[INTRO PLAYS]
I recently picked up this little retro boombox for 29 bucks,
and it's kinda surprising but probably not in the way that you're thinking.
Now, before I can tell you why I bought this, we kinda have to go back in time about 6 months ago
when I bought this retro 1980s boombox at a garage sale.
It actually worked, except for one problem. I put a tape in it, and it would play,
but the button would not stay down.
And it woudn't eject, either.
I had to take it apart in order to get the tape out.
But "no problem," I thought. I could fix this up and, while I'm at it, I'll just make a new episode about it.
The thing was also filthy, and I took an opportunity to clean it up really well.
And it actually did clean up really nice.
And, one thing I really liked about this boombox is that it was pretty small and it had line inputs on the sides
so that I could record directly to tape, and I could also use it as a amplifier for my iPhone
or for example, for keyboards and stuff like that which needed external speakers.
And it actually sounds pretty good too.
But, despite spending almost 30 hours on it, I was never able to get the tape mechanism working reliably.
Some metal pieces keep getting stuck and then it requires a complete disassembly to unstick it.
And as such, I never made an episode about it.
I've now completely given up hope of ever repairing the tape mechanism, but
I have a plan for replacing the tape mechanism completely with an MP3 player.
In the meantime, I really wanted a working tape deck and a retro boombox, and I came across this thing
at Fry's electronics for $29, and I thought, "I'll give it a shot!"
So you can see it definitely has the retro look of the 1980s here.
It even has a short wave radio, similar to some of the multi-band radios of the time period.
But, it has two things that definitely DON'T fit the time period
It has a USB port and an SD card socket.
This thing advertises itself as being the best way to get your cassettes transferred over to digital format.
So I really wanted to test that out and let you guys hear what kind of quality you might be able
to get from something like this, versus an alternative method I'll show you here shortly.
But, in order to do that, I needed a cassette tape I could play that was pretty high quality
like a factory original, yet at the same time would not get my video pulled for copyright infringement,
because I'm gonna have to play more than just a few seconds of this.
So, I thought I could use the theme music to my other channel, 8-Bit Keys.
But, I needed a recording that would be just as good as a factory original.
The problem is, I didn't really have any equipment that could produce that.
So, the closest thing I have to that is this four-channel Tascam recorder.
Now, although it does play in stereo, it can only record in mono because of the way it was designed to work.
So in order to get a stereo recording, I needed to ask a favor of somebody, so I decided to ask
one of my favorite YouTube creators, Techmoan.
Matthew "Mat" Taylor: So I've been asked to help out the 8-Bit Guy, which is something I'm only
too happy to do, because us old YouTube guys need to help each other from time to time because this can get quite expensive.
For example, if he was to buy the same casette deck that I'm going to record his tape on, it would cost
him somewhere around about $900 USD, which is a lot of money just to spend on one recording.
Much better to ask me to do it, and I'll just send him the tape in the post.
Now, it's hard to believe that the tape recorder I'm going to use
dates back to the early 90s. It's probably the last time they made decent high end cassette decks for the home.
That's 25 years ago! These things are getting pretty old and increasingly rare.
Same goes for cassettes themselves. These things - don't make them anymore.
Well, they make cassettes, but chrome tapes? Don't think they make those anymore.
Metal tapes - they don't make either.
You can get ferric tapes, but [sound of disgust]
So, I'm going to record him something on this new old-stock tape that I've got
And it's his theme, so I've got to record that on the cassette, put it in the post to him
and he can own me a pint or something. So let's get on with it.
People don't understand this nowadays, but opening up a new cassette back in the day
used to be a bit of a cause for celebration. Now this cassette here, notice it's the other way around to
how they're normally inside these boxes, and that's to make it a little bit slimmer
Just that tiny fraction slimmer, which presumably was one of those things that they hoped would sell
cassettes towards the end of the cassette era.
Now, this is a type II cassette - it's a chrome one.
You can tell that; it's got a little hole next to the write-protect notch.
