I'd love to get a great sounding small boombox for playing cassettes. Is there a best person to look to for refurbishing?
Preferably in the USA as well. Since shipping boxes over to Europe and back will get mighty expensive. There are some on e-bay that are constantly selling ones they refurbish and fix up. Dust off and change the belt then sell again. Is that a refurb though? Don't forget there are a number of modern boomboxes too. Check Amazon carefully as it may be better for some people to get a brand new one. (I am slowly getting sucked into the vintage boombox scene more and more. Gradually. Bit by bit. It is irrational and a lot of work to fully restore some of these old boomboxes. Yet the draw for me is about the insane quality of some of those old devices and their designs. Somehow it all makes sense to carefully research what model to get and try and find one. And pay more for the best condition so as to gain low hours of usage and therefor less wear and tear. With all but the cassette (belts disintegrated) already fully working. Then spend a year or more just focusing on that one machine to fine tune it and replace every capacitor and transistor lol. Crazy. But for this Sony CF-550 that I started with 18 months ago it has paid off better than expected. Last weekend with another round of belt upgrade and hours more of work... then a lot more listening... I was truly amazed at what I was hearing through headphones on my own recorded tapes. Lots of big grins and head shaking that's for sure.)
Hello stereo2gorocks, Well I am up here in Washington state and have been doing repairs since the 1980s ! Sincerely Richard
If you look on ebay, refurbished could mean anything so be careful spending more then you need to. Now a days I expect most units to show up with non-working cassette decks, fixing can be an hour or several depending on how complicated it is. If you see something decent feel free to PM me, I can give you a little advice although I don't do a ton of repairs. Learning to rebelt (and clean) is almost a requirement with cassettes these days. People will do it but they'd rather do big stereos where the repair quote is more justified.
Sorry this is a long Answer.. i say this to people all the time, Buying old Boomboxes from the 80s is getting more and more risky as time goes on, years ago i would buy a radio, they would turn up and all i would find is worn belts, but now i'm getting radios with faulty channels on the cassette, dead motors, and weird faults, i have a Toshiba S90 with the strangest deck fault, it was ok when i bought it, but all of a sudden, it developed like a uniform crackle/fuzz on the right channel of the deck, it's not a random crackle like dirty switch, it's uniform loop fault, so like a Dolby chip has gone faulty or something, it's ok on Radio and Aux, But i don't have the skills to fix it, my Telefunken studio one, i was playing it one day and all of a sudden the lights went out, then the sound faded off, and it started to smell like burning, got my multi tester on it, and found that the Bridge rectifier was short, to find the right one is rare and the one i did see for sale was only available in Germany and it was £50+ shipping, so i found a different one and made it fit, i got it working again but i'm assuming that when the bridge went short it caused damage, now it works but Right channel is dead on cassette, and no longer works on Batteries, i have other radios that are louder in one channel than the other, i have radios with tuner stuck in mono with No Fm Stereo light, i have others that don't tune in to the radio stations properly, also ones with dead tuners, these are not easy faults to repair,. so when i see the ludicrous prices that these Radios are selling for nowadays, i'm wondering what thoughts are going through peoples minds, they are paying many hundreds, some are paying thousands for these things, and they have no idea what horrors they are in for, but first of all, try to find a good engineer, and second, when you do, it will be a High skilled engineer with lots of test Equipment, it will also be time consuming, so hope they have deep pockets, then it's finding replacement parts.. this is not to mention that you also get worn out components that can't be replaced like record bars, function switches, sometimes amp chips ect.. But you see these people buying blind paying all this money thinking they will get a good one when 90% of the time they don't.. i have just learned a valuable lesson, i bought 3 radios from japan, paid a shít ton of money for them, had them shipped to UK, all 3 looked ok in the pictures, but they were in a bad state of repair, one of them is a GF787 with a faulty amp chip that has weird sound from the left channel, and keeps burning the speaker out, i priced one up and it's £45+ shipping, i already paid over £200+ Shipping for the radio, so it's already not worth what i paid, but now i have to buy a part for it for £45, it's never going to happen, i know when it becomes not worth it.. so i've decided to call it a loss and left it in the corner. so i fell for it as well..
