if you look at the best-selling record players on amazon
you'll notice a couple things in common first is that almost all of them use the same crappy
turntable mechanisms that both i and techmoan did videos about and also quite a few of them
are all-in-one systems that also include a radio tuner a cd player and an extremely
basic cassette player usually stuck on the side that looks like something out of a
1980s car radio because you just stick the cassette in and it starts playing
and the only control you get is for fast forward or to eject the tape you don't even get rewind
that's because it literally is the mechanism out of a car radio it's based on an old
tanashin design tanashin has not manufactured any cassette mechanism since 2009 so the ones
made these days are all unauthorized clones of it made by various manufacturers in china
but thanks to the internet archive i was able to find tanashin's description for their original
version of it it's the model tn-301n car cassette tape deck mechanism the features
listed are compact design and auto stop mechanism with plate tape wind-up applications are compact
cassette for car stereo one-way car stereo mechanism and there's two variations of it
although they both list the same features auto stop fast forward pause and radio tape switch
and those all-in-one systems containing that cassette player are very popular during the
holiday season i've seen this victrola system get as high as the top 40 of all
electronics on amazon which most likely makes it the most
popular type of cassette player that people are buying today so with that
in mind i wanted to get my hands on one without needing to buy one of those mahogany monsters
i thought i could just buy the mechanism itself like you can do with those cheap
turntable mechanisms you can find those on ebay or amazon but i looked all over and i couldn't find
anyone selling these cassette player mechanisms it seems that whatever company is making them
isn't selling them individually they're only selling them as part of assembled units
so the closest thing i was able to find is this
the pyle contemporary usb cassette player model pl5csub this is actually a discontinued
model and it took me quite a while just to find one of these but you can still
buy them directly from the manufacturer in china the company that makes them is
haiping electronics company limited in guangdong china their model number for it is the hp-sp03
and with a minimum order of a thousand units you can get them for as low as ten dollars each
so it essentially is this same kind of slot loading car radio style cassette player mechanism
mounted into a wooden box with a built-in amplifier and speakers
and it also has line outputs and a usb output
so with just one knob and one button you could say this is the simplest cassette deck ever made
it's not designed to be portable or battery powered it runs on a 9 volt ac adapter and
the entire cabinet is made of wood fiberboard the speakers are three inches in diameter so they're
larger than the ones built into those suitcase style record players and it couldn't be any
simpler to operate you just stick in your cassette with the side you want to play facing the front
and you get out of it something approximating music
if you don't want to listen to the entire cassette all the way through you can fast forward
by pushing down on this button until it locks into position now it's fast forwarding it's
not a very fast fast forward but it is faster than just letting it play and to
stop fast forwarding you just push it lightly until it releases and now it's playing again
and to eject the tape you just push down the button all the way until the cassette pops out
so because this only has fast forward if you want to rewind the tape what you have to do is
eject the tape flip it over to the other side put it back in and fast forward the opposite
side of the tape then eject it again flip it back over to the first side and start playing it again
but it'll probably be actually faster to use one of these hand powered cassette tape rewinders
i don't think they make these anymore but they were common back in the 1980s
so you could rewind the tape without using up the battery power of your walkman
so there's really not much more to show about the operation of this style of cassette player
you just stick in your tape and it starts playing
and because it has a line output now i'll give you a direct hookup sample of how it sounds
looking inside the cabinet we can see the amplifier board
the cassette player mechanism the circuit board for the volume control
and the speakers it uses a class d amplifier chip with a heatsink on it and pyle claims it puts out
25 watts and that actually is a legitimate rating for these class d chips however that's at a supply
voltage of 27 volts and it's measured at 10 percent distortion but this thing is running
on a 12 volt power supply not 27 volts and if you look that up on the data sheet you can get about
3 watts per channel of this chip before the distortion starts to skyrocket
the speakers in this are OK no literally that's the brand name on them
OK their impedance is four ohms and they're rated at five watts which i
think is a bit optimistic considering the small size of their magnets
there's the little sub-board for the usb output you can see the chip
and the clock crystal on it and these are just an off the shelf design used in many audio components
and there's the mechanism in all its glory it's almost entirely made of metal and it's
