Description: oh baby, this was something i'd been looking for for a looooong time now! i've said it before, but i've kind of been forced into collecting tapes and CDs by fate. those are my only way to play music in my car, so i've ended up with a lot of them over time, and i've become especially fond of cassette tapes. i really love how tactile they are, it's so satisying and fun to shuffle through a stack of cassettes, pick one out that you like, put it into your player with that little ca-clunk sound that it makes and pushing in those meaty buttons to get the tape going. it's just SO good. plus, every tape can technically be repurposed and recorded over. don't like what's on a tape? just record over it! and that's helped by the fact that tapes are DIRT CHEAP these days. you can go into Goodwill and find tapes for as low as 50 cents, then just take em all home and record new stuff over em. plus, i kinda love the jankiness and clunk of it all. recordings aren't perfect, but they're charming that way.

for the longest time, though, i could only listen to my tapes using my big, bulky, wallplug stereo, or in my car. UNTIL NOW! yes, at long last i've finally gotten a portable tape player! i think a CD Walkman would have probably been more practical, but i won't look a gift horse in the mouth. especially at the price point it was at, 5 bucks for this guy! works perfectly! i got it at a thrift store near my house, real hole in the wall kinda place. they have these two bins up front that are just full of totally random tech junk, completely unsorted, and you can find some really fun stuff in there. one of the most interesting finds i saw there was one time where there was a whole binder of burned PS2 games. there were about 4o burned discs in there, and you could really get a feel for what the original owner was like just by seeing their taste in games. enough of getting sidetracked though, let's get back to the player. actually, it'd be more accurate to call it a tape recorder, since yes, it does record! it even comes with a microphone built in, and yes, it's EXACTLY as shitty as you think it is.



not to worry, though, because it's got a line in port, for plugging in an external microphone! or, more practically, an auxillary cable! then you can play stuff on your computer and output it to the recorder, then record stuff to tape just like that! it works surprisingly well, all things considered. the player also has a speaker, surprisingly enough, and that doesn't sound too bad either. the biggest issue, funnily enough, is the headphone jack. mono-out only, and it sounds pretty rough. i think that's because this was meant to be a voice recorder only, and wasn't ever intended for music. but that's fine, i don't really have any headphones to use with it anyways, so i don't care. it runs on two AA batteries, has a counter to show how long the tape has been playing, and even a little hand strap! the sticker you see in the photo was added courtesy of yours truly, i simply couldn't help myself. what can i say? i'm a sticker fiend.

sure, this little guy isn't perfect, but it's charming and aesthetic as hell, and again, this was only 5 bucks! no repairs necessary, it came working! i think this was one of my best thrift store finds in a while, no doubt about it.