Japanese sales can be really tough, they advertise everything as "junk" so it gets them off from accepting returns. Photos are blurry so your stuff shows up with a ton of corrosion. I normally only buy really cheap stuff and my buddy brings it over. I'm with you Big_Paul, I go into it with a lot of hope but some are destined to be shelf queens. Check out Techmoans Video on the Panasonic RX-2700, they go for decent money but forget trying to get to any belt on the inside. Mine looks fine on the shelf and I'll probably save it for dead last.
Yes i only buy cheap, but after various fees and shipping from Japan, they always end up costing a lot, You're right about the pictures, All the sellers seem to deliberately do the same, they take the pictures on a very first Camera Phone in low Quality 180p from about 10 feet away, They Don't explain the functionality properly, then when you get the radio they have a whole list of issues, and including the poor quality Chrome work, also scratches and some damage. i've bought my last one now and i'm not buying no more. i've learned my lesson.. Yes i'm aware of Techmoan, i thought he was ok until he bought an Amstrad hifi from Ebay and Mocked it then totally tore it apart and wrecked it, i never watched another one of his videos since. But Yes, as for these old Boomboxes, Buyers need to be aware of the huge risks in buying these things. They are getting very old and worn out, some radios are selling for a damn lot of money and some of the faults they are having are difficult to repair, and before you know it, you either have an expensive ornament or it will cost a lot of Money and aggravation and disappointment to get it repaired. i always sum up the situation, if i buy a radio i work out how much it's cost me to buy and ship, then i work out how much it would be to repair, total it up, and if the total cost out weigh's the value, i call it a day and don't bother.
Big_Paul is right. So much of what is available is worn out junk by now. But one can still have success buying certain non desirable odd models... of very high original quality. That are lower cost and, yet, often in superb cosmetic condition. With, one guesses, low hours on them as well. Some of those 70's Mono boxes for example. All analog, no IC's at all, big easy board layouts and wide traces, thick wires etc,. Much easier to work on. Basically just resistors, diodes, capacitors, transistors, coils and potentiometers. Usually easy to find parts. But even then it has to make sense in buying a certain model. Some sort of good reason to buy model "X". If it is pure sentimentality, having had the radio once as a kid, or receiving one as a gift once upon a time etc., then that is a respectable reason to re-live the past by buying a replacement. That I can respect. /Start wacky rant Having a highly skilled tech within your country / region is a must for more serious actual collectors. I am sure there are... those who have the fixation and big bucks to do it right. By getting "their tech guy" to do all the work. Money solves problems. So many problems (in life) can be brushed aside with Money. Bet ya didn't know that eh? But it is fascinating to contemplate how Money could solve such mundane boombox problems, how there is practically no problem too complex or large to be solved, proving one simply has the Money and an electronics engineer with the brains to solve it. The potential. The idea. Of how Money can solve innumerable issues like this. Build a new incredible modern day boombox from scratch in 2024? No problem. All possible. If only... a nutcase with Money got the bug in their brain to make it happen. And so on. This aspect of wealth has always fascinated me since I was a child. Because every day I seem to be immersed in odd little problems that could all be solved, theoretically, with sufficient Money and because I am a dreamer, filled with visions and imaginings of possible and impossible things, a world full of incomplete wonders just waiting to be built etc., /End wacky rant)
What you said about non desirable models, that is my favourite type of stereo. i have all the good radios, crown 970, Tosh s90, Sharp GF999 ect.. but when i use a box, my go to boxes are my lower desirable ones, they are my favourites, like my Questar STR80, Binatone PowerCompo 7809, Bush Mini 7450, or my Teleton SDR4000. i can say that no one would even look at them twice if they saw them, but i love them.
