I like how Amazon described them as having "Incredible audio". Of course it means they have audio which lacks any credibility, which does appear to be true.
Ooohhh.... I hate you 😑 I so hate you for that. Ohhh that was bad...I think this just ruined my day it was so bad. Don't ever do something like this ever again.
That black cassette player's a bit like me in the morning, slow and nonsense at first, slowly getting better, with occasional flashes of lightning speed.
@Rubicon 1 I think someone's been making this particular model for many years now. I remember 15-odd years ago having a player that looked and acted exactly like the larger player reviewed here, only its color scheme was shades of brown (like it was meant to compliment a piece of furniture). I used that thing a lot and because I was young didn't realize the sound quality wasn't that great. :o3
@@gordontaylor2815 I think they started making the 'rounded-shaped' ones right around 2004 or so. I didn't like the aesthetic then and I don't now; some literally had the speakers angled sideways!
They sold crap players back in the day...you use a box to 'improve' the sound. Cardboard helps by sitting it on its side and sitting the player inside, sometimes in one of the corners, and aiming it to the listening area. A wooden box or a deep fully enclosed wooden shelf can help even more. You had to learn to get by :-)
@@JasonB808 , in far too many instances, just "anyone" shouldn't be able to broadcast their "music" around the world. Music was better when we had music business A&R people, and DJ's with musical taste, to filter out the worst of it and let the good stuff get out to the public. Sure, there was still plenty of dreck on the airwaves back in the sixties and seventies, but not like it is now. I had a young art teacher in the early Seventies, when I was in junior high school, who used to let us listen to AM top 40 radio while we worked on our projects, and while you might hear Tony Orando and Dawn, or the Carpenters, it was often followed by Alice Cooper, or Smoke in the Water, or Edgar Winter doing Frankenstein, so there was a pretty wide range of music even on commercial top 40 back then.
@@JasonB808 ps, you missed the sarcasm in that other comment. Back in the era of cassettes and home recording, the record companies argued that they were losing billions of dollars because of home taping. They were happy to go to what was originally a non-home-recordable CD format and phase out cassette tapes (until computers and CD burners made digital home recording possible).
If you allow people to record music FREE off of the radio then they'll NEVER buy pre-recorded tapes! I mean, people LIKE hearing the D.Js talk over their favourite songs!
There is a awful low budget horror film from the 2017 called “The Demonic Tapes” about a London psychic medium who records the voices of the dead on compact cassette tape, including one voice claiming to be a demon. It claims to be based on a true story. I could imagine this tape came from this woman’s collection.
To rid that cassette player of the C90 demon, you have to bring it to a cemetery at midnight on a foggy night. Collect the mist off of a mausoleum in the center of the cemetery and wipe it on the cassette player while reciting Amazon's terms and conditions backwards.
Do they got the pee green vomit colored one in honor of the movie "The Exorcist"? Also, I think it needs a copy of approved prayers and chants and complimentary incense.
@@fumthings But on the other hand awful and awesome, as well as terrible and terrific, are literal synonyms but their meaning is quite opposite, so there's that.
9:45 Undocumented feature: cassette deck can summon two demons who argue about which direction you’re supposed to take at the next intersection 12:40 Playing a blank tape then unlocks an even more secret feature where the demons are replaced by Alvin and the Chipmunks!
Maybe I should have one of those 'left right' cassettes poised to play in my car player, so I can let it rip just after asking the wife 'which way my dear?'
LL's Radio was the first Hip Hop I got into (I had heard the 12" of the SugarHill Gang's Rapper's Delight in '79 and the Run-DMC with Aerosmith and hadn't really cared for either). It hit me as authentic...a kid rapping about his daily life...and I was into Punk Rock at the same time so it stuck (kind of like Bambaataa and John Lydon hooking up for World Destruction later on). Just remember guys, old folks ain't gonna be like before...Gen X is a whole other enchilada :-)
@@conflictmagazine That's what I keep telling myself....until I see most of my fellow Gen Xers dressing like scrubs and sitting around bitching about taxes, just like the generations before them lol
I'll up my Patreon level if Techmoan puts his hat on backwards and takes out that clown radio blasting tunes around the neighborhood while filming all the action.
The stereo test on the black boom box had me literally crying with laughter 😂! I had to get out of bed and go to another room so as not to wake my wife who was asleep next to me. After its 30 minutes punishment it then played fast - killed me! Great stuff Mat - loved it!
No Diablo burnout session...no Scarlett Fire? My standards for e waist reviews has really reached a new bar thanks to Wade...I feel like these are just nessisary now.
If you are ever using these boom boxes at the beach and find the batteries are exhausted, you will have to look for the battery lady: She sells "C cells at the sea shore.
If the clown's handbag had been out in the mid 90s from somewhere like Comet for maybe 50 quid, my teenage self would have probably bought it as a birthday present.
I actually bought a Venturer, CD, Radio, Cassette in transparent blue plastic for £30 in Comet at the end of the 90s when eveyone was copying the style and colours of the original iMac.
I can find NEW release on cassette easier than I can find them on CD. And with the hipster crowd with their Crosley turntables ("because analogue sounds better"), what type of players do you think they are likely to have?
So I do agree no one is using THESE cassette players, but I do know it's not a dead format. Because cassette tapes are more reliable than CD players in cars so to folks too broke to upgrade the stereo of their cheap used car cassette tapes are still fantastic.
Actually there's plenty of 75+ year olds who buy things like this because they have some old tapes they want to listen to. And they don't know or care about the fact that these sound like rubbish.
@@tim3172 Many black metal bands nowadays release their music only on limited edition cassettes. Some release it on CD and online too, but as we know they are just posers and sellouts. \m/ /s
2:51 That’s precisely the hip lingo my good chums and I would use to converse when we were youthful rapscallions! Glad to have you down with us Matthew! 🤓👍🏼
In a decent 80’s Boombox the instructions always said ‘depress the play button’. I imagine the play button on that one is depressed enough already though!
