Is This The Ugliest Cassette Recorder.....Ever?

[Radio Wrangler]

Getting EVERYTHING wrong is interesting. If what they did had been simply random, they'd have got some things right purely by accident.

There was a science fiction story (Asimov? 1950s?) about someone doing one of those 'Guess which card someone in the next room is currently looking at' ESP experiments being done in a university.... Then they came across a guy who ALWAYS got it wrong and never got it right by chance...

David

[Paul_RK]

The 8304 is a mite too garish for me: funny how so much seemed to go amiss in terms of quality and design shortly after 1982. I'm susceptible to large and solid machines able to give a good account of themselves, so would nominate 1982's D8714/8814 as the beauties of the Philips range, http://www.stereo2go.com/topic/dream...d8814-vs-d8714 - I've not met an 8814, but an 8714 in fine shape came my way for £10 at the local flea market a while back. Can't have been long after that when the range turned to technicolor plastics.

Paul

[julie_m]

I think the stereo radio-cassette recorder is an excellent example of how a market matures. The first models, in the mid / late 1970s, were purely functional, and manufacturers were competing on features. Of course, not everybody needs an LCD tape counter, selectable music / speech / manual recording level modes, a rotatable ferrite rod aerial, super-wide stereo or six SW bands. Eventually, a minimal feature set is found that the market can live with. Semiconductor manufacturers begin to produce standard chipsets, and eventually anybody can make one using available parts. The item eventually becomes so ubiquitous, and so homogeneous, that there is so little to choose between any one and another; then the next logical direction is to treat it as a fashion accessory, and so create artificial grounds for selection.

At the beginning and the end of this process, of course, we see some genuine design classics -- and plenty of examples that only a mother could love .....

[PaulE27]

Originally Posted by camtechman

Then there's Eastern Block machines. e.g: the Russian 'version' of the Philips EL33XX series, the "Sputnik 402".
Everything about its' layout is wrong & NO! The photo is not upside down !

That is truly horrible! You see the same thing with Soviet radios - some Vegas and Astrads are handsome, others look rubbish.

Paul

[sp10mk11]

I don't think the "sputnik" to be horrible, I rather ;like the way the designers have worked hard to make it look as un-western as they could, and if I saw one I would buy it for its wrongness

If I chose a Philips machine that I really liked visually it would probably be the N2204 followed by the EL3302 with transparent door
Gary

[camtechman]

if I saw one I would buy it for its wrongness

Believe or not, that's why I want one !

[julie_m]

Those machines must have been a nightmare actually to use!

Not only do you have to reach across the speaker to get to the transport controls, which is bad enough; but the recording level adjustment and indicator are positioned as far away from the operator as possible, so you have to reach across the speaker, tape transport controls and tape compartment!

[crudmeister]

It looks like something out of the DeWalt range that builders use on site!

[Radio Wrangler]

The Russians had a direct way of solving problems, so presumably theu bought their Sputnik tape players, and promptly used them upside-down?

Shades of the old joke about NASA spending millions on zero-G ballpoint pen development, and the cosmonauts used a pencil...

DAvid

[suebutcher]

Soviet stuff tended to be clunky-ugly rather than loud hey-look-at-me ugly, and is therefore slightly more lovable.

Some of those trendy-looking Singapore-designed machines had unfixable plastic cog drives and permanent magnet erase. That was the worst thing about them, but I suppose they weren't normally used for recording.