Bush Portable Cassette Player. As bad as it gets...and then some

i had a completely different video planned for this week but unfortunately i've had to delay it while i wait for some spares to be delivered so at the last minute i've pulled this off the shelf a while ago a chap asked me to review one of these i think he knew it was going to be awful but he just wanted to hear me say so so i bought one and i just couldn't face it in the end well today seems to be as good as day as i need to face my demons so this is a portable cassette player it says it's a player but in reality it's recorder one touch record now that's kind of typical of devices like this these modern day nasty cheap plasticky horrible personal stereos they tend to be recorders i mean back in the day your personal stereo wouldn't normally have a speaker on it so yeah there were some with them but as a general thing they didn't and also generally they didn't record there were more players personal stereos again yes you could get recorders but your average personal stereo didn't have a speaker didn't record this is really a dictation machine that's then been kind re-engineered or rebranded slightly to be classed as a personal stereo now talk about rebranding bush they were a well-known uk manufacturer of radios was really the thing that they became most known for but other equipment over the years that branding was bought by the retail chain argos in 2008 and it will be no surprise that this came from argos so yeah they just stuck the bush branding on there if you go on alibaba you can buy one of these without any branding on it whatsoever or ask them to put whatever label you want on there hey let's let's open it up and have a look now i'll move the cassettes out of the way i just mentioned here i've got a few test tapes well that's a type two so it's probably not going to be suitable for this but i've got a sign sweep stereo test well flutter test i've got some youtube audio library on a type 1 tape there so i could do some tests and of course i can also test my own audio but i won't be able to play any of that in the video of course now let's just get in here yeah now one thing i wanted to mention about these a bit of an update to previous videos of course we mentioned in the past that there's only really one type of cassette mech being made there are days i mean there are a couple but they're kind of very cheap end of the thing i call them tanner shin mechanisms but i've kind of been corrected by videos from the westlife who's investigated this even more and some of the ones that i thought were tenacion or tanishin were actually copies of those and then on top of that it's possible to spec up a kardashian mech or even a copyback with different quality of components you could have a metal flywheel you could have a plastic flywheel you could have really cheap motors and there's fake motors going around i mean they're real motors but uh they're not like sankios and stuff i'm going to link you to the westlife's video in the description so you can learn more about that but you know whenever i've mentioned in the past that really there aren't any decent quality cassette makes being made anymore the number one thing that people will say is but what about that tiak one or that tascam one there's a tascam or tiak i think it's a twin tape or is it a tape and a cd anyway that one yeah they're using tenacion mechanisms again and it's all they can get it's not their fault that said if you get a tenacious mechanism and you put a um a metal flywheel in it and a decent motor it'll be okay i i'd say it's like a kin to say if car manufacturers nowadays who are making combustion engine cars they could only get hold of one engine and it was from a larger reaver made in say 1990 or something well i mean it's all right it gets you from a to b there's probably no problem with it and it's all right in a budget car but the trouble is once you start putting that same engine in say a bentley it gets a little bit ridiculous and that's really where i was coming from with these things a cheap mech in a cheap cassette deck you're going to get a cheap result but if it's cheap well what do you expect let's put some batteries in here so it's going to be two double a's kirkland batteries people always say kirkland batteries leak and they're not wrong but who really cares in something like this now we've got a clip on the back i'm going to take it off because it's kind of annoying me but that's uh that's your belt clip there there we go right again personal stereos did not tend to have a big old aerial on the back i mean these things are a bit of a concoction into it it's a few things together i mean it's like a more of a radio than a cassette player but we'll just open it up inside here i'm looking for an eject lever of course i'm a bit overreally optimistic there there'll be no eject leave it'll just be pulling the door i'd imagine let's read the buttons here don't if you can see this rewind fast forward stop play and record those nasty looking buttons out there all kind of weird different angles from one another but yeah i don't see i don't see the eject button yet no doubt it's going to be the stop that's what user happens oh no it just opens or does it yeah it does okay now let's have a look in here and see if we can figure out if this is going to be mono or stereo it's sad if it's mono aren't it but did you notice on the box i just moved it to one side here whenever it says something like portable cassette player and it's like a one speaker on it i'm not expecting stereo play and record your favorite station so you can record off the radio built in speaker share your music i'm sure everyone want to listen to that belt clipping earphones for easy listening anywhere and one touch record for dictation but yeah nothing about stereo is there hmm okay well let's find out for ourselves gonna take a bit of a weird camera angle this one yeah just when you thought things couldn't get any worse mono tape head you can tell it's mono because it's just the one square