I hear wow & flutter on the turntable recording. That is the same reproduction of the Crosley & Victrola & there made in China garbage. The cassette should have Dolby or some kind of noise reduction if transferring a Dolby recorded cassette.
My dad (he's 99) has one just like this only it's branded Emerson. It hasn't been used for years and then they only used it for local radio. I just took a look at it and it has the same CD door on the side. Might have to dust it off and see if all the functions work. Thanks for posting this!
I see no use for CD-RW, to complicated and fragile and no edit capabilities. I think MiniDisk is a far better choice, especially for recording vinyl records radio, streaming. Or SSD recorders.
Laptops with CD drive can do the same thin, takes less space. I see no need for this ugly stereo. 😅 Sorry!
I had gotten something similar. I had a jar full of screws to get access to the cd drawer due to it being stuck. Absolutely the worst thing ive ever gotten into. I will never be opening one again myself. Idk the brand but i imagine they are all similarly constructed as this one looks about the same.
It's hard to know what firmware is in the disc drive, it's easily changed. I'm impressed, it looks fairly high quality, might actually sound good. If I had seen it for sale, I would have passed it over as a POJ (piece of junk). 🙂
I recently acquired a 2000 era dual bay stand-alone CD Recorder at a thrift store. Yes, the kind that required the special discs. I picked up a spool of CD-R Music discs just to test it out. I was happy to discover when dubbing disc to disc, it duplicates at high speed while letting you listen. You can use the aux in to record other sources as well. In the US, I believe the blank media levy is 3%.
The pitch is probably too fast on the turntable most of these types stereo units are like that just get a extra small flathead screwdriver and turn the motor speed down a notch
THE CASSETTE DECK: Another respectable YouTuber showed you can put a drop of 3-in-one oil in cassette motor (disassemble, put it in the back baring) and it would give respectable WOW and Flutter readings. Just in case you choose to try.
Edit: and after listening to the sound, I'd decide if those speaker boxes could use some rock wool or polyfill.
Edit2: I would add an aux out on the back to run into a bigger amp. Maybe patch into the "phones" on the inside and lead them to 2 RCA jacks on the back with a push-button switch to the front for activation.
I would have loved something like this in the late 90's – early 00's. I had the capability to record vinyl and cassettes digitally by connecting my hi-fi up to the sound card on my PC, but this kind of unit did away with the need for wires stretching from one device to the other. The only down-side is that cassette player. Horrible things designed to go on the dashboards of cars, no less. Still, I suppose it was cheaper/quicker than having a proper mechanism that would look weird on the side of the unit. An after-thought, indeed. The turntable would be the main consideration for me. Getting to record albums to put onto CD was very innovative, at the time. I did a few for my parents, as I remember, from some of their old albums that I'd converted to CD, so they can something to play on their CD player that I'd just got them, when their library of music of CD was zero!
Nice video. I have seen this contraption in EU in second hand store. Have You seen somewhere to buy these CD Music cd? I want to do experiments with them.
While this one has some redeeming features this style of devices make me mildly angry any time I see them… well not the devices themselves but how they were sold. I've had 3 or 4 elderly relatives buy devices like this that were just not worth even close to what they paid for them and use a defunct brand name (like the one here using Memorex who went out of business as a company in 1996). They are/were clearly aimed at a more senior market, for instance according to the sales and documentation calls it a 'phonograph' which is a word only older generations would use. While they look good they are almost always very plastic in construction using the cheapest low quality off the shelf assemblies and almost always end up just being used to listen to the radio as everything else breaks or is too complicated for the owner to use.
Could put a small bin under the cassette slot so once youve finnished recording it falls straight into the trash ready for the next cassette to record.
There was a time, maybe thirty or so years ago that MEMOREX made a very good line of cassette tapes. amongst brands such as TDK that I frequently used in that format. Sad to see those classic brands gone and the brand names slapped into junk. That is progress – I guess. Units like that were intended for people with limited "audio know how" and just wanted something to listen to the radio, CD, or burn on in that case, or to pop on an record in some cases. Junk. What amazes me in that many wealthy households have nothing more than one of those Bose Wave radio things which is a step up from your unit but not by much. My view of that unit, UGLY made in China junk that tries too hard to be nostalgic. Too bad they did not go for a package that is more straight forward. No doubt the the Chinese manufacturer made a boat load of money on those units.