Metal would have an extra two holes in the middle. This just has the one at the edge,
and the ferric type one would just have the write-protect notch without a hole next to it.
Now, I'm going to record it on my Hi-Fi setup here. I'm not going to do an equalization or any of that business.
We'll go straight from that file onto this cassette recorder.
HX Pro - might as well switch that on, it makes it sound better, and you don't need to have a compatible deck at the other end.
So the first job is to calibrate the deck to the tape we put in it.
So pressing the calibration button runs an semi-automatic calibration system
where the tape deck records a signal onto the tape, and then listens back to it and makes a graphical display here.
Now, my job is to adjust the bias to get those two lines to match up, and then adjust the record level up
so that I can record the maximum amount of signal onto the tape without over-saturating it.
Now, I'll be playing the theme tune back through this device here. This is a Sony HAPS-1.
It's a hard disk drive audio player with a built-in DAC.
So I'm playing the WAV file though that, it's coming out of the RCA left and right stereo
leads, going into my cassette recorder, and I'm just listening through the first time to check that
the loudest points on the track aren't too loud and therefore distorting.
So once we've done that, we can then go back to the beginning again, take the pause off the record,
press play on the hard disk drive, and all we're doing now is dubbing that file in real time across to the cassette.
So the idea with recording onto cassette is that you're trying to get as much of the signal as possible
onto that tape, so that you don't have to turn the volume up to hear it, because more you turn the volume up,
the more you hear hiss and things.
So hopefully I've got the maximum amount of signal on this tape but without distorting it, so I feel like
I've done that, or at least I've tried my best to, anyway, so there's my cassette,
put it in a nice little cassette mailer, and then pop down to the post office and send it back to the 8-Bit Guy.
So that's my bit over and done. Back to you!
David Murray: So about a week later, I went out to check my mail, and there it was.
So I put the tape in the boombox, and I started to record it to a USB stick.
OK, so it took a few minutes for it to finish,
then I played it back on some headphones, and...
something just didn't seem right.
I expected a little bit of degradation from the original recording, but nothing like this!
So here's the original file that I e-mailed to Techmoan, just for comparison purposes.
[Plays perfect audio]
And here's the copy that this machine recorded over to USB.
[Plays less than perfect quality audio]
Several things caught my eye here. First of all, I noticed that the recording was 22 kHz. I mean, seriously!?
But wait, it gets even worse. When I open the MP3 in VLC player and I told it to give me some information on
the audio stream codec, it showed that the bitrate was 64 kb/s.
And to make matters worse, what is this "Dual-mono?"
So I went back and looked at Audacity again. Notice in the original recording that
for example, in this section here, you can see there is some activity on the left speaker
that doesn't exist on the right.
But, when you look at the copy that came from the boombox, there IS no difference.
This thing is really recording in mono.
So, I decided to do another experiment. I took my Tascam recorder and hooked up the stereo line
output straight to the line input on my Mac Mini.
In order to make this thing play like a regular tape player, I can turn off the volume to channels 3 and 4,
and set the panning for channels 1 and 2 to the extreme left and right.
This should make it behave exactly like a regular stereo cassette player.
So, let's play the tape in here for a few minutes, and listen to the result.
OK, so I'm going to play it where I can compare all three samples.
[Plays perfect audio]
[Plays reasonably good audio]
[Plays horrible audio]
Now let's pick a softer part of the song.
[Plays perfect audio]
[Plays reasonably good audio]
[Plays horrible audio]
[Plays perfect audio from another part of the song]
[Plays reasonably good audio]
[Plays horrible audio]
And, by the way, if you look at the one I just recorded from my Tascam unit,
you can definitely see the stereo seperation, so there's no question the tape was recorded properly in stereo.
I think we can safely say that the recording quality is junk.
I thought I'd take a look at some Amazon reviews and I saw this guy by the name of Roy,
who claims to have copied 300-400 tapes with this thing.
