goodnight sweet prince (my SONY CFS-1250L Radio Cassette-Corder)

today, i took apart my cassette player. it has been whining horribly and playing cassettes too slowly lately, which is fun and games in an ironic sort of way for two minutes and then just makes listening completely unenjoyable. with nothing to lose, i thought i could take a look inside the thing to see if i (with my extremely limited knowledge of electronics) might find something to fix and generally clean it up a little. also, i won't deny that seeing how a device like this that is really almost mechanical in its functionality is very interesting to me.

my CFS-1250L in the twilight of my fairy lights and dusk 

i first got him when i was preparing to move out of my parents' house in summer of 2021 and my mum and i were at my grandma's looking for things that might be useful for me to have once i lived alone. of course, entertainment couldn't be neglected and i'd for some time been wanting a cassette player again (an old one in particular. it needed to be....well, aesthetic-appropriate, shall we say?) and this one ticked all my boxes. so i took it with me and i loved it but admittedly didn't use it nearly enough. i didn't (and still don't) have very many albums on cassette and the box of my uncle's mixtapes that came along with the cassette player mostly aren't really aligned with my tastes. and three years later, after another move, when i wanted to put on Linkin Park's From Zero, which had just come out, he wouldn't play the cassette at all anymore, so i retired him.

now, i did this before, opening him up. one day, after yet another move last summer, i wanted to find out why he'd so mysteriously and suddenly stopped working. so i bought a gigantic screwdriver (the four main screws on the CFS-1250L are buried 10cm deep at the bottom of some very narrow holes, so i really couldn't get to them with my regular screwdriver arsenal), opened him up and found a rubberband connecting the engine (spool?) to the thing that spins the cassette utterly brittle and fallen apart. i replaced it with a new band (just a regular household rubber band i thought should do.) and the recorder (kind of) worked once again.

the new rubberband inserted around the cassette-spinner (big grey cogwheel) and the engine (small gold cogwheel). at the bottom, you can see the underside of the play, pause, rewind etc buttons. it was very interesting to look at what each of them physically does to achieve its respective function, and how. the pause button's mechanism has this metal piece that's shaped in such a way that on one press, a little metal pin locks into place at its top, then on the second press, the pin is lifted off and slips around the back of the piece into its original place. it's so tiny but just such a smart design! 

 

the same section, now isolated & without the engine. i can't quite remember which bit is the pause mechanism.

 

anyway. now we're another few months along and i've been thinking, maybe it's time to put him to rest after all. i'm sure he's earned it, if not in recent years, then certainly back when my uncle (& mum and other uncle, perhaps? i'm not actually sure of the ownership here) used him.

i obviously did not end up being able to fix the issue. tape playback is still horribly slow. i guess i could still listen to the radio on it, as that functionality doesn't seem to be affected at all. but i don't really listen to the radio at all, so.  

some more pictures i took while working:
 

the intricacy of this thing. at the bottom are the mic and speaker connectors. at the top right are the headphone jack (green) and a switch to switch between tape and radio mode (black, right beside the jack).

the entire insides put together and fixed to the front part of the player's shell (sans electricity parts, those are fixed to the back)

the large yellow block seems to adjust the MHz for dialling radio channels -- at least this is where the respective front-end dial collects to.

i hope i'll find something sensible to do with this thing. i don't necessarily want to cast it out onto landfill, but letting it sit around in my basement isn't very much better either. maybe i'll put it in the kitchen or living room for if i ever have guests over and we fancy some background noise. maybe i'll see if i can give him away to some nerd who can take him apart or fix him for their own enjoyment. i obviously also thought about bringing him to an expert to repair but that honestly would've been more costly than just getting a new player off ebay.

in fact, i found this cute little thing:

the SONY CFM-10 that i found and bought on ebay. the photo is from the listing.

the SONY CFM-10. isn't she adorable? seller says she still works, so i'm very excited to see this for myself soon. i think she'll fit into the limited shelf-space of my room very nicely. i'll update you when she arrives.

when i was browsing ebay, i also saw another player that enamoured me but i had to concede would probably take up too much space in my room at the moment.

SHARP CD- and Cassete-Player of unknown model. it would come with soundboxes on either side. i love these shapes, all the buttons AND the green on the buttons at the centre. photo is from the ebay listing

but she is gorgeous, and i was trying to find out which model she is so that i might at a later time try to find her again. unfortunately, the listing didn't include model information and i couldn't find her in a whole list of Sharp cassette players. (if you know her model or have any leads, please do share!!)

but i was looking at all these cassette players and thought how wonderful the variations of design were, and how i feel like we don't really see that today anymore. or maybe it's just that we are centralising usecases that would in the past be separated into multiple devices (camera, stereo, game console, etc) into one very digitalised device that doesn't need to be particularly interestingly designed. it seems to generally be the style of the time to reduce any object's design to be the least interesting or mentionable aspect of the object. i dunno. i just like how tactile these cassette players are. buttons and dials and if you open it up (and you can open them up!!) you can see what a buttonpress is doing. augh. i love it when things are physical reality!! AND i love it on older stereos when they label everthing on the object itself. you don't need to compare with the manual to know what a thing does and you don't need to try to interpret icons. they just tell you! yay!

ok i need to go to bed. tell me about your favourite old device! include a model number if you can so i can look it up!