Shoebox Cassette Player & Recorder

Utter Rubbish

I purchased this cassette deck about a month ago and was extremely disappointed with the performance of the machine. It's ability to record and play was very poor and the sound quality was appalling. I feel that it is fully not fit for purpose full stop. The only thing I would do with it is through it in the rubbish.You should stop selling this product and try and get something that is actually a quality product. In the end, I bought a second hand Yamaha for $180 and it is fantastic.Therefore, I am gutted that not a spent this hundred dollars on this machine, it's not with one dollar.

Cheap but good enough for purpose

I bought this unit 21 August 2025 after sighting it in the Jaycar Newmarket store. The only reason for this purchase is to capture audio from a stack of audio cassettes recorded in mono on a National Panasonic cassette player purchased in 1969 when I was at secondary school, and for this it is perfect. The audio in question comprises (1) voice audio using the microphone input, and (2) AM radio programme material captured from the "earphone" output of a National "solid state" radio. Oh, those were the days! There was no commercial FM in NZ until 1983. The old player has long since passed on, but the tapes survive surprisingly well. For high fidelity stuff, forget it; I have a high end SONY TC-K511S 3 Head Audiophile Cassette Deck with Dolby S for that. The old tapes tend to deposit oxide onto the tape head, so I would much prefer to use a cheap player such as this rather than wear out the expensive Sony. The "Shoebox" player is good enough for the quality of the source material, and once the material is digitised, it will be of limited use and a curiosity piece. RECORDING FROM THE PLAYER: Forget using the in built audio to USB stick (mp3 format). The quality is awful. The way to get acceptable audio is to use the headphone output and feed it into the "line in" socket of a PC (or laptop) and record it there. I use the free open source application Audacity, utilising its native file format .aup (= Audacity Project, 32 bit float) to record, clean up the audio, normalise where required and mix down to mono. Then you can save it in whatever format you like. POWER SUPPLY: the USB-C input for powering this machine is a great idea; just don't use a plug pack or even a computer USB port as I found both are generate far too much noise. Perhaps a laptop with its internal battery would be OK, but I found a power bank with USB output to be perfect and it lasts a very long time. No need to use 4 expensive size C dry cells which may only last a few hours.

Great for loading old-school computer games

Bought this as a replacement data recorder for my old ZX Spectrum. Works perfectly for loading all my games from the original tapes. Requires a stereo-to-mono audio cable to connect to the computer for playback. Even has a 3.5mm mic jack for saving. Only downside is the lack of a tape counter.

Simple, but it does the job.

Works totally fine. Everything does what it is supposed to do. Nothing wrong with the sound at all. Nice to see headphone output and mic input, also has a hilt in mic. Sure it’s light and plastic, but everything is like that these days. Functionally, can’t fault it. I plugged the headphone output into the aux in on my car stereo, power the tape player off a usb charger and bingo, no I can blast tapes through my car stereo. Stoked!

Beware battery consumption!

This tape player consumes battery when batteries are installed and not playing. Probably won’t be an issue if the handy USB C power source is connected with the supplied cord. Flattened the four C cells in about 10 days. Otherwise, the device does what it’s meant to do. Hard to get affordable and useful cassette recorders. Manual needs to alert of this. Would be handy to have an LED to show power is on. Also some isolator switch.