cliz305

I recently bought this beautiful Sony DDII walkman. Nice metal body. Very well made. It utilizes a special disc-drive mechanism with a thick rubber ring (replacement available at fixyouraudio.com) instead of a  normal belt. Thanks to that, it has very low wow and flutter (mine is about 0.05%). It is also the first walkman that incorporates a Dolby noise reduction chip at 3V (without upconversion). The walkman is just a bit wider and longer than the tape itself and about twice as thick. Truly a marvel of engineering. The DDII has two headphone jacks and is capable of driving headphones with impedance up to 300 ohms. The play button is interesting. By pressing it, it does not directly engage the tape head. Rather, it just pushes the mechanism to the right position while the main motor starts spinning. This process drives and engages the tape head. I would like to call it mechanical softtouch control. Very satisfying to push.  Sony DDII walkman (photos added later from 2021, Dec....

 Santoro Gorjuss London playing cards. Cute and a bit expensive for what it is ($15 in my case), this deck features different full-color artworks for different cards. It's probably the cheapest way to collect more than 50 different Santoro artworks, especially when you don't care about their rubber stamps. I think there is at least one more version with some different artworks. I'll probably get that as well if I can find it around the same price.

Technics M33. Built like a tank. After 40 years since its release in 1979, it's still going strong. It just needs to be calibrated to ensure a flat frequency response in the region I care about (at least mid-range). And it does have lots of potentiometers inside for fine adjustments: playback/record level, bias, and EQ, plus fluorescent meter levels (0dB and -20dB). It also has an output-level knob, which is great for headphone playback (believe it or not, lots of decks from back then do not have the output-level knob). For me, the biggest shame is that the keyboard-style buttons are made of plastic. Technics M33 (Grado headphones here  if you haven't noticed. SR80 to be specific) I mainly use it for playback tapes in my workplace. Before this, I have been using the Technics M224, which uses needle VU meters (beautiful!). It does not have an output-level knob though, so I had to use an eternal knob. Technics M224 The tapes are recorded with my Yamaha KX-650 deck in my apartment...