Wow! I was expecting a little tiny board with a couple blobs, tons of empty space, and a piece of steel for weight. Can they really make an assembly like this for so cheap? Guess slave labor helps.

1:27 "1.5W output for moderate volume" This might be the first ever instance of honest power level descriptions in the entire history of audio electronics marketing. That box belongs in a museum!

Dave, once you removed the protective film from the tape drawer I was on the edge of my seat to watch you remove the film from the tuning scale... Watched the whole video and there is the shot at the end with the film still on the tuning dial! Ahhhg! You owe us another video to rectify this crime.

Single-sided phenolic boards, discrete wires between boards directly soldered with no headers. They really did go the extra mile to give it that "retro" look inside AND out.

The numeric scale is there so you can remember your fave stations'"abstract absolute position" rather than having to memorize values in a large arbitrary frequency range.

loved this oldschool teardown . Reminded me of some of your old videos back in the day

consumer electronics are such a disappointment these days. I fix stuff for a charity shop (for free obviously), we often get old ghetto blasters and I'm always amazed at how well they were engineered with repair in mind. one of them had a frame that allowed you to lift the electronics out with the mech attached and the cool thing about it was that the tape eject button released it from the main chassis. (it was a Hitachi TRK-8190E for anyone interested)

Damn, if this was stereo, I'd be sold.

I'm diggin the Qbert board pattern on the back wall of the tape well. 😂

The HiFi enthusiast in me would likely want something better, but to be honest, for the price, and if you want a simple all-in-one machine, that's really not too bad.

Would like to see some more cheap-o teardowns.

I had a laugh at 3:14 when i saw that fallen off dustcap in the advertorial of the supermarket. Of all those boomboxes, this one on the picture already had failed instantly.

You could buy a 1980s boom box with RCA input connection and connect it to a Bluetooth/SD card unit internally to make the 1980s boom box modern again.

Looks like the SD circuit board also does BT because I see an antenna "squiggle" trace at the board's lower right.

I work in PCB and product design and the fact they can assemble, package and ship these for $33 AND make a profit is just unbelievable. Especially since it techincally works, even if not as well as a brand-name item. They're using a couple of the all-in-one chips, obviously, but just the cost of the PCBs, casing and manual assembly these require adds up. I think Dave messsed up a bit as when he initially held the mic in front of the speaker on this unit it sounded pretty good, so he then moved it between the speakers so it was more muted :)

8/10 for giving it that vintage look from the speaker grills to the cassete buttons on the top. bonus point for having modern options like usb and bluetooth. Sadly have to drop a point for using treble and bass knobs instead of the set of eq sliders.

I too buy discounted electronics from the clearance pile in Coles XD. I have purchased a few cheap blaupunkt (if that's how you spell it) 12v inverters that has come in handy. I also grabbed a 12v kettle for the car when I feel like making road coffee!

A headphone jack AND Bob's my uncle, for $33? We live in marvelous times.

Great stuff, Dave. Thank you for the entertaining video:) BTW. (after 5:20 ) they wrote "LED" above the LED. That's how we know the truth. But it is very short-sighted that they didn't marked the knobs with a "KNOB" sticker and the buttons with "BUTTON". I think they are keeping some secrets from us ... hehehehe

I was pleasantly surprised by how much circuit board and direct wiring there is in this thing. And the micro switch in the power connection would be to prevent the batteries from receiving unintended voltage. For $50 it’s a bloody steal

Big props for having MC Frontalot on a USB stick ready to go in case you need it!

That's what I'm going to do when my neighbors start to getting annoying! Take the oscilloscope for a spin with me 😂

I think you missed a sticker to peel across the freq display area.

That's actually waaay better put together than I'd have expeced, I can't imagine any other target segment for this than young kids, and in that context, the mic makes perfect sense, it was great fun to record yourself to tape play it back, when you were a kid.

Brisbane K-Mart has them for $49AUD, I love it, play some radio out the back shed, little memory of old times. Nothing special but it turns on with 1 switch. I also got a new age cheap clock radio for down the back, but to play the radio you need to press one button to turn on, another to select BT, then some other button to change to radio, every time, its going in the bin, keeping the fake old school tiny boom box for ever

I remember buying a Matsui (Currys home brand) double tape stereo in the late 80's for 30 quid (so I could copy computer games)

Perfect gift for the lover of today’s music!

