Cassettes are a Dying Breed but...

I got this to replace my previous cassette deck which had somehow gone belly up in the 8 years or so since I had last used it. For some reason I got bitten by a bug to transfer my old cassette tapes to the computer and of course every cassette player in the house had simultaneously died. All I needed was something cheap to play a tape decently to create a digital image. I was about to buy the cheapest tape deck I could find online (a Teac W-600R for $90 plus tax and shipping) when I ran across this model at Circuit city. It was an open box model for $109.99 with no sales tax (in Oregon) so I got it instead.

As it turns out, this tape deck works just fine for my purposes. It plays my old collection of prerecorded cassettes perfectly adequately to transfer them to the computer. Actually, listening to the tapes on the stereo I was pleasantly surprised at how well most of them sounded.

I also recorded some tapes just to see how the record function worked (not that I plan on making a bunch of cassette recordings, that kind of went out when CD and DVD burners became ubiquitous). The record function works just fine. Actually, the recorded tape sounded better than a previous recording I had made with my old Sony which was more expensive and had more features.

This is a fairly no frills cassette deck. There is NO headphone jack, contrary to what the specs on Epinions indicates. There is no microphone input. Also there is no balance control which may be important if you plan on making some custom recordings or dubbing a poorly balanced tape. The record level knob is small and the pointer on the knob to indicate where it is set is almost invisible. There is no music search function. There is a combined play/record head in the B cassette deck as opposed to separate heads as in some high end models.

There is autoreverse for both the A and B cassettes which will allow you to play each side of two different cassettes twice in succession for a total of 6 hours of uninterrupted music using two 90 minute cassettes. There is Dolby B and C (as opposed to just Dolby B on the barest bones models). If you have an Onkyo receiver and CD player it also can be controlled with a single remote control from the receiver and synched up with the CD player.

The typical online price for this model is $169, which seems a little steep considering the no frills nature of the beast. I would only get this deck if you get a good price on it or if you already have Onkyo equipment and want to use the unified remote control.