@@mycosys I became a young adult in the mid 1970's, and much of the music we listened to was influenced and informed by the 1960's. Yes, there was plenty of dreck, but back then we had free-form, progressive FM radio stations with DJ's who were allowed to play whatever they wanted ---- from rock to jazz to fusion to blues, bluegrass and country, they played it all. It was a real ear-opening experience and greatly expanded my musical tastes. Prior to that, even early 70's AM top 40 would play Alice Cooper and Deep Purple amidst the MOR crap like the. Carpenters or Tony Orlando and Dawn. It was the 80's and the rise of MTV that did the most damage ---- the sound quality of the recordings and mixes went way down hill, And the look of the band on camera became far more important than any intrinsic quality of the music or the lack of it. I was selling audio equipment for a living then, and I switched to college radio because commercial FM radio had become playlisted, homogenized and dull.
Hi Matt. Following your numerous advices about crappy modern boomboxes, I put my hands on a Panasonic RX-CT800 for a bargain 29 euros. The cassette decks probably never encountered a tape, they were as clean as new although the belts were completely dry. A least it wasn't horrible goo. 2 new belts and I got myself a great twin cassette Panasonic boombox ! Thank you Matt for your advices
Hey techmoan. There is an amazing boombox style unit called the Roberts Concerto 2. I think it is still in production. It is designed for the visually impaired, but it has features like usb, SD card, mic input, cassette, dab, CD etc. Dream features to have.
Portable "hi-fi" for the masses, on an 'Amazon Basics' wage, while the boss hi-flies. And that black model resembles a fly's head. "Help me! Help me!" (garbled of course).
This video made me unusually sad. The industry really missed out on a big opportunity with the recent compact cassette renaissance. Instead of investing a few bucks in R&D for a half decent cassette mechanism, they just took the absolute worst, end of the line 90s mechanism and literally just hit "copy" + "paste". They successfully managed to revive vinyl with a few half decent turntables that actually sound Hifi, why not just take on the next big thing??
I'd imagine setting up QA for compact cassette mechanisms in China isn't the easiest thing ever. Also, it's a piece of technology that came into prominence just before planned obsolescence and unrepairablility really took off and those things never really got figured out for higher end cassette players, so that's another reason for major electronics manufacturers to not be interested in investing.
12:40 - I see your mistake, there, Mat. You've picked up your C90 of Sgt. Quackers calling drill at the 4th Royal Duck Batallion. A classic, I understand.
The multicolored one looks nearly identical physically to the old basic Koss boom boxes from the late 90's/early 2000's. The difference is that those worked decently well and sounded half decent.
There is much better modern boom boxes than this junk, but they won't contain tape decks. High end Bluetooth speakers such as soundbox or ue hyperboom. There are many others
Oh man, I went searching for this kind of reference, and you didn't disappoint! th-cam.com/video/HiQP5htOcPc/w-d-xo.html Bowser's aircraft had to be an inspiration for this, subconsciously or intentional.
I've been asking round my friends as i had a spare tape deck that needed a new home, not one of them had any tapes to play so i think the market for tape decks is shrinking, i even asked at a local record shop that sells secondhand Hifi and they have difficulty selling the decks they have in stock, even though they sell tapes as well as cd's and vinyl.
@@mycosys "but certainly not for hifi" My 1979 JVC kd-a2 makes recordings on humble type 1 ferric that are so true to the digital source that it's actually difficult to tell the difference between the two, and that's with shp9500 headphones which are very flat and have clear treble. I do keep dolby off, and whenever the music is really quiet you can hear the tape hiss, but it needs to get very quiet before it becomes intrusive, or even noticeable much of the time. I believe cassettes are hifi and very underestimated, you just need to record them at the proper volume. Pre-recorded cassettes more often than not were very compressed, the age of cds (and digital in general) gets the blame for the loudness wars, well I'm here to say it absolutely started with cassettes, I have recorded many pre recorded tapes in audacity and brickwalling is very prevalent in them. I think CDs just turned this up a notch because digital compression doesn't have as much distortion, but it ruined the dynamic range and made everything seem way too loud all of the time.
Maybe not. A record player is relatively uncomplicated. I was inside my old 1970s tape deck and boggled at the complexity of the mechanisms and the tolerances required to get proper playback. If someone brought a new proper one to market it would probably be geared necessarily toward the audiophile market, and I don't know that tapes are preferred to anything these days.
@@jdraven0890 I think modern manufacturing and materials *could* bring an affordable mechanism to market. Tolerances are way improved and things can be done cheaply and easily with microcontrollers and cheap motors rather than fancy mechanisms in many cases. There's just no market.
@@andygozzo72 The funny thing is that the only reason to call them "vinyl" is to distinguish them from the earlier shellac records, which look similar but are far less common today than they were even in the 80s. Would be cool if a current band released some music on shellac; would give us an excuse to restore an old Victrola lol.
@@andygozzo72 If we ever used the v-word if would have been singular, as a collective noun, like "I collect vinyl" or "I'm running out of shelf space for my vinyl", we would never have said "l'm going to put a vinyl on", and we definitely never said vinyls.
I picked up a Sony Boombox at the Goodwill for $5.00 and I am super happy with it. Not only is it a Sony, within the top five brands since forever, but it picks up a radio station I listen to frequently that many radios I have in the house cannot pick up due to mountain ranges. Comes in clear as a bell as if I was listening from the parking lot of the antenna.
The wow and flutter on those Amazon prices is off the scale. Absolutely ridiculous. No wonder so many Amazon electronics end up in landfill before anyone has even bought them. I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.
It's worse. Many families in the US never being able to make the month because prices go up, wages stagnate, cannot afford anymore anything else. So they deal with those trash products and know exactly that their parents had it better but they go into resignation mode. Plus - when their kids invite friends and they see this the friendship won't last long stigmatizing them even more ...
Thanks for another entertaining video Techmoan. It makes me sad that Panasonic have discontinued their "Boombox" with cassette. I purchased an RX-D50 at your recommendation for my 5 year old daughter for Christmas last year. She loves it and has a really nice sound.