I like giving the lesser models a little breathing time, some of the big ones have so many knobs and switches that getting clean sonics without a major DeOxit Bath is impossible. A couple of my buddies are having a hard time getting someone to look at their older BMW's (and I've heard Audi's as well). They pack the engine compartments so full that sometimes a simple part change requires removing 1/2 the stuff hanging on the front of the block. Boomboxes and Walkmans can be like this and I think that is another reason it's difficult to find a service person, they'd rather work on big open receivers and amps where they don't spend 90% of the time just trying to take it apart.
Reading my mind... Absolutely... Though they were the top quality and technology many years ago, I don't think that Matsushita and Sony with their top notch R&D, engineers would expect those radios to run for 40+ years already. I am still wondering how many years of faultless operation they did consider, "laid in" in their Stereos?
Absolutely, this is what i think all the time, i bet they didn't expect them to last all these years, i think they were expecting them to last about 2 to 5 years, maybe 10 max. i bet they never expected them to go for 40 years, i'm glad they have though because without radios my life would have been boring, Radio's is all i've known since i was a kid. i've been collecting these things since the mid 80s. it's like a disease, or an incurable mental illness lol..
I often wonder what happened to the army of fresh young engineers at Sony that were creating all sorts of masterpieces. By the early 2000's they would have not yet retired so I am curious what they ended up doing and working on. Do they ever look back? Do they have examples of their early work? Like a radio or device I mean. There needs to be some kind of documentary film on these topics. There may have been mass lay offs at some stage in the consumer electronics de-industrialization? Or did the Japanese wind it all down just as the they all retired so as not to create such a situation? Maybe the timing all just worked out. (And as for Radio, yes, I "discovered" AM radio back in 1994 when I was 15 and was going through the dial at night finding all these cool US stations like 810 KGO San Francisco and the Dr. Bill Wattenburg show. And Art Bell... on 780 KOH in Reno. I was an early listener of Art Bell show but couldn't stand the fakers and scammers he would let run wild. Like Richard C "Hoaxland" Hoagland, major ed dames etc,. I also liked the AM music stations playing just 60's oldies. Then I could pivot into Saturday night FM stations where they would have hours of non-stop weird Euro Dance stuff and could like that too. Was recording off FM and trying to find the titles of the music (that they seldom gave out) etc. ,
I also did wonder about that, about those people from giants like Sony, Matsushita, etc. Why we don't see them at our forums? That would be so cool and interesting to get true information firsthand. I can remember only one of our colleagues who in 90s worked at a Hitachi plant in Singapore IIRC.
Hello Mystic Traveller, Very cool I have a older radioshack multi band radio that looks a lot like that one ! Started acting up darn germanium transistors devolped noise even with the volume completely down it sounds like white noise . Sincerely Richard
This is a Perfect Example of what i was talking about when buying from Japan, This GF858 just arrived 2 days ago, i saw it on the auction, pictures was taken from 6 feet away, no close ups, no real description. so i took a gamble, really i should have already learned my lesson from all the junk radios i'd already bought, but i wanted one of these for 25 years. anyhow. i checked it out when it arrived, Tape A - both Door hinges snapped off, Cassette B Left (Centre Hing) snapped off, i've replaced the outer hinges on these in the past, but when the centre hinges have snapped it's game over.. You can't replace them. so i had a faulty GF575, i used the front cabinet and the Fm Board from the GF575, removed the Centre Panel from the GF858 and Fitted it to the GF575, and the rest is the GF858. so really it's a Frankenstein box. but if i didn't have the Donor GF575 i would be in big trouble with the this box. this is the Last radio i'm buying from Japan, i've closed the site off and i'm not going on there again. seems all the radios on there are just junk, so i've learned my lesson, it was an expensive lesson because i've spent about £1000 on that site and every radio was a mess.. No More.. and this Post is just a warning to anyone else that's thinking of buying from those japan auction sites.. first pic is of the auction photo, second is the after..
Hello Big Paul, Yes , I have heard some real bad cases from those sites I have had enough problems buying stuff poorly packaged from Ebay . Sincerely Richard
