When I was little my parents gave me a small radio/cassette player. But when I got bigger, I also wanted something bigger and better. Something with two cassette decks, something with stereo sound. And something with loud speakers. The apparatus that I choose was a Sharp WQ-T234 stereo radio cassette recorder. I have fond memories of listening to music on this machine and of recording songs from the radio on cassette and making mix-tapes with the double cassette deck. All the while marveling every time when after pushing the eject button the mechanism for the twin cassette started working and the holder slowly and smoothly slid open.

Eventually however, I of course wanted a newfangled CD-player and I moved on. The Sharp has an AV input, so I could have connected a separate CD player to it. But those things were way too expensive and a new Philips FCD185 music system took it’s place.

The Philips also had a record player that I played some old singles on from my dad. It had a proper dual cassette deck with a counter! Music from CD’s sounded so good! I believe that the first CD that I bought was Face Value by Phil Collins. After the Philips I moved on to a Pioneer HiFi system with a 6 CD changer and some Jamo Compact-90 speakers.

After that I went back from 6 to 3 CD’s with a Sony RX775 mini system that had a MiniDisc recorder. Although I loved listening to Minidiscs, sound quality wise the setup was a step back from the Pioneer. After that I got a Yamaha RX-V450 AV-receiver. And that was followed by a Yamaha RX-V2057 AV-receiver with a Naim Nait 5i stereo amplifier for the frontspeakers which I still use up until now.

Present day: I’ve got the Sharp radio/cassette player again. I want to connect my retro home computer setup to it. Because it doesn’t sound as good as my retro stereo amplifier that has KEF eggs connected to it through a subwoofer, I might want to have some sort of AV-switcher through.

I guess I now have to have some cassettes for it. Something from the same period. Like Phil Collins maybe.