https://www.todocoleccion.net/radio...-funcionando-japan-80s-funda-kc230r~x62501636 I'm not talking about quality or performance, but about weirdness. The radio part is a cassette tape! Never heard about this...
nothing weird about it, this was a common thing (...this one is a Tosh-KT-AS1-clone, i should have one of those in a box somewhere), just some quick examples: (the "A" on the Akai is not missing, jus lost in some light-reflex ) there was even a tuner-cassette existing for the Sony-WM800 double-Walkman, besides that they even made "tuner-cassettes" suitable for any Walkman, i dig it out...
The radio being a cassette is not as weird as it seems, though the first time it look so. There are many examples in Toshiba, SONY, AIWA...
...here's a "universal" cassette-radio - works like the later cd-adaptors for car-hifi: says in the instruction-card that it won't work with certain mechanisms as f.ex. WM-2 - haven't bothered to try but i guess it's because you can't open the lid of the unit for tuning while it's in play-mode. ...and mentioning that means also that this is quite an early unit - pre-DD f.ex...
Thanks for sharing that autoreverser! That's really cool, is there a power supply for it? I can just imagine the engineers sitting around thinking they would get rich with that unit. I never really looked into these cassettes closely but the AM cartridge for most units is like gold now-a-days. I have a handful that came with my thrift store finds and they are all FM. Not only were they an expensive option (around $45.00 USD) but most players, and their owners, were probably too cool for AM radio. Roman666, most of these cartridges are unit specific so you can't change brands over even other models for these to work. The newest and coolest is the ION Cassette Adapter Bluetooth. This little guy keeps a lot of my boxes and walkmans going.....
Thanks everybody! Your hardware is awesome. I feel like a hobbit inside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory!!!
....ooooh Roman, we haven't even started yet properly in the meantime i'm going to dig out my Digisette's
Cassette tuner pack was common in late 80s. Sony made only one cassette tuner pack CTP-1A that is compatible with several sony walkmans: WM-W800, WM-55, WM-R15 and Wm-40 Toshiba made more than one tuner cassette ( I have 2 different version) and as @autoreverser mentioned this Rarismo walkman is a Toshiba KT-AS1 clone that accomodates a tuner cassette.
One weird walkman I've at least heard about was an early-ish Sony where the play button was on one side of the unit, but the heads were on the other side - wonderfully unnecessarily complicated. I think Cris knows which one it is...
