Perhaps it'd be fun to share what great deals you've found in a week in a thread? I'll start here with mine, as this last couple of weeks has been a fabulous one! I discovered a lot of interesting units, and ticked off 3 boxes in my wishlist. Generally I'm very un-fussy about condition and will pick them up in almost any state. Providing that the price is proportional, of course. So, here they are: Sony WW-101, Sony WM-F103, Sony WM-30, Sony WM-EX910, Sanyo M-5550, Sony TPS-L2, Sony WM-3, Toshiba KT-V670 and Toshiba KT-V750 (not pictured). All for a total of under $100! They've been cleaned up before taking the photo, but originally some were very dirty and even taped together with electrical tape. Quite a great price, I'd say. All are of course untested and presumably off, and 2 are definitely for-parts-only. But I'm very happy, especially since the WM-101 includes original case and papers and the WM-3 is made in Spain. Been looking for one of these Spanish units for a while.
Indeed. Although it's the All fixed up it will definitely pay for the entire lot plus some healthy profit on the side I'm definitely keeping the rest for my personal collection
Lucky you All of them are collectible. TPS-L2 is the best of them. Toshiba walkman units that you got are not easy to find
The Toshiba is a rather neat one. Very good condition too. Judging from thy styling, looks like this is their competition to the Aiwas (HS-G600 and such). At first it was just a simple belt change. But looks like i has other problems. Just a slight pressure at the back of the unit is changing the speed erratically.
Here's my weekly find (actually from last week, but I was too tired to post it after those trips to retrieve it ): Rough summary of what I got: Monday (15th): OK-looking blue MZ-R500 without any defects, power adapter, 12 MDs. Needing that one as the recording function of mine said goodbye. Sunday (21st): Silver MZ-R30 including the cardboard on the photo which counts many MDs (have to count yet), an MD stand, two bags to put the walkman into, a (fake) leather carry bag, power adapter, remote, two remote adapters, original headphones with that weird proprietary jack, manual, that black plastic AA battery adapter, original rechargable battery pack inside device - and it still works well! I was surprised to find out this one's acutally made of metal, my MZ-R500 is just spraypainted plastic. Not listed: near-mint-y silver MZ-R700 minidisc walkman incl. remote, power adapter, 1MD inside and 5 sealed Sony Premium 80 MDs - although it was for someone else, so I have no photo of that one. Sounds exactly like my MZ-R500 when reading MDs. The MZ-R500 was a lucky find as I was in dire need. Next to the MZ-R30 the additional proprietary Sony jack to 3.5mm adapter for remotes and the original headphones were certainly the nicest find on Sunday as I wanted a second one as backup for my DAT walkman. The headphones don't sound as good as my Sennheiser, though definitely pretty good for their time. But I think the negative connotation in sound might have to do with a lack of cushions. Without them mine would sound like sh** too as they concentrate the sound, help them sit properly in your ears and boost the bass, so I'll have to see what size of cushions would fit well on those and help to improve the sound. Also the MZ-R30 might lack LP2 and LP4 support, but it's extremely quiet and has good sound. I almost couldn't tell it was reading an MD and skipping is insanely fast - or my other ones are just aging worse. This was a successful week/month! With this my collection has grown, photo of what I got so far in the spoiler below. Spoiler Both WM-2091 are defect at the moment, I intend on fixing them if possible. Everything else works. Guess I need more pairs of headphones now.
Quite a good week's find! I rarely the the MD units here as I've not found someone willing to service them. Higher chance of them not working too, when buying blind. Looks like you have some DAT units as well. Still on the lookout for those. They very rarely show up.
Not quite so many great finds this week, but these certainly made me very happy! The smaller of the 2 being the more expensive one, still way on the cheaper side though Quite rarely do I take on boomboxes to the collection, due to their prohibitively large size, but this one's one of my favorite looking ones. It definitely needs some TLC, but tech-work on boomboxes aren't really my thing...
If you're interesting in starting a journey to DAT, I can personally recommend the TCD-D8 from experience as a cheap, yet bulky and heavy portable alternative to a stationary recorder. The WMD-DT1 (Sony's only pure playback-only walkman) is really hard to come across and prices for DAT in general are often way too high, so it takes long searching to find something that seems fair and in working condition. Try local ads and check ebay frequently, sometimes they can disappear very fast when they show up. That's how I got mine. If you need any information, at the beginning of this year I was very new to this format as well, so I had a thread that documented my journey to those two devices. Maybe you'll find out some useful things you didn't know about if you read it. Note that WMD-DT1 models have "only" 4-6h usage time (depending on your use) on two AA batteries. If you want more info on the WMD-DT1 (a very desired one), here's my found-thread and a small info thread I made about it. If you find one, better make sure the seller will ship it in a box with a fragile sticker, you wouldn't want them to handle it carelessly. If possible, retrieving it personally is the safest choice. When I saw your blue AIWA I first thought "What a strange blue DAT tape, wait, is this a VHS? OH, a walkman!?". It really got the shape of a tape. Maybe I'm just tired.