Every time I watch one of these I am reminded of the odd boombox from my teen years I have squirreled away in the garage. Very strange, mostly wood, 1930s styling, bought in he 90s... Weighs a ton to ship to you I'd imagine, but could do with a refurbish... I've never seen anything else like it... :)
Oh my god this video gave me way more laughs than I ever expected it to! 😂😂 Brilliant! I loved it. Starting with the "clowns handbag" 😂 ...I laughed like a little kid at the left/right playback. I wish I could like this vid more than once.
That L and R test nearly killed me! It sounding like the cross between farting and vomiting! XD Yeah, I've heard shoebox players with better fidelity. Certainly better speed control.
I was intrigued by the title of this video, but I LITERALLY laughed out loud when you revealed the coloured boombox!! The Clown's Handbag... brilliant!
Good catch on the liquid crystal display display, I love those silly grammar things. If you’re not familiar with baseball, there’s a stat called RBI, which is Runs Batted In. They are regularly referred to as RBIs, which translates to Runs Batted Ins. RsBI would be the corrected abbreviation, which is what I call them to annoy my friends and family. You could also simply say “he had 3 RBI on the day,” but that ain’t how we do it over here :)
Haha, I came here to comment on the same thing. I don't know what it is but hearing a British accent quoting 80s American hip-hop made me glad I woke up for no reason on a Saturday at 5:30 am.
What a blast from the past! I recognized what these were just from the thumbnail. These are most likely rebranded Chinese boomboxes that have been in production for many years. I had an Emerson branded one in 2003. The colorful one has almost exactly the same layout for the buttons, LCD panel, speakers and tape controls as my old Emerson. The quality looks to have gotten worse, as on the old one could record audio, that's probably why the play button is so big now. The quality wasn't great back then, because, you know, Emerson, but man this terrible haha.
I am wondering if the inconclusive +3% drift results you were seeing on the black one might actually be accurate considering just how bad it was when it started out. Whatever is wrong in the mechanism might well result in a massive error like that, might it not? Then again the meter was maxed out, so my arguing might just be a "3.6 roentgens, not great, not terrible" sort of thing.
The mechanism has some sort of issue, and might have been calibrated when it ran slow(er) than after it got a workout. And as it sat, it got slower, and when it got some exercise, it got faster. It does seem significantly higher pitched to me; but most people can have a hard time telling apart anything less than a semitone, unless in direct comparison, and that's already 6%.
I would repeat the test using the mic, but on the clown boombox. Then compare to the results gathered using it's headphone jack. If similar then the test was accurate on the black box.
I'm curious what research Amazon performed to think people still want a cassette mech in a cheapo boombox? I got away from cassettes as soon as I could in the early 90's and "moved on" to CD's. Either way, interesting content as always, excited for whatever you have in store next!
The Amazon Basics stuff is really hit or miss. I've bought a lot of Basics cables over the years and have been generally impressed; despite the low price they've always had a "premium" feel, and they've never let me down. Batteries are OK for low power devices (remotes, etc.) but in something like a camera they're not so great, but given their low price they're good enough to just keep a stash of assorted sizes in a drawer for emergencies. Anything more advanced than that, though, and it's a total crapshoot; sometimes you get something half decent, sometimes you get some terrible trash, and there's no real way of knowing, so I'm curious as to how they select which products get their "seal of approval".
I think they're just pulling the old Wish-prank. Slap the logo on any cheap crap they can find and sell it for a way too high price. Some people will return it, sure, but some others can't be bothered with it and just toss the thing in the trash in the same box it got delivered in. Just another brand to avoid. Sadly, there's loads of unknown, crappy sounding brands on Amazon anyway. It seems they're at the point where they sell a lot of stuff based on the name alone, people will generally trust Amazon because it's Amazon, and all the crappy brands profit off of it.
I love how there are two distinct types of audiophiles; One that only wants the highest quality, lossless, uncompressed, raw digital format studio recordings And the other that wants to listen to neolithic audio formats in the most accurate, highest quality imaginable.
My kid sister had a version of the larger one (sans clown colors) and that was ~10 years ago. I can tell straight away by the layout of the CD buttons and the tri-point volume knob. I'd wager there's countless copies of the design.
Yeah, I remember having the larger model in a brown color scheme (like it was meant to go with a desk or table) for many years. I think it's still at my parent's house from when I moved out to my own apartment...
Tomorrows land fill today. Thank you for this. I understand that people may want to buy one of these as "a bit of fun" or have very limited means and can't afford any better but there's nothing fun about cheap tat and it's tragic to think of someone on a low income spending all they can afford on garbage like this. I've been subscribed to your channel since the early days when you were reviewing dash cams and I adore your content. You are very thorough yet remain so very human with your wonderful British sense of humor. I'm based in Sydney Australia and I'm sure your 1 million plus subscribers will agree that you're appreciated the world over. Keep up the stellar work.
it's safe to assume it's got the same one being it's made at the same factory and it looks like the assembly line splits off at some point and X number of internals goes off and get's a clown suit or a black suit.
This would be good for a garage radio, recreational (camping, boating, beach) or maybe for a child's first stereo. That way if it fails due to weather exposure or a mischievous kid, you're not out a lotta money.
I love how like... 5 episodes of boom boxes ago he was already getting annoyed with the low quality of them, and he's reaching the point where he's just like, "These bastards keep making boomboxes! "
OK I had to pause this at the price. This whole time, all this was fine and dandy for what they were.... $15 little portable radio/CD players. Exactly the type of thing I bought to put in my baby's room just to play a little goodnight CD at bedtime. 40 pounds even after the price drop!? That is unreal.
I like how Amazon described them as having "Incredible audio". Of course it means they have audio which lacks any credibility, which does appear to be true.
See, that's how you do marketing.
Incredible that someone would pay 65. for something that bad.
"They both treat bass as though it was one of the world's rarest commodities, and it shouldn't be wasted in a boombox." quote of the century
🤣
If you'd told me one of them was going to have a possessed cassette mechanism, my money would've been on the clown one.
@@johndododoe1411 autopsy or an exorcism?