This makes me more keen to save rather than scrap older cassette decks given the modern units are, well, garbage.

1:05 Rigol or Siglent need to make a model of battery powered oscilloscope with an audio amp, bluetooth, and speakers. That would be real street-cred.

I must admit 4 D size batts isn't going close to old school units. My neighbour had a old school boom box and it required 16 D batts. It would beat you out of the house not a problem. His had 5 radio Frequencies AM /FM/SW1/SW2/LW and had tune knob and fine tune. It would also auto skip a song and play in both directons i belive it was a mid 80's unit and it was super heavy and it might have been JVC or SHARP and made in Japan. I miss him he is no longer here but i remember him washing his RED Gemini and listing to tunes.

They squeezed a lot into it for the price. I'm amazed at what a single chip can do these days.

It’s worth it alone for that rack and pinion tuning dial! Genius engineering. 🙂

I was half expecting a capacitive dropper that ben found in his.

Dave, I'm disappointed that you didn't peel the plastic off the tuner window too. 😢

Love the knock off "Xabuchi" motor name and logo @15:48 !

I suspect they included shortwave for markets where that still somehow matters plus since the tuner chip does it anyway, the cost is minimal.

Great video! Right up my alley, Thanks!

Recently rebuilt and repaired a mint, but broken Tivoli Model One that I got for $10 (probably the most expensive Model One anywhere in the world now)- and was reminded how nice it is having a radio that you just turn on with a knob and has a tuning knob. The Chinese production quality was mostly trash with crooked SMDs everywhere and probably why so many of them failed. Sounds pleasant though.

I think there's another protective sticker over the "scale" too. ' Left me hanging man! :D

AntandTec did a video presentation on one of these where he modified it to take an Amazon Dot. He said that he was thinking of installing a proper tweeter for improved performance at higher frequencies.

The nightmare of the 'speaking' mp3 / bluetooth chips. A total embarrassment when one of those goes off at full volume (it always speaks at full volume). It will be one of those JL chips, AC46 type (a now obsolete version); I even managed to download the source code for those chips, along with the dodgy original speech files, but never got around to trying to re-program one due to the Chinese software tools often coming with included malware.

Eight to 16 MHz shortwave? What happened to 1.8 MHz to 8 MHz where the most action is? I was actually considering picking up one of them as a cheap, do everything box, but I actually wanted the HF reception.

I have like 4 of those old school boom box's they are a necessity for every shop/garage, the manual ones are better then the digital display ones since you don't have to re-tune them when power goes out

I'm a big fan of your content, and I really appreciate the amazing ideas you share in your videos. Your insights have been super helpful! I wanted to offer a suggestion that might enhance the viewer experience. Some of your viewers, including myself, find it a bit challenging to catch every detail because of the fast-paced speech. Slowing down your speech a bit could make your fantastic ideas even more accessible to a broader audience. Keep up the great work, and thanks for the awesome content!

loved to watch this as im from that old generation and i remember how many models of this i did repair!

Enjoyed the video! Maybe this would be a good option for a kid's first radio.

(2:08) I think the designers tried to make it look like a tuning band for shortwave distance, VHF channels, and/or UHF channels. (2:46) I seem to remember a Techmoan video where the host mentioned that the designers likely used photos of Sharp boomboxes as part of their design reference photos and didn't bother to search online for what APSS was or their radios were rushed into production. (3:08) The one Techmoan had was branded 'REKO' which, if i recall correctly, was the brand name used by Aldi South when they sold them.

Really strange feeling to watching this thing's teardown 😅 Happy New Year 🎉

You can kind of see how this was probably a better product when it was first released, and then got cost reduced into oblivion over the years.

APSS works only, if you have play pressed and THEN press fwd or reverse.

