Hello people. Well, I've moved on to thoroughly modern gadgets such as the Mighty Vibe portable offline Spotify playlist player. I formerly owned a Sony TC-D5M portable cassette deck, which was awesome in its day (bought in 1982), and I formerly owned the brilliant Sony ICF-SW1000T which was a shortwave radio plus Walkman combo unit that automatically selected Fe/CrO2/Metal cassettes. Those are long gone (sold) but I still have a Sony WM-D6(B) Walkman Pro that I bought at a Listen Up chain store in 1983. The TC-D5M clearly sounded better than the Walkman, but the WM-D6 was much better at erasing and re-taping over Type IV Metal tapes. My plans are to have the WM-D6 repaired/restored as needed, then I will erase most of my cassettes that I used to record my vinyl albums and sell the recorded-once Type II and Type IV cassettes on eBay. I'll keep the Walkman Pro as long as some of the cassettes have music I like that's not on Spotify.
Welcome! Great units, all very expensive when new, I could only drool and see photos of these high end units when I was a kid. Honestly I don't think we have many members that had the ultra-cool stuff when it first came out. I had to look up the Sony ICF-SW1000T, I love those mini-shortwave/cassette players and that thing listed for $540.00 USD when new. I have to believe it's pretty nice, I've got a few MBs, they look really good up on the shelf and they are so small. Is your background in radio or TV? They used a ton of those Sony Players over the years.
Radio, adventurous music on FM, late at night. An auto-reverse cassette deck could record 2 hours of an overnight radio show while I slept. Then I became a DJ volunteer with an all night show on a community station. I could play anything I wanted to. I did not think of it as free-form, but curating music that people would not likely hear anywhere else. And then shortwave listening with a collection of radios. A tiny pocket sized Sony (ICF-SW1). Even a car radio with shortwave bands in it (Philips DC-777).
We had a ton of radio stations back in Michigan, there was at least three of every genre going and it was beautiful. Two of my favorites were the local high school had two-hour blocks of different music, they could play anything they wanted, and the local college station known more for alternative, punk and indie. One of my favorite memories was listening to the college station late at night, programming my Apple II+, and hearing a brand new song from a band's third album, yep they slipped in Def Leppard and really mixed it up in the middle of the night. Henry Rollins might not have liked it but that album went on to mega-status.
