Restoration
Battered and broken is how I would describe this one. It was sold as broken and it turned out that the suspensions on both speakers were disintegrated. The belt on the cassette motor is a bit loose but it works, so I have no need to change it just yet.
This one caught my eye for its design and technical specifications. While specs say it has 4″ bass speakers and independent discants, the latter are just piezo speakers which are common in low-end gear.
I started to work on this before I knew I would start blogging things so there aren’t a lot of pictures of it. I completely disassembled the whole thing and cleaned electronics and mechanics with isopropyl alcohol; the plastic parts I washed in soapy water. I use tall oil-based soap for plastics: it doesn’t dry up the surface nor damage it in any way, like how IPA might.
For the new speakers I chose a pair of Visaton FR 10s, full range speakers with the same exact dimensions as the originals. However the original speakers were proprietary things for this boombox so the new ones would have a little gap around each speaker. I could have bent the rims on the speakers to match the originals but instead I chose to shorten the posts they are attached to.
Thoughts
While the quality of the new speakers is not anything to write home about, it is well above the average for this kind of application. The speakers do their job well when listening to a cassette, as C cassettes surpass the sound resolution of a CD.
I might come back to this and add Bluetooth to it. It already has auxiliary input so adding it wouldn’t even affect the original functionality.
