SlashGear Japan
A fancy-pants iPod Touch is all well and good, but there’s nothing like the halcyon days of crappy old cassette tapes. In fact, while most of us would gladly forget the damned things, coming only into contact with them when renting a particularly shoddy hire car, there are others for whom life would not be complete without that old Tammy Wynette cassette. So for you sweet, innocent few, here’s BTO’s bricktastic PlusDeckEX, a USB tape-deck with all the features you could ever stomach desire.
Oh yes, not only do you get that sweet USB connection, but RCA inputs and outputs, 7.1 surround sound (is that actually possible with a tape?), LCD control panel, AM/FM radio and a remote.
Frankly, while I’m sure there are many with the odd cassette that they’d like to archive as an MP3, I can’t imagine many people actively needing to refer to so many tapes that they need to buy something like this. But maybe I’m being unimaginative; if you can think of a reason – beyond being in charge of digitising a great big archival library – then educate me via the comments!
BTO PlusDeckEX [via Akihabara]
2 Responses to “PlusDeckEX makes archiving old cassettes simple”
TJB October 9, 2007
There are plenty of audio books that are only available on cassette that I would like to be able to listen to on my iPod.
+1Barbara June 16, 2008
I personally have hundreds of tapes and acquire more from the thrift store all the time. I have been converting them slowly but surely by means of the Toshiba Gigabeat (The Creative Zen Nano’s recording abilities were harsh sounding at best and the Wolverine MP3 player was somewhat clear but the volume of the files was way to low). I use it to convert my tapes because that’s all it good for since one of the channels has gone out making listening via headphones nearly impossible (I have to jiggle the plug around to get both channels so that can hear the music). It does a pretty good job since when recording both channels work, but I would like something to connect directly to a computer instead of recording my cassettes and then transferring to a computer and tagging the music files.
I also agree somewhat TJB: there are audio books that can be converted into digital files and transferred to MP3 players. I see those books in the thrift store and was looking over them to which ones I would like to convert to carry with me everywhere in a more convenient way than carrying a tape player.
Neutral