Just tried to repair our Rio EX1000 which is a tiny 120W stereo, bookshelf size. It has some firmware flaws, one of which is that the cassette player capstan motor comes on (and stays on!) after a power outage. So now it wore out and screeches :-( Lubed it all, worked for an hours and then ... screeeeeech. It's sad to throw the whole thing out but my wife doesn't really like a smattering of pieces for a stereo, should be all in one. Even Amazon has hardly any stereos left that have cassette players. Since we have many cassette we'd really like to keep this "dinosaur" feature. Is there any manufacturer that still makes "living room suitable" compact stereos with cassettes players? -- Regards, Joerg

Interesting SonicBlue was S3, yes the graphics chip company. Sonicblue is bankrupt. D&M bought them out. D&M brands are Denon, Marantz and McIntosh Laboratory. You can try there, or get one of those neat Cassette-CD-USB mp3 converter decks and convert it all to mp3 or cd. Cheers

Compact living room stereo with cassette?

Dec 29, 2012 21 Replies

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Mark Zenier 13 years ago

Only 10 years old? The deck was probably by an OEM. The same drive probably was used in other singles or boomboxes. You might try MCM, Newark's sibling distributor for the repair trade.

I still use cassettes to record radio programs, which results in a hobby of repairing cheap chinese walkman players and shoebox recorders. They all have the same guts (a lot of them are built in the same factory or at least the same town). They all use variants of the same Japanese company's single chip design, use the same motor, and drive mechanics.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

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Joerg 13 years ago

Dang, I should have snapped a photo. Now I have to open it all up again to get the motor data. But chances are some of the other rollers are also worn. Then there is a loose belt, a wobbly plastic idler, and so on. Not sure if it's really worth a repair attempt.

This one seems not to be an OEM. They really spared no expense and digitized just about everything. Fancy flex cables everywhere, a fat AD converter in the middle of this cassette unit, I think it said SonicBlue on the board or something. And they are gone :-(

While they did use some cost-cutting tricks such as using phenolic boards this radio appears to be a bit over-engineered. Unfortunately the firmware in it is at the same time a bit buggy, some things appear to not have been thought through very well.

Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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