of silver in the middle if it was stereo that would be split in half to be like a black line in the middle of it great well this is one less test i'm going to have to make with this machine but it is disappointing the fact that it's mono but it just shows that you can't assume anymore i mean someone of my age looks at a personal stereo and would call it a personal stereo but nowadays it's like a personal mono and the fact it didn't mention stereo on the box was the thing that's the giveaway nowadays unless it says something it's quite possibly not that thing so yeah don't assume that it's stereo but let's uh let's go through the controls on here so top left headphone volume tnr so that's tape and radio and then tuning for the radio on the bottom dc 3 volts center neg right let's put the radio on hopefully we won't hit anything that content matches i'm so excited oh there we go oh he's gone where's he gone and well-being as well as their education i'm mr iva a primary school head teacher as well as cleaning hand washing ventilation and bubbles there'll be extra protection with twice weekly covert 19 testing available well that's not going to date this video in the future is it but there we go let's put a tape in here tight ones the other one it's going to play properly so that's what i'm using i wouldn't only use a tape of this quality that's a bit dodgy okay now it'll no doubt come through the speak of this to start with wow wound flutter central you know what it would have to be three times better than that to be considered as complete crap but let me just plug the output from that into the camera so you can have a miserable experience all to yourself [Music] now i know you are really enjoying that but sorry to break it up i'm going to have to demonstrate one further thing with this cassette in a different machine because whenever i've reviewed something and i've said that it's a bit rubbish of course you always get people jump to the defense of things like this i don't know why they do it but they'll say that it's user error i'm doing it wrong in this case it'd be the tape was recorded badly let's play the same tape look nothing up my sleeves and we'll put it in this sony wmd6c yes this is not a fair fight as far as quality goes all i'm doing here is demonstrating the tape was originally recorded properly it was just reproduced pathetically so let's plug this into the camera and then you can have a listen to that one [Music] so [Music] so [Music] now there's one test i wanted to do which didn't work out i wanted to record the radio and then play it back the idea being would listen to the live radio and then compare that against the recording unfortunately i didn't realize at the time that whenever i plugged the headphone output into my camera it went out of tune and then when you unplugged it it was perfectly in tune again so i was listening to it on the speaker thinking that's fine plug the headphone out put in record it all i got was static of course i realized afterwards that it'll be using the headphone wire as the aerial whenever they're plugged in so you don't have to have the full aerial extended so the recording test was a wash and you'll see later on in the video why i'm unable to go back and re-record that section but we know what we would have got it would have been a low fidelity mono recording with a generous helping of wow and flutter and if there's anyone out there wondering if the radio output in fm is stereo well i very much doubt it's one of the things i wanted to test at that moment as well when i listen back to the recording which wasn't there but i'd recommend buying any other radio other than this one because for me it only picked up one station with any kind of quality in this room whereas any other radio that i bring in here picks up half a dozen okay remember this the spectrum analyzer from a few videos ago well what i'm going to do with this is i've got this cassette with a sign sweep on it logarithmic scale so this is a series of notes that goes from very low up to very high and just keeps doing that over and over again now ideally it should light each of these columns up one after the other but because it's on a tape and tape has a limited frequency response especially on this type 1 tape it won't light all the columns up it'll go somewhere in the middle so the idea is the more you light up the higher your range of frequencies that the device can reproduce the more towards the middle it goes the lower frequencies are getting cut off as are the higher ones so we'll see how it performs but again first let's just play it back in my d6c just to give you an idea as to what this can reproduce okay now i'm going to press play but bear in mind that this tape is a very budget type 1 tape this device could perform much better than this but we'll see where it gets up to at the top the highest frequency that it's able to reproduce off this tape and it's getting past 10 12 and a half bit of 16 and no 20. so it gets up to 16k at the top there remember that number for when we show the other device and see how far that gets up and now we'll have a look where it gets to at the bottom i think it shows a little bit of 20 but then gets better at 25 and up you'll see a few sort of shadow frequencies popping in here ignore those but yeah 20 25 yeah we're doing fine there so let's zoom in again i'll just show you that in a little bit more detail so we'll have a look at the top first okay so here we go it starts to fade off around about 6.3 k and then after that it gets a little bit more indistinct on the upper frequencies let's look at the bottom okay so it's just about to loop around in a second keep your eye on the 20 at the left it gets about halfway up there and then it gets stronger as it moves through the other frequencies but it pretty much covers all the frequencies you should be able to hear even off this quite cheap type 1 tape so let's move on to the bush see how well that does there we go now it's not broken it's just on a part of the frequency range that it's not able to