@@Kalvinjj Or big Clives X-ray hammer! 😂😂
I can't upvote this comment as hard as I want to.
it's always teh wallflowers ya gotta watch
It was funny 😆
If you're at the beach and the batteries run low, that's just fine. I heard she sells c-cells by the sea shore.
underrated comment
This joke brought to you by a guy named Cecil
I C what you did there
Sea shore does!
Ooohhh.... I hate you 😑 I so hate you for that. Ohhh that was bad...I think this just ruined my day it was so bad. Don't ever do something like this ever again.
That black cassette player's a bit like me in the morning, slow and nonsense at first, slowly getting better, with occasional flashes of lightning speed.
Brilliant comment!
This is so underrated
Sounded a bit like the shipping forecast there 😃
Hey, I resemble that!
Sounds more like the side effects of the latest rona vaccine.
I wouldn't call them boombox either. "Crackle carton" feels a bit more fitting.
How about "pieces of shit"
@Rubicon 1 I think someone's been making this particular model for many years now. I remember 15-odd years ago having a player that looked and acted exactly like the larger player reviewed here, only its color scheme was shades of brown (like it was meant to compliment a piece of furniture). I used that thing a lot and because I was young didn't realize the sound quality wasn't that great. :o3
@@gordontaylor2815 I think they started making the 'rounded-shaped' ones right around 2004 or so. I didn't like the aesthetic then and I don't now; some literally had the speakers angled sideways!
With a hiss-hatch on the front.
They sold crap players back in the day...you use a box to 'improve' the sound. Cardboard helps by sitting it on its side and sitting the player inside, sometimes in one of the corners, and aiming it to the listening area. A wooden box or a deep fully enclosed wooden shelf can help even more. You had to learn to get by :-)
Of course they don't record! Don't you know _home taping is killing music!_
Lol. Sadly music died a few years back, and it wasn't home taping that killed it :(
TH-cam. You can watch free music videos for almost anyone.
@@JasonB808 , in far too many instances, just "anyone" shouldn't be able to broadcast their "music" around the world. Music was better when we had music business A&R people, and DJ's with musical taste, to filter out the worst of it and let the good stuff get out to the public. Sure, there was still plenty of dreck on the airwaves back in the sixties and seventies, but not like it is now. I had a young art teacher in the early Seventies, when I was in junior high school, who used to let us listen to AM top 40 radio while we worked on our projects, and while you might hear Tony Orando and Dawn, or the Carpenters, it was often followed by Alice Cooper, or Smoke in the Water, or Edgar Winter doing Frankenstein, so there was a pretty wide range of music even on commercial top 40 back then.
@@JasonB808 ps, you missed the sarcasm in that other comment. Back in the era of cassettes and home recording, the record companies argued that they were losing billions of dollars because of home taping. They were happy to go to what was originally a non-home-recordable CD format and phase out cassette tapes (until computers and CD burners made digital home recording possible).
If you allow people to record music FREE off of the radio then they'll NEVER buy pre-recorded tapes! I mean, people LIKE hearing the D.Js talk over their favourite songs!
Techmoan: “Let’s play the Left/Right test”
Boombox: “No Left. No Right. Only Zuul.”
Boombox: I am the Gate Keeper!
-
L-R Tape: I am the Key Master!
Man of culture, I see
There is a awful low budget horror film from the 2017 called “The Demonic Tapes” about a London psychic medium who records the voices of the dead on compact cassette tape, including one voice claiming to be a demon. It claims to be based on a true story. I could imagine this tape came from this woman’s collection.
I'm surprised at you techmoan. You didn't recognize the C90 cassette tape, that less popular brand of 45 minutes per side cassette tape?
Love this comment
To rid that cassette player of the C90 demon, you have to bring it to a cemetery at midnight on a foggy night. Collect the mist off of a mausoleum in the center of the cemetery and wipe it on the cassette player while reciting Amazon's terms and conditions backwards.
Upon success, the cassette player will turn itself in joyful colors, grow, learn to play MP3 and get a headphone jack.
Do they got the pee green vomit colored one in honor of the movie "The Exorcist"?
Also, I think it needs a copy of approved prayers and chants and complimentary incense.
@@plan7a great point, I'll edit that one in :)
Ahah
Hahaaha 😂
Honestly, the clown's handbag would be quite cool with one simple hack: Put a Nickleodeon sticker over the Amazon Basics logo. ;)
Nothing else describes that colorful abomination better than "Clown's Handbag".
@@NickHill729 maybe the most accurate description would be POS ! 😁😆😂😄🤣😅😃
@@NickHill729 the curse?
Buzzlightyear star command sticker
"Property of LL Cool J" sticker.
"It has incredible audio."
Suggests to me that the audio isn't credible.
Misprint it was meant to say In-credible 😄
isn't that Latin for, not credible?
@@fumthings But on the other hand awful and awesome, as well as terrible and terrific, are literal synonyms but their meaning is quite opposite, so there's that.
@@fumthings Yes.
Which is why I said that.
Yeah incredible how hard they messed it up. That took incredible effort!
Ah a new episode of Techmoan's award winning "modern e-waste" show. Nice.
9:45 Undocumented feature: cassette deck can summon two demons who argue about which direction you’re supposed to take at the next intersection
12:40 Playing a blank tape then unlocks an even more secret feature where the demons are replaced by Alvin and the Chipmunks!
lol
it's the purple two-headed monster from Sesame Street ;)
Losing my shit at this comment
@@jub8891 lol
Maybe I should have one of those 'left right' cassettes poised to play in my car player, so I can let it rip just after asking the wife 'which way my dear?'
Sometimes I'm amused at how someone like Mat is into old school hiphop. Then I remember that he's probably exactly the right age for it.
Yeah most so-called old skool fans weren't even alive when it came out
@@80s_Boombox_Collector just goes to show how great and influential it really is.
Yeah. Those of us who were fans, when it was current. Well we are getting old.
