So, there are a couple of electronic music artists who release predominantly or only to cassette tape that I wanted to listen to. I have held off buying their work, because I have not owned a tape player since the early 1990’s, and haven’t really had an interest in getting one. All I really remembered was flutter, and my father attempting to fix the Sony WM-R202 I’d saved up to buy that I broke when it fell off my belt, and failing and salvaging a really strong magnet, and me being very disappointed — part of the realization that parents are not infallible that every person goes through, I suppose. When MiniDisc came out, I just gave up on tape completely for making mixes and things, and I had only dabbled in ambient sound recording when I was younger (largely discouraged by my mother, who had very poor childhood memories of growing up with my grandfather who tape-recorded everything. I thought this was an exaggeration until we started cleaning things out of his garage.)
So I decided to get a tape player. At first I figured I’d just get an inexpensive one — did the drug store still sell them? Radio Shack isn’t an option; they’re out of business. I did a bit of Googling and decided I’d get a used one instead; the general consensus online was that it would be difficult to find one new in a store, and the quality of a new one was significantly inferior to an older one of good quality — both the construction and sound quality. I did not want to obsess about sound quality, but I did not want to experience what these artists had done in a manner as poorly as my dim memories of cassette music suggested. So I went on eBay and found a Sony WM-D6C. I picked this one after reading a couple of forums; the fact that it could also record was appealing, as an adjunct to the other music stuff I’ve been doing.