I'm sorry to tell you Roy, but I think you wasted your time and I hope you didn't throw away those old tapes.
Some guy by the name of Matt has also discovered the 64k bitrate, and 22kHz sample rate.
And it's too bad, really, because one of the neat things that this can do is it makes it really simple to
record songs from the radio, whether it be to cassette tape or onto a USB.
And you know, that's something that everybody used to do back in the 80s and 90s, and it was perfectly legal
and nobody had a problem with it, even though, you know, the sound quality was a little bit less than what
you would get from a store bought cassette.
I also like the fact that it can play MP3s from the SD card or the USB socket, so you'd think you'd make a good
you know, MP3 playing boombox. The only problem is, it's nearly impossible to find the song that you want to
play unless you've only got just a handful of songs on the card, because there's no menu or screen or anything like that.
But the terrible MP3 quality is not the only thing going against this unit.
Even though you can see the speakers are about the same size as my vintage 80s boombox,
the vintage Panasonic boombox actually sounds 10 times better,
especially in the bass department.
The irony is that it has all the advertising printed all over it claiming that it has so much bass.
I've tried to demonstrate this on camera, but the camera really doesn't do it justice in the difference in audio quality.
[Plays sound]
[Plays slightly better sound]
Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed. There's another person on Amazon also mentioning the
laughable claim of 500 watts.
Also, the volume control knob is utter crap. You can turn it about 25% of its motion, and it's already blaring
at maximum volume.
Announcer: The essence of life: [INAUDIBLE] Westinghouse.
David Murray: Where the volume on my old Panasonic boombox actually has a nice smooth gradient.
Announcer: Visit westinghousewatertreatment.com. That's westinghousewatertreatment.com.
David Murray: It also makes this really annoying humming sound when it's plugged in, even if it's turned off.
I've also done some more testing, and I determined that despite the fact that it has 2 speakers,
this thing is completely mono. It plays mono from tapes, it plays mono from USB (or an SD card), and it even plays mono from the radio.
On the plus side of this experiment, I can honestly say that the tape that Techmoan created for me
actually holds up really well against the digital file that I had emailed to him.
Which kind of reinforces what I've said in previous episodes that cassette tapes
are actually pretty darn good if you use a quality cassette tapes, and of course, quality recording equipment.
Also, if anyone is interested to learn more about this Tascam unit,
I did a whole episode about how this thing works with the multi-track recording and everything on my
other channel, 8-Bit Keys. I'll put a link to that down in the description field.
Honestly though, if you do plan on actually converting some cassette tapes over to MP3 for whatever reason,
the way to do it is just to grab one of these little cables off eBay for like $1, and just plug it in to your Walkman
and plug the other end into the back of your computer, and just record it that way using something like
Audacity. It's going to sound a lot better than unfortunately this device.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS]
[TRUCK ENGINE SOUND PLAYS]
[CRUNCHING AND CRACKLING SOUNDS PLAYS]
[MORE TRUCK ENGINE SOUND PLAYS]
[DRAMATIC MUSIC RESUMES PLAYING]
David Murray: On a somewhat unrelated note, a lot of people have been asking me what kind of brackets I use
to mount these keyboards and boombox on the wall.
They're actually just regular L brackets that I bought at the hardware store.
I put a bolt and some nuts through some of them to make sure that the objects don't slide right off the front.
So, that's all that is! Nothing special.
Muppet #1: Oh no!
Muppet #2: What's up, son?
Muppet #1: Well, now they're doing crossover episodes!
Muppet #2: What like, Batman v. Superman?
Muppet #1: No, it's not as bad as that.
Muppet #2: Alien v. Predator?
Muppet #1: Uhh...
Muppet #2: Ludwig v. Beethoven?
Muppet #1: Uhh...
Muppet #2: Freddy v. Jason?
Muppet #1: Yeah, kind of! But with more cassettes!
[OUTRO MUSIC PLAYS]
Original closed captions by Victor Tran. Closed captions fixed by Kirill Telegin.