LL's Radio was the first Hip Hop I got into (I had heard the 12" of the SugarHill Gang's Rapper's Delight in '79 and the Run-DMC with Aerosmith and hadn't really cared for either). It hit me as authentic...a kid rapping about his daily life...and I was into Punk Rock at the same time so it stuck (kind of like Bambaataa and John Lydon hooking up for World Destruction later on).
Just remember guys, old folks ain't gonna be like before...Gen X is a whole other enchilada :-)
@@conflictmagazine That's what I keep telling myself....until I see most of my fellow Gen Xers dressing like scrubs and sitting around bitching about taxes, just like the generations before them lol
I'll up my Patreon level if Techmoan puts his hat on backwards and takes out that clown radio blasting tunes around the neighborhood while filming all the action.
Let's get this comment more likes so he sees this! lol
that is not how this works, Mike.
yes
"The Clown's Handbag" sounds like a British euphemism.
I thought that, too. On a par with 'The Wizard's Sleeve'. (If easily offended, please DO NOT look it up). 🤔😳😳😳😆😆😆
It is very close to the term "clown's pocket".
English euphemism.
It immediately made me think of the scene in Family Guy where Stewie asks Brian to help him shave his "coin purse."
Yeah, it's where I keep all my C90s.
And this is why I get my audio equipment at the thrift store.. Thanks for taking one for the team on this.
The stereo test on the black boom box had me literally crying with laughter 😂! I had to get out of bed and go to another room so as not to wake my wife who was asleep next to me. After its 30 minutes punishment it then played fast - killed me! Great stuff Mat - loved it!
The multicoloured one looks like it was styled by Fisher-Price.
Beat me to it. If "Baby's First Boombox" were the model name, I wouldn't have been surprised.
Or My First Sony.
I like it
"It's like the biggest companies make the worst junk!" -Dankpods, Wade
"Oops, my PK Cell!"
We need to compare these to the "Hurr-Durr Six Hunge-os" by ol' mate Senny
look at these nuggs!
If ever techmoan was going to need the ol’ one grit, it was that possessed tape player…
No Diablo burnout session...no Scarlett Fire? My standards for e waist reviews has really reached a new bar thanks to Wade...I feel like these are just nessisary now.
The speed fluctuation is a feature. You’ll never going to get a content match.
8:29 "They both treat bass as though it's one of the world's rarest commodities, and it shouldn't be wasted in a boombox." 😂😂😂
100% correct, sound has no credibility whatsoever, completely incredible.
Also correct: When Techmoan reviews a modern piece of electronics, a CEO silently cries for the impending profit loss.
More like uncredible.
The possessed one has accumulated the grieving of Amazon employees having to pee in bottles.
or potentially having to pee in the cd players and forced to wipe there butts with the CD who knows!
If you are ever using these boom boxes at the beach and find the batteries are exhausted, you will have to look for the battery lady:
She sells "C cells at the sea shore.
Out.
Sadly that popped into my head when he said it!
Best worst comment. Well done
"Bass, how low can you go?" - Somewhere around "Mickey Mouse" apparently.
If the clown's handbag had been out in the mid 90s from somewhere like Comet for maybe 50 quid, my teenage self would have probably bought it as a birthday present.
Reminds me of the "My First Sony" range of brightly coloured electronics made for kids.
I actually bought a Venturer, CD, Radio, Cassette in transparent blue plastic for £30 in Comet at the end of the 90s when eveyone was copying the style and colours of the original iMac.
3:45 Wow, i haven’t seen a “numbers on the dial” tuner since the transistor radio i had in the ‘70s 😄 Bravo Amazon!
I have a feeling you're the only person who will ever attempt to use the cassette player in an AmazonBasics boombox.
I can find NEW release on cassette easier than I can find them on CD.
And with the hipster crowd with their Crosley turntables ("because analogue sounds better"), what type of players do you think they are likely to have?
So I do agree no one is using THESE cassette players, but I do know it's not a dead format. Because cassette tapes are more reliable than CD players in cars so to folks too broke to upgrade the stereo of their cheap used car cassette tapes are still fantastic.
Actually there's plenty of 75+ year olds who buy things like this because they have some old tapes they want to listen to. And they don't know or care about the fact that these sound like rubbish.
@@tim3172 Many black metal bands nowadays release their music only on limited edition cassettes.
Some release it on CD and online too, but as we know they are just posers and sellouts. \m/
/s
@@tim3172 Well, you are wrong.
2:51 That’s precisely the hip lingo my good chums and I would use to converse when we were youthful rapscallions! Glad to have you down with us Matthew! 🤓👍🏼
In a decent 80’s Boombox the instructions always said ‘depress the play button’.
I imagine the play button on that one is depressed enough already though!
Given the state of what passes for music today, for myself the depression usually begins *after* pressing the play button!
@@mycosys I became a young adult in the mid 1970's, and much of the music we listened to was influenced and informed by the 1960's. Yes, there was plenty of dreck, but back then we had free-form, progressive FM radio stations with DJ's who were allowed to play whatever they wanted ---- from rock to jazz to fusion to blues, bluegrass and country, they played it all. It was a real ear-opening experience and greatly expanded my musical tastes. Prior to that, even early 70's AM top 40 would play Alice Cooper and Deep Purple amidst the MOR crap like the. Carpenters or Tony Orlando and Dawn. It was the 80's and the rise of MTV that did the most damage ---- the sound quality of the recordings and mixes went way down hill, And the look of the band on camera became far more important than any intrinsic quality of the music or the lack of it. I was selling audio equipment for a living then, and I switched to college radio because commercial FM radio had become playlisted, homogenized and dull.
Hi Matt. Following your numerous advices about crappy modern boomboxes, I put my hands on a Panasonic RX-CT800 for a bargain 29 euros. The cassette decks probably never encountered a tape, they were as clean as new although the belts were completely dry. A least it wasn't horrible goo. 2 new belts and I got myself a great twin cassette Panasonic boombox ! Thank you Matt for your advices
Hey techmoan. There is an amazing boombox style unit called the Roberts Concerto 2. I think it is still in production. It is designed for the visually impaired, but it has features like usb, SD card, mic input, cassette, dab, CD etc. Dream features to have.