When I saw the case I thought you'd already worked on one of these before, then found the video (5NE3MKre1_o) and it looks like it's the same case with slightly different internals.
I know you said you wouldn't use the record player, clearly a very good 🙂 it's shockingly bad with all that flutter. The cassette sounded better than I expected. I think I would just feed an external source into my PC, rather than having an enormous unit around. Also I still have my Philips CDR560 from 1999 which works beautifully 🙂 Tascam PCM recorder these days though. Nice video
All of these "reproduction" units seem to use the same record player regardless of the brand. Even the el-cheapo Crosley Cruiser uses that same record player. The first thing anyone should do before they attempt to play a record is to swap out that sapphire needle for a diamond one. The needle that comes with all of these units will start to degrade the records being played very quickly as it has an extremely short life span. And yes, that is not a magnetic cartridge but a ceramic one.
i had a pioneer CD-R when they appear ,a pioneer like those litle turntables and in the display crystal meters for the recording level, the CD-R either than being more expensive wasn´t re-writtable i had a few from pioneer and sony but one day a indian had several things on the floor for sale one of them were cds without any brand ,and i told him if he had cd-r only for music i would buy them ,the next day passing on the same street he calls me and shows me a cake of 100 cds nothing written on them , brandless ,i went home after telling him that if it didn´t record he had to give me my money back, he assure me that will record ,i tried the first ,just perfect than i recorded another ,perfect at the end of a week all that i tried were perfect i went to talk to him and said that all that i tried were perfect, i paid 20€ or around it ,the € didn´t exist at the time and the sound was just like the original this using a optic fiber cable that had come with my first minidisc deck conected to a pioneer cd player the PD-6700 ,but limited to 3 recordings from each original cd but if you knew someone with the same cd you could do 3 more and even today they sound very good some that years after i bought for my computer that had a white brand it recorded very close to the Pioneer but faster ,the pioneer only real time ,the computer recorder that i bought in 2003 with already perfect quality could record 52x faster but if one compared in diferent systems the CD-R was always better it was a exact replica of the original ,but after so may years the first cd recorded in the computer stoped working but the cd-r even all yellow and with missing bits it played perfect, but this first cds i recorded on a computer weren´t recorded in my computer ,the ones i recorded in my computer i took care of them and all play today but one can notice a litle more refined sound in the pioneer CD-R
when i was a kid i wish i had a system like that ,but there were no cds, my father gave me his 76 top end system from Pioneer when i was almost 30 years old before i had a ES-2000 system from Pioneer. While living in africa my father went to japan and bought this system which is better finished than that years component catalog from pioneer ,1974. he only ofered me it because he spent a fortune in 1979 in a revox/studer system ,i because i understood why he had given to me his precious system told him that i would prefer the BMW 535i that costed around the same price of his new system this in 1980, it all works today ,the system i bought in the 90´s already had to send almost all components to repair , but he surprised me ofering me my first car with drivers permit a Porshe 928GTS ,i couldn´t believe ,he was a rich man but all my life he ofered me is pioneer system if you have the 76 catalog choose the most expensive components and you´ll see my 76 equipment ,just remeber it now i had to sent to repair in 84 my reel to reel deck and after he ofered me a porshe 928GTS stop ,in all my life not a single piece of clothes or birthday gift or christmas gift, and because when i was 30 i didn´t had that much money sometimes when getting out of my home to drink some alcohol with friends i would look at the porshe 928GTS stoped in front of my house without a drop of gasoline, sometimes a friend would put some gasoline just to ride in a porshe for the first time, i ended up talking more about my life than the memorex system i had never seen one but i do know well the brand memorex , sorry for the personal story and regards
The only reason I can think of for not allowing recording from the radio is that the motor and laser circuitry in the CD drive can produce interference that would be picked up by the radio – and therefore be recorded along with the audio. This would particularly affect AM reception; I'm sure you've tried radios near computer equipment before!
32:01 the aux recorded from mp3 has the left and right channel mixed up !!
Seems to be remarkably competent for an anachronistic little thing
I hear wow & flutter on the turntable recording. That is the same reproduction of the Crosley & Victrola & there made in China garbage. The cassette should have Dolby or some kind of noise reduction if transferring a Dolby recorded cassette.
Good quality music. 🎷
nice unit tbh quite handy
My dad (he's 99) has one just like this only it's branded Emerson. It hasn't been used for years and then they only used it for local radio. I just took a look at it and it has the same CD door on the side. Might have to dust it off and see if all the functions work. Thanks for posting this!
