2 The Technics RS-B665 is a direct-drive cassette deck and roughly the middle of its model range from 1989 to 1991. It's a good performer and a fuss-free, maintenance-free cassette player.
The Toshiba PC-G10 cassette deck was sold in 1983 as part of a Toshiba ‘Rack system’. These are fine decks and well worth the little they cost to pick up on the second-hand market.
the culmination of the so-called ‘ghettoblaster’ in its best form after decades of refinement. This particular example had a few faults. The CD player didn’t read discs, the tape deck warbled hopelessly off key and FM radio reception wasn’t as good as I thought it should be.
A Sony CFS-W318 radio cassette boombox from the turn of the millennium. Scrapped due to brittle plastic in the tape mechanisms, but an interesting electronic design and a useful source of parts including a nice tuner module.
You can't save 'em all. This is a Philips MC-151 micro 'hi-fi' system, a far cry from the once-great audio division of Philips who produced the first cassette recorders, a myriad of portable and hi-fi turntables, one of the first consumer CD players and even owned Marantz for a time.
A basic primer on cassette capstan and turntable DC motors and how to repair them if they become noisy. With due care and a steady hand many can be repaired with success.
a Yamaha CRX-M170 CD receiver offered on Freecycle recently sparked my interest. It was listed as having a couple of faults - a temperamental CD player and an erratic volume knob. These are plentiful on the second-hand market for little or no cost and are well worth a punt.
Engaging, fun and emotive, with bags of detail and a pleasant sonic palette that is easy to listen to for hour upon hour.
2 full of cheap plastic and not the most fun to service, but serviced with care they do sound very good, and cost less on the second-hand market than other 3-head, dual capstan models from Sony, Technics, Aiwa, Pioneer and Nakamichi et al.
2 well made and smart to look at, clean uncoloured and pleasant to listen to, the AXC35 is a fine performer. Its simplistic electronics and quality disc drive should be reliable for many years.
a smart-looking, well-featured amplifier. It’s nicely made and finished with plenty of versatility for most users, but it could be better engineered in places and has a lot of competition at this price.
a system that performs in perfect harmony and looks more expensive than it is.
These are speakers for rock and pop fans, but classical listeners should probably look elsewhere. They’ll delight hiphop and electronic fans too providing you have an amp with some ‘oomf’ behind it that can give those slightly stiff woofers a kick up the backside.
2 Later KX-series decks are very simple mechanically and electronically, easy to service and maintain and generally well constructed as far as later cassette decks go. And for now at least, second-hand pricing is still relatively sane
A mini review and repair of a Cambridge Audio 540C V2 CD player with a 'No Disc' error. Applies also to 340C, 640C, 740C, 840C, 351C, 651C, 851C etc.
2 Whether cassette will see the same resurgence as vinyl, only time will tell. But while there are still plenty of these in the wild, it’s a fine deck for the money.
A real breath of fresh air in a market dominated by boring black boxes with average build and same-old specs.
A supremely comfortable pair of headphones with wonderful build quality and evident craftsmanship throughout.
4 An aesthetically beautiful speaker with a sonic signature that closely follows the neutrality line, but adds a dose of ‘get up n’ go’ to proceedings. Impeccably built with possibly the best single-point concentric driver currently on the market.
it is now almost impossible to find a decent new name brand amplifier for less than £100, let alone a pair of quality speakers. The P12s are a genuine hi-fi loudspeaker at a bargain price.
Edifier's NeoBuds Pro are the world's first high-res certified earbuds and are a well-rounded ‘anything goes’ listen. They pack plenty of useful features, excellent active noise cancellation, a well-designed app, and the sonics needed to reproduce high-resolution audio.