extremely simple there's only one spindle it only has to take up reel spindle because
it only goes in one direction it doesn't rewind so it doesn't need the other one
and when you pop in the tape it pushes against this piece here which snaps it down engages the
capstan and pinch roller raises the playback head into position and starts playing the tape
and when you push in the button to fast forward what that does is release the
pinch roller from the capstan and also move the playback head away from the tape it does not
increase the motor speed what it simply does is release the tension
from the pinch roller and allow it to take up the tape as fast as it can
and when it reaches the end of the tape that triggers the auto stop mechanism which pushes
down slightly on this switch to turn off the motor so it does not release the playback head or
the pinch roller from the tape it just switches off the motor
so once you reach the end of the tape you should push in the button all the way to eject it
and that raises this up pops out the tape releases the playback head and the pinch roller
and you can see it pushes down on the switch to shut off the motor
here's the underside of the mechanism there's just one belt and once you remove this plastic
mounting frame it's very easy to get to in fact i don't think you even need to remove this plastic
frame to get to it if you just have a little hook or something to help you get it on the pulley
and i'll try to trigger the mechanism as if i was inserting a tape
and you can see it moves certain things into position you can see the grease on the mechanism
and here's the action of the fast forward you can see how it latches into place and then releases
these springs and here's what happens when you push it all the way in to eject
so it's really simple mechanism largely made of metal so it's should be pretty sturdy
only real weak spot is probably just the belt and the motor because that's not a genuine mabuchi
motor even though it has their name on it you can tell because it's not stamped into the bottom
for comparison here is a genuine mabuchi motor and if you look at the bottom it has mabuchi motor
stamped into it so that's the way you can tell the difference between a genuine one and a knockoff
and the unique thing is this is a clockwise motor whereas every cassette mechanism i've seen that
has all the functions including rewind uses a counterclockwise motor you can see it says ccw
instead of cw so that may be another reason why these car radio style mechanisms are so popular
because they use a clockwise motor and so do turntables so that allows them to share parts
you can take a turntable motor and put it in one of these and use the same thing
and because they're making millions of these cheap turntable mechanisms
every year that makes these clockwise motors less expensive than the counter clockwise motors
that are used in the more full-featured cassette mechanisms
and if you need to adjust the speed of the cassette player
because it might be playing slightly too fast or too slow you can do that by sticking in a
small flat blade screwdriver or preferably one of these non-conductive adjusting tools
into this hole here you have to turn it a little bit until you feel it drop down into the notch
in the motor and then as you twist it slightly left or right that will adjust the motor speed
there's also a little felt pad that rubs against the belt i've seen this
in other cassette decks as well i'm not sure exactly what the purpose of it is but i guess
since this belt is rather long i think it may be there to try to help dampen vibrations in the belt
and now if the mechanism reinstalled we can see in action i'll pop in a tape
and there it is playing and i'll engage the fast forward
you can see it moved the pinch roller
away from the capstan and if I release it that goes back to play
now i'll eject the tape
and i have to say i'm not impressed of the wobbliness of the flywheel
it's nice that they made it out metal instead of plastic
but they sure could have made it straighter that's certainly contributing to the wow and flutter
and there was the action of the auto stop mechanism
you can see it triggered that switch to stop the motor but it did not release the
pinch roller or the playback head so you still have to eject the tape to do that
and there's actually one undocumented feature about this style of cassette
player and that is this line output jack on the top actually doubles as a line
input so you can connect any external audio source such as this walkman and
play it through the built-in speakers and it also will output it through the usb
so like it or not this very basic slot loading cassette player
is probably the most popular kind of cassette player on the market today and i'm sure some
would argue that this is giving people a bad impression of what cassettes can sound like
but you have to remember in those all-in-one systems there's a very low bar of comparison
versus those cheap record player mechanisms they have
so i would wager if people actually compared playing a cassette on one of those systems
versus playing a record they would actually discover that the cassette sounds better and
with the rising popularity of cassette tapes in recent years i would think there will be a market
for this style of cassette player that i have here if either pyle wants to reintroduce it or
some other company wants to introduce their own version of it because despite how basic
it is it actually doesn't sound that bad and it couldn't be any simpler to operate