I see no use for CD-RW, to complicated and fragile and no edit capabilities. I think MiniDisk is a far better choice, especially for recording vinyl records radio, streaming. Or SSD recorders.
Laptops with CD drive can do the same thin, takes less space. I see no need for this ugly stereo. 😅 Sorry!
Not bad, better then the sound design and yorx crap from 80s with fake equilizer slider buttons and painted on tweeters.
I had gotten something similar. I had a jar full of screws to get access to the cd drawer due to it being stuck. Absolutely the worst thing ive ever gotten into. I will never be opening one again myself. Idk the brand but i imagine they are all similarly constructed as this one looks about the same.
It's hard to know what firmware is in the disc drive, it's easily changed. I'm impressed, it looks fairly high quality, might actually sound good. If I had seen it for sale, I would have passed it over as a POJ (piece of junk). 🙂
that wire is to prevent ground loop if i had to guess…
I recently acquired a 2000 era dual bay stand-alone CD Recorder at a thrift store. Yes, the kind that required the special discs. I picked up a spool of CD-R Music discs just to test it out. I was happy to discover when dubbing disc to disc, it duplicates at high speed while letting you listen. You can use the aux in to record other sources as well. In the US, I believe the blank media levy is 3%.
you got a wow and flutter meter? sounds a little off
The pitch is probably too fast on the turntable most of these types stereo units are like that just get a extra small flathead screwdriver and turn the motor speed down a notch
How do you work with all that crap all over your workbench?
THE CASSETTE DECK:
Another respectable YouTuber showed you can put a drop of 3-in-one oil in cassette motor (disassemble, put it in the back baring) and it would give respectable WOW and Flutter readings. Just in case you choose to try.
Edit: and after listening to the sound, I'd decide if those speaker boxes could use some rock wool or polyfill.
Edit2: I would add an aux out on the back to run into a bigger amp. Maybe patch into the "phones" on the inside and lead them to 2 RCA jacks on the back with a push-button switch to the front for activation.
I would have loved something like this in the late 90's – early 00's. I had the capability to record vinyl and cassettes digitally by connecting my hi-fi up to the sound card on my PC, but this kind of unit did away with the need for wires stretching from one device to the other. The only down-side is that cassette player. Horrible things designed to go on the dashboards of cars, no less. Still, I suppose it was cheaper/quicker than having a proper mechanism that would look weird on the side of the unit. An after-thought, indeed. The turntable would be the main consideration for me. Getting to record albums to put onto CD was very innovative, at the time. I did a few for my parents, as I remember, from some of their old albums that I'd converted to CD, so they can something to play on their CD player that I'd just got them, when their library of music of CD was zero!
19:08
Just because YOU don't record to cassette does not mean other don't.
Besides recording to cassette is MUCH easier and cheaper to record onto CD.
cd recording in these must be pretty rare!
Nice video. I have seen this contraption in EU in second hand store. Have You seen somewhere to buy these CD Music cd? I want to do experiments with them.
While this one has some redeeming features this style of devices make me mildly angry any time I see them… well not the devices themselves but how they were sold. I've had 3 or 4 elderly relatives buy devices like this that were just not worth even close to what they paid for them and use a defunct brand name (like the one here using Memorex who went out of business as a company in 1996). They are/were clearly aimed at a more senior market, for instance according to the sales and documentation calls it a 'phonograph' which is a word only older generations would use. While they look good they are almost always very plastic in construction using the cheapest low quality off the shelf assemblies and almost always end up just being used to listen to the radio as everything else breaks or is too complicated for the owner to use.
That piracy tax thing was bullshit. Fucking record labels need to go to hell.
Could put a small bin under the cassette slot so once youve finnished recording it falls straight into the trash ready for the next cassette to record.
There was a time, maybe thirty or so years ago that MEMOREX made a very good line of cassette tapes. amongst brands such as TDK that I frequently used in that format. Sad to see those classic brands gone and the brand names slapped into junk. That is progress – I guess. Units like that were intended for people with limited "audio know how" and just wanted something to listen to the radio, CD, or burn on in that case, or to pop on an record in some cases. Junk. What amazes me in that many wealthy households have nothing more than one of those Bose Wave radio things which is a step up from your unit but not by much. My view of that unit, UGLY made in China junk that tries too hard to be nostalgic. Too bad they did not go for a package that is more straight forward. No doubt the the Chinese manufacturer made a boat load of money on those units.