I have the same/similar unit, bought it second hand in 2020, just curiosity. Piece of crap, deck not working (broken off wire), belt stretched, awful sound quality, USB groundloop, digital tuner (doesn't work really well with an analog compressed scale), passive tone controls, linear volume control and MONO. Mine is branded "Ricatech" and identifies itself as "USB/SD 3 Band Radio Cassette GHETTOBLASTER" haha. Chipsets used; BK1198 (tuner), KA2206B (amp) and BCFDY02.1N (unknown). Speakers are 5W 4 Ohms in series (bridged amp config). Plastics are pretty good. It can run on an USB power bank (connected via battery terminals) a pretty long period of time. But don't waste your money on this. If it was stereo you can do some tweaks to make it a little better as is.

Bob’s yer uncle! Hilarious video! Thanks for making it!

Thank you for the video.

Oh yeah baby, I've been waiting for this one...

2:37 love the M C Escher graphics inside the Cassette well..!

Its actually a good looking radio in a creepy late 80s kind if way. Might be worth gutting and replacing the guts with something a little less beefier, maybe sime good speakers... You could really have something nice... for triple the original purchase price!

On the box it said something about converting your tapes to MP3, so I guess someone could buy it just for that and still get reasonable value. No auto-reverse though, so you can't record the charts show for a couple of hours on a Sunday evening. Who said technology only gets better? Thinking outside the box, I wonder if you can record the radio and if the mic is active - you could record your own shows like we all did in the 80s for $33 - cracking!

Re: The APSS (Automatic Programme Search System). From what I can remember from my ghetto blaster days, you need to have the play button and either FF or RW pressed down at the same time. The play head should detect silence or gaps and stop at the first instance. If you get quiet bits in songs it can fool the search. Having said that, it's probably bogus on this cheap setup.

“It speaks to me!” - in recent years you’re lucky it seems if that’s all something does, where many things seem to want to listen to you also/instead. ;)

Hi Dave! I love to see your teardown videos! What about show us some of thermionic tubes and first transistor radios? Greetings from Argentina! 🇦🇷 🤝🏻🇦🇺🦘🗽

I know some old Philips record/tape/radio combo's had the cog-wheel radio tuner like this. After repair you had to lock it to a well know radio station and move the slider to that station and pair it up so the freqeuncy shown on the front would match the settings on the tuner....

Imagine you have so little power that you have to advertise it in the box.

Oh wow, the Wow and Flutter of that tapedeck is abysmal from what I could hear. Even though there's only one style of clone cassette mechanism now, it doesn't mean it has to sound like absolute garbage, there are some good new ones that use that style - as I recall TASCAM make a fairly decent HiFi one. It's nothing on a decent old model with Dolby C or S, but for those that want new with warranty it's fine. No dolby (since dolby don't license the tech anymore)... I bet the microphone only records to tape, and I bet it sounds terrible since it looks like a generic tiny electet microphone. And not stereo? Dang. Well you can get these in stereo and they sound better, I think VWestlife reviewed one that wasn't half bad for a modern boombox.

It is pretty impressive for $33. I just got an air purifier for my bedroom and I burned 99 bucks, all it has is a blower motor filter and a UV light!

That wood grain. Clint of LGR would be happy!

😂 better vid than i expected good work As always Dave cheers

The $33 dollar boom-box sounds like tape is running just a hair bit faster than the silver one. Noticed that on the Queen song.

I think it's pretty neat they added Shortwave too. Even if it's not the whole range but just a smaller section of the shortwave band but it's a very useful portion still and you should be able to receive a lot of stations on it. Especially during the day. Yeah i think the biggest downer is that even if it has 2 speakers it's just a Mono Radiorecorder. So you won't get Stereo sound from Radio, SD & USB and also Bluetooth and cassette. However you should still be able doing stereo recordings of the FM Radio to Cassette.

I got the Sylvania SRC232BT-RED boombox simulator to this one. I wouldn't mind it if it was stereo, there was a shuffle play for the sd card or usb, and there was auxiliary in. I would allow for the permit erase head and other cheap thing added but I would have used 1 watt 8 ohm speakers instead of these 8 watts 4 ohm speakers.

14:25 ZD2 Looks like you got your MELF.

rippin teardown! more please!

I LOVE 80S BOOM BOXES AND GETTO BLASTERS 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

Market is the 1980's hipsters, who still have worn out tapes they want to listen to, and where the tinnitus and deafness means they just fill in the rest with the mind.