Portable "hi-fi" for the masses, on an 'Amazon Basics' wage, while the boss hi-flies. And that black model resembles a fly's head. "Help me! Help me!" (garbled of course).
@@andygozzo72 Or 'lo-end' even?
This video made me unusually sad. The industry really missed out on a big opportunity with the recent compact cassette renaissance. Instead of investing a few bucks in R&D for a half decent cassette mechanism, they just took the absolute worst, end of the line 90s mechanism and literally just hit "copy" + "paste". They successfully managed to revive vinyl with a few half decent turntables that actually sound Hifi, why not just take on the next big thing??
Because... cassettes are rubbish?
@@fredbloggs5902 some people still use cassettes and they nearly sound CD quality
@@fredbloggs5902 cassettes is still viable nowadays. For nostalgic or for convenience.
@@sam_64 It can sound very adequate, but CD is a very, very high bar, that none of them really approach.
I'd imagine setting up QA for compact cassette mechanisms in China isn't the easiest thing ever. Also, it's a piece of technology that came into prominence just before planned obsolescence and unrepairablility really took off and those things never really got figured out for higher end cassette players, so that's another reason for major electronics manufacturers to not be interested in investing.
“You got a separate switch for FM and FM stereo”
-Techmoan, 2021
The reason is there's greater background ‘hiss’ associated with the stereo than with the mono signal.
Bass is a rare commodity that shouldn’t be afforded for these boom boxes 🤣
Techmoan: Let's test the stereo!
The smaller boombox: *RIGHTLEFTRIGHTLEFT*
12:40 - I see your mistake, there, Mat. You've picked up your C90 of Sgt. Quackers calling drill at the 4th Royal Duck Batallion. A classic, I understand.
"Pass di 90 from di left han' side"
The multicolored one looks nearly identical physically to the old basic Koss boom boxes from the late 90's/early 2000's. The difference is that those worked decently well and sounded half decent.
I lost my shit when you started paying a tape in the black boombox. i must have laughed for 5+ minutes.
Never expected Amazon to sell a demonic tape player. 🤣
That’s because you didn’t use a C90 cassette!
@@KiraSlith It's not demonic, it's only got the spirit of Jeff Bezos in it. Oh wait, maybe it is demonic after all!
"This is now your future: enjoy it"
How foreboding does that sound lmao
I've reported him for threatening me. 😜
There is much better modern boom boxes than this junk, but they won't contain tape decks. High end Bluetooth speakers such as soundbox or ue hyperboom. There are many others
Liquid Crystal Display Display 😂🤣
Made me laugh that one and surprisingly common how many descriptions say that.
I would pay cold hard cash for an album of Mat reciting LL Cool J lyrics. Released solely on C90 cassette.
Bowser from Super Mario just called, he wants his flying thing-a-maging back
I was thinking the same! I was expecting a green propeller in the bottom.
Koopa clown car.
Oh man, I went searching for this kind of reference, and you didn't disappoint! th-cam.com/video/HiQP5htOcPc/w-d-xo.html Bowser's aircraft had to be an inspiration for this, subconsciously or intentional.
Bowser's Aircraft was my favorite CCR album.
Thanks for your front line reporting on the race to the bottom in modern boom box manufacturing 🙏
If Vinyl can continue to get solid players, I hope someone goes and makes quality Casette players.
I'd like to see that too, but old tapes haven't survived the way Vinyl records have.
I've been asking round my friends as i had a spare tape deck that needed a new home, not one of them had any tapes to play so i think the market for tape decks is shrinking, i even asked at a local record shop that sells secondhand Hifi and they have difficulty selling the decks they have in stock, even though they sell tapes as well as cd's and vinyl.
@@mycosys "but certainly not for hifi"
My 1979 JVC kd-a2 makes recordings on humble type 1 ferric that are so true to the digital source that it's actually difficult to tell the difference between the two, and that's with shp9500 headphones which are very flat and have clear treble. I do keep dolby off, and whenever the music is really quiet you can hear the tape hiss, but it needs to get very quiet before it becomes intrusive, or even noticeable much of the time. I believe cassettes are hifi and very underestimated, you just need to record them at the proper volume. Pre-recorded cassettes more often than not were very compressed, the age of cds (and digital in general) gets the blame for the loudness wars, well I'm here to say it absolutely started with cassettes, I have recorded many pre recorded tapes in audacity and brickwalling is very prevalent in them. I think CDs just turned this up a notch because digital compression doesn't have as much distortion, but it ruined the dynamic range and made everything seem way too loud all of the time.
Maybe not. A record player is relatively uncomplicated. I was inside my old 1970s tape deck and boggled at the complexity of the mechanisms and the tolerances required to get proper playback. If someone brought a new proper one to market it would probably be geared necessarily toward the audiophile market, and I don't know that tapes are preferred to anything these days.
@@jdraven0890 I think modern manufacturing and materials *could* bring an affordable mechanism to market. Tolerances are way improved and things can be done cheaply and easily with microcontrollers and cheap motors rather than fancy mechanisms in many cases. There's just no market.
"back in the 80s we all listened to our dope C90s and vinyls" lol!
Yeah! Wasn't C90 just what blank cassettes containing an hour and a half worth of magnetic tape were typically sold as??? 🤣
@@andygozzo72 The funny thing is that the only reason to call them "vinyl" is to distinguish them from the earlier shellac records, which look similar but are far less common today than they were even in the 80s. Would be cool if a current band released some music on shellac; would give us an excuse to restore an old Victrola lol.
@@andygozzo72 If we ever used the v-word if would have been singular, as a collective noun, like "I collect vinyl" or "I'm running out of shelf space for my vinyl", we would never have said "l'm going to put a vinyl on", and we definitely never said vinyls.
I picked up a Sony Boombox at the Goodwill for $5.00 and I am super happy with it. Not only is it a Sony, within the top five brands since forever, but it picks up a radio station I listen to frequently that many radios I have in the house cannot pick up due to mountain ranges. Comes in clear as a bell as if I was listening from the parking lot of the antenna.