When I saw the case I thought you'd already worked on one of these before, then found the video (5NE3MKre1_o) and it looks like it's the same case with slightly different internals.
It has manual record levels? That’s the last thing I would expect that to have!
I know you said you wouldn't use the record player, clearly a very good 🙂 it's shockingly bad with all that flutter. The cassette sounded better than I expected. I think I would just feed an external source into my PC, rather than having an enormous unit around. Also I still have my Philips CDR560 from 1999 which works beautifully 🙂 Tascam PCM recorder these days though. Nice video
It sounds awesome, Maxell CDRs are great also.. – How will it sound in the car and in a more expensive home stereo set up ?
All of these "reproduction" units seem to use the same record player regardless of the brand. Even the el-cheapo Crosley Cruiser uses that same record player. The first thing anyone should do before they attempt to play a record is to swap out that sapphire needle for a diamond one. The needle that comes with all of these units will start to degrade the records being played very quickly as it has an extremely short life span. And yes, that is not a magnetic cartridge but a ceramic one.
26:00 Flutter, flutter, and some more flutter.
i had a pioneer CD-R when they appear ,a pioneer like those litle turntables and in the display crystal meters for the recording level, the CD-R either than being more expensive wasn´t re-writtable i had a few from pioneer and sony but one day a indian had several things on the floor for sale one of them were cds without any brand ,and i told him if he had cd-r only for music i would buy them ,the next day passing on the same street he calls me and shows me a cake of 100 cds nothing written on them , brandless ,i went home after telling him that if it didn´t record he had to give me my money back, he assure me that will record ,i tried the first ,just perfect than i recorded another ,perfect at the end of a week all that i tried were perfect i went to talk to him and said that all that i tried were perfect, i paid 20€ or around it ,the € didn´t exist at the time and the sound was just like the original this using a optic fiber cable that had come with my first minidisc deck conected to a pioneer cd player the PD-6700 ,but limited to 3 recordings from each original cd but if you knew someone with the same cd you could do 3 more and even today they sound very good some that years after i bought for my computer that had a white brand it recorded very close to the Pioneer but faster ,the pioneer only real time ,the computer recorder that i bought in 2003 with already perfect quality could record 52x faster but if one compared in diferent systems the CD-R was always better it was a exact replica of the original ,but after so may years the first cd recorded in the computer stoped working but the cd-r even all yellow and with missing bits it played perfect, but this first cds i recorded on a computer weren´t recorded in my computer ,the ones i recorded in my computer i took care of them and all play today but one can notice a litle more refined sound in the pioneer CD-R
Memorex never got anything bad from this brand
the stylus is magnetic allthough it´s the cheapest i found in cheap turntables
when i was a kid i wish i had a system like that ,but there were no cds, my father gave me his 76 top end system from Pioneer when i was almost 30 years old before i had a ES-2000 system from Pioneer. While living in africa my father went to japan and bought this system which is better finished than that years component catalog from pioneer ,1974. he only ofered me it because he spent a fortune in 1979 in a revox/studer system ,i because i understood why he had given to me his precious system told him that i would prefer the BMW 535i that costed around the same price of his new system this in 1980, it all works today ,the system i bought in the 90´s already had to send almost all components to repair , but he surprised me ofering me my first car with drivers permit a Porshe 928GTS ,i couldn´t believe ,he was a rich man but all my life he ofered me is pioneer system if you have the 76 catalog choose the most expensive components and you´ll see my 76 equipment ,just remeber it now i had to sent to repair in 84 my reel to reel deck and after he ofered me a porshe 928GTS stop ,in all my life not a single piece of clothes or birthday gift or christmas gift, and because when i was 30 i didn´t had that much money sometimes when getting out of my home to drink some alcohol with friends i would look at the porshe 928GTS stoped in front of my house without a drop of gasoline, sometimes a friend would put some gasoline just to ride in a porshe for the first time, i ended up talking more about my life than the memorex system i had never seen one but i do know well the brand memorex , sorry for the personal story and regards
The only reason I can think of for not allowing recording from the radio is that the motor and laser circuitry in the CD drive can produce interference that would be picked up by the radio – and therefore be recorded along with the audio. This would particularly affect AM reception; I'm sure you've tried radios near computer equipment before!