Gotta' give 'em credit for the honest output wattage. I remember these pieces of shit with 400W+ P.M.P.O.

All those "0" resistor (jumpers) were a clue that it is a single-sided board. I'm amazed no lithium ion battery (upgrade it Dave!). Would make a good prop for BTTF4. That woodgrain reminds me of Realistic audio equipment.

The pot for the digital tuning is interesting- all of these digital radios seem to use the same style pot and mechanical linkage. I think a pot off the board would be easier mechanically- anyone know why they all use this arrangement? Is the pot special in some way? BTW, the crazy thing on other recent radios: many don't use log/audio-taper pots for volume, instead they use linear. It means all the volume action is in the first 5 degrees of turning the knob.

G'day, Thanks for making and posting this. I live off-Grid, and I like to leave ABC FM Radio National playing in the background, I still listen to Cassettes which I recorded from Vinyl, in the 1980s to '90s...; and recently my olde '70s vintage Radios finally died... And over maybe 10 years I've burned through quite a few Chinese Radios..., and the last 2 years have seen about 5 of them being bought cheap, in the vain hope that their 240-Volt Transformer will be able to cope with the output of my Digitech Pure Sine-Wave Inverter... Every time, within a day, the Transformer shits itself. But, for the price - they're probably OK for anyone living with Gridpower...; it's a pity they're Mono, but they're not bad. And the Pure Sine-Wave Inverter killed the Transformer in two top of the range Digitech "World Band" Radios, as well. My guess is that all the 240-volt Transformers come from the same factory, and none of that place's output will run on a "Pure Sine-Wave" Inverter...(?). Ahh, Chinesium..., Bright Shiny Landfill ; For THUS, We Trashed the Earth...! Such is life, Have a good one... Stay safe. ;-p Ciao !

Dave I know the market for these devices: teardown videos! I actually love seeing the evidence of all the clever engineering they put into these to get the BOM down! You absolutely know this thing was overseen by marketing wankery types who demanded they put a microphone in it just so they can tick off another box. That's the entire story of this thing (and millions more like it): they could actually build something that was cheap and sounded great if they kept the features down to a minimum

Bonus points for that random strip of wood grain 🤣

Surprisingly they didn't wire those speakers out of phase, did they? It would have been a spatial sound! 😂

Pretty cool!

Save all the screws and throw the rest away 😂

Not bad for $33. I have to take a points away for it nor being stereo. If you're going to put two speakers in, maybe take away the microphone and have stereo instead. The tape mechanism is a novelty item, probably not going to be used much. I got something similar but better for the garage.

Short wave might be making a small come back :). In all seriousness though with all the world events in some parts of the world there might be new interest in short wave broadcases. Maybe im wrong. But for 30 bucks plus all the other features it might not be bad to have around if for nothing else just to hear whats out there.

I used to own a Panasonic RX-DT75. Man, that was a boombox!

Happy New Year 🎉 ausie

Thanks

You are driving me crazy by no pealing the radio dial cover, like you already did the cassette! :(

Yey, that's a "rosewood" top right there, feels just like a premium guitar.

Short Wave can be useful to receive international broadcasts when there's no internet available.

"What a piece of junk!"

I wonder what amplifier IC they used, pity that there was a heatsink soldered over it.... It would be interesting to know if they used a mono amplifier or an actual stereo one? Maybe they joined the outputs and inputs together? Who knows 🤔.

Casette music search works only if you press play and FWD (REW) simultaneously.

14:57 the tape mechanism has no changes for past 30+ years.

1:04 Dave, because of You, I cant stop laughing for last 5 minutes.

Nice hearing MC Frontalot :)

I expected to hear "The bluetooth device is ready to pair" XD

My hand, quite indepenant of my body, sprung at the screen and slapped like when I saw the Scope on the shoulder!

I’ve destroyed more than one double cassette player trying to replace those black rubber tension bands on old 80’s -90’s players which in most cases were a confusing melted/oily disintegrated mess and extremely hard to get to. On top of that trying to figure out how and where those multiple-different length bands, especially for reel to reel /auto reverse/etc were interconnected has been a nightmare.

I’m going to sachet down the high street tomorrow with my Tektronix DPO on my shoulder.