't exactly go like hot cakes either. I bought mine about ten years ago for 45 bucks from a guy who had something like eighty boxes of them. He still has a dozen left. So if anyone's interested.... https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dictaphone...444515?hash=item4b61bed8e3:g:NIEAAOSwKsdbZjU5 After 35 years, my little 4250 still works like a charm, emitting little beeps and whirrs when its logic controls are pushed. Here's a very informative video on the 4250 someone put up on YouTube: This one's also very watchable, if only for the guy's skilled left hand and the great music: The Dictaphone 4250, on the right, next to a few of my tiniest friends.
There's some interesting starting prices, I tend to stay away from Sonys because that's what everyone assumes is the one to have while ignoring some hidden gems. Don't get me wrong, I have a good sampling of their early models, I stay in the early 80's with my personal players, most I found locally when I had boots on the ground. I've got my eye on a few that have been sitting for months, sent offers over but no budging. The seller starts dropping the price and once they get some-what reasonable I lose interest. My advice is keep your eyes open, anyplace with 2nd hand sales is a good opportunity and sometimes the further out of the way the better. Ask your friends, tell them about your crazy hobby, I've gotten a ton of stuff this way but be prepared to get some entry level as well. Look up old John Edwards Threads (RIP), he did some great breakdown of product lines, I've aquired several of the models he talked highly of at great pricing because they only pop up every few years and nobody is looking for them. Feel free to ask in the forums below, autoreverser is clearing out some of his collection and he has posted some really nice stuff. I've got a box full of mid-level I'd love to pass-on to locally. Good luck and keep posting the cool photos!
Thank you for advice, Mister X ! I will be looking on this forum for next purchases for sure ! I have told friends of my crazy hobby, but this kind of products are not very common here. And entry level models that were offered usually come with a lot of cosmetic wear, which is a no no for me. I found some on local auction sites in the past, like the Panasonic RQ-J3 (which I love how it looks, although technically it's nothing special). On the other hand there are people who ask crazy prices and never sell them. A guy has a SONY WM-3 in mint conidition for the equivalent of 500$ for 6 months and never sold (and I recently bought one from ebay at a little more than half that price). Also another one has a WM-D6C with problems at 400$, not sold for more than one year (I bought my D6C more than a year ago at about 230$ from ebay with new rubber set and in very good condition).
