Just to answer everyone “Burning Questions”, yes I do want a cassette deck. Anyway, when I was looking though pictures from estate sales with boring and ugly chairs and vases, I spotted a picture of something I believed to be a cassette deck. When I went to check what it was, I was happy to see it was a cassette deck. And a beautiful one too. Even though it has a weird cassette mechanism, it met all my criteria. It has the silver 70’s look with woodgrain I love, it has two nice analog decibel meters, and it’s Pioneer. To top it all off it was only $12.

So I’m sure you know now that I bought it and sure enough, I did. When I hooked it up to my stereo, I noticed it had a large “discharge sound” that kind of sounded like a slowed down pop. It would play cassettes, but it sounded awful and scared my dog. So I went to check the insides for my first guess, which was bad capacitors. Sadly, that was not the case. Since I had no clue what might be going on, I just turned it off. Later I turned it back on for fun, and realized that the pops mysteriously disappeared. Have you ever seen things fix themselves? I have at least several times. It hasn’t given me any trouble since. I still need to replace the belts, but it was only $12 so I’m very happy with it.

The front of the cassette deck.

The nice dB/VU meters.

A look inside the strange cassette mechanism.

I copied in the instruction manual, if anyone wants to see it: Instructions