The Clown's Handbag. Great name for a Psych Rock band.
As a clown, I have to say that I feel like the quality of Amazon Basics boomboxes has gotten pretty good.
"Hopefully that's improved the speed"
Oh my sweet summer child if only you knew
lol the second speed test went exactly as I'd hoped, bloody beautiful
The wow and flutter on those Amazon prices is off the scale. Absolutely ridiculous. No wonder so many Amazon electronics end up in landfill before anyone has even bought them. I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.
And all so that some bald rich guy can ride a massive c*ck into not-space. I cry for this world.
It's worse. Many families in the US never being able to make the month because prices go up, wages stagnate, cannot afford anymore anything else. So they deal with those trash products and know exactly that their parents had it better but they go into resignation mode. Plus - when their kids invite friends and they see this the friendship won't last long stigmatizing them even more ...
@@PascalGienger what the fuck are you smoking
"Wow! Flutter!"
@@TheFool2cool Just looking around in my neighborhood. And visiting my friends.
“The clowns handbag” 😂🤣🤣 I’m giggly from being so tired rn, but that made legit me laugh so hard. Bless You, Techmoan. 👍🏼
Yep, I was tired when I watched this and the messed up stereo test had me literally crying with laughter! 😂😂😂
So, how much is it to get one that DOESN'T require an exorcism?
The price is... a young priest and an old priest!
Thanks for another entertaining video Techmoan. It makes me sad that Panasonic have discontinued their "Boombox" with cassette. I purchased an RX-D50 at your recommendation for my 5 year old daughter for Christmas last year. She loves it and has a really nice sound.
Oh dear, my 80s music collection is only on C120s, looks like I'll have to pass u p on these magnificent machines
No, just use a chainsaw to cut the cassette in half and it's a C60.
@@BriteTap These only work with C90s anyway :(
Jokes aside, I surely wouldn't put a delicate C120 into either of these.
I don't think I've ever heard a more genuine "What's going on!" in all this channel's videos XD
I'm pretty sure your stereo test cassette was *not* a C90. It never claimed to be compatible with whatever it actually is.
Every time I watch one of these I am reminded of the odd boombox from my teen years I have squirreled away in the garage. Very strange, mostly wood, 1930s styling, bought in he 90s... Weighs a ton to ship to you I'd imagine, but could do with a refurbish...
I've never seen anything else like it... :)
9:45 "oh dear!" Said Matt. He had accidentally summoned the demon of wow and flutter!
Much wow.
Owen Wilson:WOW!
😂
Oh my god this video gave me way more laughs than I ever expected it to! 😂😂 Brilliant! I loved it. Starting with the "clowns handbag" 😂 ...I laughed like a little kid at the left/right playback. I wish I could like this vid more than once.
12:40 I did not expect that, it really got a good laugh out of me!
Oooooh.....hi fidelity with stereoscaping. They spared no expense on these puppies. Thanks once again for taking one for the team.
"LCD Display, which is a Liquid Crystal Display Display" LOLOLOL
Often featured on automatic teller machine machines.
Someone might PAT Test it one day (Portable Appliance Test Test)
"LOLOLOL, which is Laugh Out Loud Out Loud Out Loud"
@@jonleibow3604 LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL :D
That L and R test nearly killed me! It sounding like the cross between farting and vomiting! XD Yeah, I've heard shoebox players with better fidelity. Certainly better speed control.
It's both actually
Try it playing through a 5.1 home theater! Wowser!
13:55 No headphone jack? Man these cheapo boomboxes are sure ahead of time
they are courageous
Awwwwwwwwww, we’ve been spoilt by an upload every Sat for a while.
Going to cry onto my Ghetto Blaster all night. Hope you’re back soon Matt.
I was intrigued by the title of this video, but I LITERALLY laughed out loud when you revealed the coloured boombox!! The Clown's Handbag... brilliant!
Good catch on the liquid crystal display display, I love those silly grammar things. If you’re not familiar with baseball, there’s a stat called RBI, which is Runs Batted In. They are regularly referred to as RBIs, which translates to Runs Batted Ins. RsBI would be the corrected abbreviation, which is what I call them to annoy my friends and family. You could also simply say “he had 3 RBI on the day,” but that ain’t how we do it over here :)
Techmoan quoting LL Cool J songs like nothing happened is why I love Saturday mornings with this channel
Haha, I came here to comment on the same thing. I don't know what it is but hearing a British accent quoting 80s American hip-hop made me glad I woke up for no reason on a Saturday at 5:30 am.
He's a G.
Step to tha T-Moan an' he'll break you off some, son.
You mean "Techmoan quoting LL Cool J songs like he just don't care"
Same!!!!
You guys are funny 😂
An extra point to Techmoan for not doing a Lady Bracknell impression.
"This is now your future. Enjoy it." - So ominous. :D
What a blast from the past! I recognized what these were just from the thumbnail. These are most likely rebranded Chinese boomboxes that have been in production for many years. I had an Emerson branded one in 2003. The colorful one has almost exactly the same layout for the buttons, LCD panel, speakers and tape controls as my old Emerson. The quality looks to have gotten worse, as on the old one could record audio, that's probably why the play button is so big now. The quality wasn't great back then, because, you know, Emerson, but man this terrible haha.
Thanks a lot Techmoan now I can't stop imagining Ronald McDonald walking down the street carrying one of these as a handbag.
His AmazonBasics vibrating the concrete.
Is Mat okay? No video today and my whole world is fucked without it
Me too !
Where is he !
I am wondering if the inconclusive +3% drift results you were seeing on the black one might actually be accurate considering just how bad it was when it started out. Whatever is wrong in the mechanism might well result in a massive error like that, might it not? Then again the meter was maxed out, so my arguing might just be a "3.6 roentgens, not great, not terrible" sort of thing.
The mechanism has some sort of issue, and might have been calibrated when it ran slow(er) than after it got a workout. And as it sat, it got slower, and when it got some exercise, it got faster. It does seem significantly higher pitched to me; but most people can have a hard time telling apart anything less than a semitone, unless in direct comparison, and that's already 6%.
is it just me or do many people not understand the concept of stereo?
