Realistic Micro-18 Microcassette Tape Recorder

[MrSethJM]

The violin & piano piece is "Rondo" by Mozart.

Look up Jascha Heifetz plays Rondo (from Serenade No. 7 "Haffner", K. 250) by Mozart, here on YouTube.

[randomforum]

That tape recorder seems to be awesome! :D I have plans to get a microtape recorder from a store which is made somewhere around 2008. Yes, they still make new ones.

[SamuelPetersen]

awesome! keep it for the future

[BadEditPro]

Neat little recorder! I always wanted a hi-fi micro cassette recorder but I have yet to find one. They are quite rare but a lot of companies made them in the early 80's... :) JC

[clydesight]

This is a nice looking machine. Most microcassette units sound crappy.

The mics aren't well insulated from the cases for one thing. Try an external mic. Also the amps have limited response and the speakers are too small an inefficient. Try an external speaker and dynamic mic (your computer mic needs power to work, it is electret, not dynamic) and see if that doesn't change things a bit.

Did I see TEAC on a label at the end?

[coolbluelights]

Thanks for watching! actually I found the problem, if you watch the video I made today, you'll see what I figured out :)

No that wasn't TEAC, that was Radio shack's date code, 4A1 means April 1991 ^^

[Lachlant1984]

Where were both these tape recorders made?

[coolbluelights]

same place everything is made, china :P

[tubeie07]

Isn't it funny hearing your old recordings - oh man, it all comes flooding back to you! Great vid Daniel.

[coolbluelights]

Yeah I'm so glad I saved all those tapes!

[SpeakerVoiceCoil]

Good luck with fixing the distortion!

[DrCassette]

I don't know what's causing the recordings to sound not that good, if this machine has an iput for an external mic you could try that to see if it sounds better then.

Of course it could be a dirty switch like you said, or also dirty heads or something like that...

[coolbluelights]

Yes I will have to find my external mic, the one for my computer seems not to work with this. I used to have a small mic that took a little button battery.

[DrCassette]

That's a nice machine!

[umajunkcollector]

I had one of those too back then. I think the RS has really good audio compaired to many other brands that costed more.

[vwestlife]

Oh, I just saw the date code at the end... "4A1" means April 1991. :-)

[coolbluelights]

oh cool! how did you find out how to decode that? the '93 says 8A3 so.. July 1993 I'm guessing

[vwestlife]

Your voice hasn't changed much at all since 1992! :-P

There should be a date code sticker in the battery compartment. The form is "mmAy" where "mm" is the month and "y" is the last digit of the year. For example, 11A8 would be November 1988 (or 1998, or 1978, etc.) and 6A2 would be June 1992. Radio Shack still uses this date code today on their products, except in 2000 they began using two digits for the year (for example, 4A06 for April 2006).

[coolbluelights]

Awesome! thanks for the insight!

[krankiev]

i always wanted one of these things.

[coolbluelights]

yeah they are really cool to have, after I took it apart my mom wouldn't buy me a new one for a while, they were pretty expensive lol

[wilkes85]

WHOO YOU WON IT! Good job!

That's a nice recorder. i don't like the style of the 1993 model though, it looks cheaper (very '90s-ish lol) with the little rounded buttons and rounded shell lol

I like the look of that circuit board too. I want my room wallpapered in a pattern like that haha

[coolbluelights]

Yeah I think 1992 was the last year of "80s box design" in '93-'94 designs started getting more rounded, I called it 90s crap lol

[CassetteMaster]

Very nice recorder! I hope it's AC bias. Maybe the tape itself had to do with whether it was distorted S. Or the way you talked in to it and the strength of your S. I will say that even some AC bias machines have a distorted S to some extent.

[coolbluelights]

Yeah, I cleaned the rec/play switch, that fixed it a little, but not much. it was very dirty. I'm almost wondering if this might be an early model, maybe they went to AC bias in the later models. I didn't see the little AC bias coil when I opened it. in the '93 model I noticed it right away.

[1walkgirl]

those are graet! :-)

But why is the later model bigger? :O

[coolbluelights]

I guess they wanted to make it more "Stylish" I noticed a lot of things changed design in 1993-94. 1992 was, I think the last year of the "80s box design"