I am very interested in trying DAT, and the TCD-D7/D8 is the unit I'm looking out for, since I like its looks best. They seem to be the most common one to show up here as well. I'm limiting myself to local purchases only though, not really keen on paying expensive shipping and annoying customs. I'd rathen spend that on some nice but more beat-up units to tinker. An thinking about portable DATs, fragility too is weighing on my mind. The angle of the photo of the Aiwa could be better I just didn't have pics with the button in it, since I took the pic the first time it arrived. A very nice small but heavy unit. Got an FM transmitter too, for wireless listening!
Portable DATs can work quite well so long as you're not intending to jog with it and don't use them day in day out. Technically and theoretically it should take it, but why risk anything if they're made of such small fragile parts. Perfect for the nice, calm hi-fi music walk. If you can, go for the D8, as I said it offers you a better recording option. It might be worth looking into the "remote" for it (and the optical cable, as it has an own proprietary jack - typical Sony) too as it opens up a lot of possibilities for record editing. I found the photo to be a hilarious visual similarity to a tape. It's sort of charming.
That National was a great find stuck-in-time, what was the story with that? It looks like it was around kids, hence the missing knobs and door but it's still a kind-of rare exotic model.
A great find indeed! I've always wanted one just for the looks. I know that opinions are kinda divided on the styling, but I personally love the wood sides, "upside down" layout and speaker rings. As for my unit, it has gone around a few hands in kind of a loop. It's a typical junk unit picked up by one of those pickers that scour the flea markets and sells them back online, as-is. I already contacted the seller and almost reached an agreement on price but then he was offered a much higher sum and I lost out. Apparently, the guy who bought it was a friend of mine who is more in the boombox game than I am. The unit itself was in a sorry state to begin with. Off, no tape door, missing some knobs, and a huge crack in the bottom right side. Said friend of mine kinda used this unit for parts to to complete his other RX-7000. Then he fixed this this up just so that it was kinda acceptable working and resell it. In the end, I got the unit for less than what I offered the first guy the first time around. It's kinda in a more sorry state. The speakers have been changed but the replacement has a lot of tears around the ring, and more knobs are missing, especially the large one for tuning the radio. The good news, though, is that it works! Well, it barely works, but I'm quite happy as I'm more excited about the looks. Radio can only receive some stations and neither the dial light or VU meters work. Sound is distorted at higher volumes, but it wouldn't get quite loud anyway. Tape also somewhat works, courtesy to my said friend. He can fix boomboxes, but mostly of the mechanical variety. In the case of this feather touch mechanism, he bypassed the electronics, so now the only buttons working are the play and stop button, and not with their original functions. Interestingly, different sequence of button pressing would activate play, stop, ff and rew. I'm not adept on servicing these, and have yet to find an accessible and trustworthy technician to work on these, so for now I'm quite happy with that arrangement.
I was drawn to those units in the early days of the forum, on the pocketcalculator.com website (which seems to be down) he had a handful of them, new old stock, for $700.00 each. I used to think who would pay that much for a boombox in the early 2000's. The only high end boxes I was previously exposed to were mid-line Panasonics that everyone had, it was one of the first exotics I had seen.
It's been a while since I went hunting directly on the flea markets, so last night I went to one on the way home from work. At first, it looks like a dissappointing day. All I found was a cheap Sony walkman, that'll be a quick fix and sell, and a Sanyo that has seen much better days. But on my last sweep, I saw the Toshiba XR-P20 hiding on a rather dirty shelf! Digging in, it turns out to be a set with the base! Quite a rare found I guess? I wasted no time in asking the seller for the price. He said "Oh, that one's rather expensive?" "How much?" "A lot of people have asked about it" "Yeah, but for how much?" "70 thousand" "Hmm, I'll take it for 50 thousand. Look, the power cord's gone" "How about and extra 10 thousand" "Deal" And I just purchased this beauty for just over 4 USD. There's even a CD in there, and it looks like it's almost as old as the discman itself.
The CD is a nice bonus, I find that when there's a tape or cassette still in the unit, it still works.
I just wished that that were the case, but apparently it was not the case this time I just replaced the power cord yesterday (the original one was cut-off), but the unit shows no signs of life. I just peeked inside, and it looks like no one has been inside before. But that as far as I dare go. Back to the display cabinet it is...
It's been an amazing start of the month! Found some more personal grails and even high-end 3 head deck. This will be my first 3 head, and I'm very happy with this. I can probably call this the "black Sony week" as I got plenty of those. Aiwa AD-3800H, Sony D-88, Sony WM-R707, Sony WM-F707, Sony TCM-7, Sony ZX-7 That's plenty of 7s! As of now, the only one working is the Aiwa. I'll get to the rest after I get through of my current list of units to work on. As for the Aiwa, it's working beautifully. I think I got a really good deal. All it needs was a change of a single idler wheel!
This just showed up in the new posts feed, weird, four days later..... Sweet finds! I'm in awe, were they all at one place or spread out?