@@asn413 Your question is a bit ambiguous.
I would repeat the test using the mic, but on the clown boombox. Then compare to the results gathered using it's headphone jack. If similar then the test was accurate on the black box.
There was a night and day difference in sound of the cassette decks, I think the black one might be slightly defect or not calibrated correct.
I'm curious what research Amazon performed to think people still want a cassette mech in a cheapo boombox? I got away from cassettes as soon as I could in the early 90's and "moved on" to CD's. Either way, interesting content as always, excited for whatever you have in store next!
The Amazon Basics stuff is really hit or miss. I've bought a lot of Basics cables over the years and have been generally impressed; despite the low price they've always had a "premium" feel, and they've never let me down. Batteries are OK for low power devices (remotes, etc.) but in something like a camera they're not so great, but given their low price they're good enough to just keep a stash of assorted sizes in a drawer for emergencies. Anything more advanced than that, though, and it's a total crapshoot; sometimes you get something half decent, sometimes you get some terrible trash, and there's no real way of knowing, so I'm curious as to how they select which products get their "seal of approval".
It's more their seal of "I guess it's fine..." than a seal of approval.
Sounds better than how the Nintendo Seal of Approval worked out.
I believe Amazon sold some USB wall chargers under its brand name that would catch on fire.
I think they're just pulling the old Wish-prank. Slap the logo on any cheap crap they can find and sell it for a way too high price. Some people will return it, sure, but some others can't be bothered with it and just toss the thing in the trash in the same box it got delivered in.
Just another brand to avoid. Sadly, there's loads of unknown, crappy sounding brands on Amazon anyway. It seems they're at the point where they sell a lot of stuff based on the name alone, people will generally trust Amazon because it's Amazon, and all the crappy brands profit off of it.
@@DaedalusYoung Even well known brands from the 50s, 60s, and 70s are now being slapped on this low quality stuff today.
Thanks for making my Saturday morning better. That "boombox" on the right looks just like a clown😂 I've been a subscriber for about 2 years now.
Yeah, we used to say "pass me the C90" only for them to say "Sorry man I only have C60's"
don't forget about the C30's lmao
@@cherrysdiy5005 We never bothered about c30's as my cassette deck was c90 compatible and my mates was c60 compatible.
@@mrfoameruk Nice!
C120 quietly slinks out of the room.
@@johnruschmeyer5769 more like c120 quietly slinks its way into the mechanism and shoots out in a twisted mess
I love how there are two distinct types of audiophiles;
One that only wants the highest quality, lossless, uncompressed, raw digital format studio recordings
And the other that wants to listen to neolithic audio formats in the most accurate, highest quality imaginable.
My kid sister had a version of the larger one (sans clown colors) and that was ~10 years ago. I can tell straight away by the layout of the CD buttons and the tri-point volume knob. I'd wager there's countless copies of the design.
Yeah, I remember having the larger model in a brown color scheme (like it was meant to go with a desk or table) for many years. I think it's still at my parent's house from when I moved out to my own apartment...
These, especially the Clown's Handbag, remind me of the toy ones I had in the 90s. Except with.. fewer features.
"Hey dude, pass me those C90s. Oh I've just picked up some funky fresh new C90s I'm gonna put some dope tunes on them."
Tomorrows land fill today. Thank you for this. I understand that people may want to buy one of these as "a bit of fun" or have very limited means and can't afford any better but there's nothing fun about cheap tat and it's tragic to think of someone on a low income spending all they can afford on garbage like this.
I've been subscribed to your channel since the early days when you were reviewing dash cams and I adore your content. You are very thorough yet remain so very human with your wonderful British sense of humor. I'm based in Sydney Australia and I'm sure your 1 million plus subscribers will agree that you're appreciated the world over. Keep up the stellar work.
would have been interesting to see "mic" results from the clown box, you might have been able to confirm if that black one was really that bad!
it's safe to assume it's got the same one being it's made at the same factory and it looks like the assembly line splits off at some point and X number of internals goes off and get's a clown suit or a black suit.
This would be good for a garage radio, recreational (camping, boating, beach) or maybe for a child's first stereo. That way if it fails due to weather exposure or a mischievous kid, you're not out a lotta money.
“The clown’s handbag” queue a Ronald McDonald lookalike pulling large wads of cash, his wallet , car keys, phone, etc out of the boombox inexplicably.
You mean "cue"?
I love how like... 5 episodes of boom boxes ago he was already getting annoyed with the low quality of them, and he's reaching the point where he's just like, "These bastards keep making boomboxes! "
Incredible - too extraordinary and improbable to be believed.
I'd say that's an accurate description of the claims made for sound quality.
OK I had to pause this at the price. This whole time, all this was fine and dandy for what they were.... $15 little portable radio/CD players. Exactly the type of thing I bought to put in my baby's room just to play a little goodnight CD at bedtime. 40 pounds even after the price drop!? That is unreal.
The fact that in Argentina we have a "dope tune" called C90 that was top 1 for a while lmao
That’s a classic song we always play at weddings in the Philippines too!
@@jimmymcgill2961 DUDE that's greaaat !!
Mat casually and perfectly quoting LL Cool J truly made my Saturday. No surprise of course but still brilliant :) 🤘
If only our old friend Jeff used some of that playing-astronaut-money to make proper boomboxes...
It takes a lot of cheap-boombox-profits to build a phallus-rocket!
“It’s a small win but we’ll take it.”
*5 seconds later*
Oh my.
Matt: "Now this is your future, enjoy it!"
Me: Reaching for the rope and the chair...
😂
Lmao!
Me as well, am starting to feel more and more like Brooks in Shawshank Redemption
15:39
I mean, the clownbox wasn’t surprising, but the demon-and-chipmunk-box _was_ a surprise!
The way you cited LL Cool J really was unexpected, it made me laugh
Mat is well-versed in the ways of Golden Era Hiphop 😎
@@Gappasaurus I always love when he drops a verse. Mad props