reproduce at the moment you'll see it's popping in there there at the bottom so it starts i think around 80. there might have been a bit of 63 hertz that it works its way up and these bits are all right the volume's a bit higher on this one that's why it's peaking in red and then it's it's dropping off at 10. just wait for it to come back around again see where it first appears yeah 80. so you can see we're concentrating the audio in the middle here 80 up to about there i think it was was it eight or ten let's just have a look again yeah a tiny bit of ten so really eight kilohertz at the top and at the bottom eighty hertz so we're missing the top and bottom off there very much with this machine yeah excellent isn't it let's try wow and flutter okay to set a base level wmd6 c again it's playing at the moment we've got both of these set to one percent at the top zero is in the middle of this one zero is on the left of that one looks like nothing's happening it looks like it's not even switched on so let's just put it to point three at the top and we'll put that one to point three at the top as well yeah so the speed's dead on as far as the flutter goes well 0.3 is hardly doing anything let's put point one at the top so there's point one there's a slight naught point naught point naught eight percent wear and flutter on this one and that some of that is down to the tape but let's just leave it there move the tape across put it into the bush okay well there we go we pegged both of them straight away of course that's on this very tight point one percent at the top so let's put one percent at the top on that one and one on that so we're both at one now these were showing at effectively zero on the other machine that one's off the chart that's the speed so the speed's too fast let's put it on three percent of the top yeah it's running over three percent fast i'm not too sure how much over that's as far as this thing will go and then on oh it's going down a bit now look at this this is the kind of thing that happens with these just so variable you know they're not able to keep control of the speed at all that's where things like quartz slot coming in more sophisticated devices but over here one percent at the top we're running at 0.5 on the top row there perhaps yeah naught point five percent or up to naught point six percent wear on flutter so the other machine 0.08 this 0.5 half a percent wear on flutter but it's what's to be expected and as i mentioned before it's a budget device but you know take all those things into consideration let's open it up now and just see what's going on inside so i'm interested to see what kind of mechanism is in here and also whether or not it's got a plastic flywheel on it and also if we can find out who makes the motor so let's take this apart let's just delete there we go right so that's your wire for your aerial that's attached up to the back there soldered on you can see the mechanism here it's all plastic of course so yeah these are suppose these are the flywheels we've got two in here plastic on the outside metal on the inside it's amazing how they try and cut the cost of these things down but you could have done the whole thing metal and it would have had a less of a wow and flutter issue and then we got the motor down here let's just keep going and see what we can find in here now the presence of two flywheels would suggest that this device is able to play in either direction which reminded me that back when that chap asked me to do a review of it the one thing that intrigued me was the fact it was being advertised as an auto reverse device now of course the one i have here can't do auto reverse the tape head would need to be able to play either side of the tape for that to happen which this one can't there's also no mention of auto reverse on the packaging or in the instructions however the argos website does still have one old image of an auto reverse version and the device itself still has that telltale play button with the arrows that point in either direction so it turns out that this device can be specked up to be an alter reverse unit and it seems like much of the mechanism that enabled that feature still remains inside that's a lot of cogs in there isn't it by the way don't worry about this thing i'm going to be using this for spares for example that belts will come in handy somewhere i'm sure some of these other components in time might come into use there's a lot going on in there flip it out it's like a crap clock into anyway it's time to try and get the top off this and see who makes the motor okay just a load of numbers and letters on here it doesn't mention a company name unless the company is called xrf300c1427020413 made in china that's about it or if there's anything under here no okay right but there you go that's the mech that you get in these cheap decks no doubt maybe it's the same one you get all the personal stereos i can't really say that there's any quality in this whatsoever but i mean it kind of works it just feels very grindy the whole thing there's no smoothness to it whatsoever but it's made extremely cheaply no doubt and there are quite a good number of components on there i mean just look at that it's a lot of stuff going on for very little reward but yeah as i say i'm going to keep these as spares i've got little springs here little switches and things other stuff that i might be able to use in the future it's probably worth more to be in spares well definitely worth more to being spurs than it was as a working machine but one thing i definitely don't need is another mono head that's uh it's pretty weak in it but there you go that's what you get that's the um bush personals from argos hopefully next time i'll have something a little bit more deserving of your time and mine but that is it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 401,944

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K

Id: 1Cq-rkr_taU

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/j_gedney]

I've been following techmoan for a while now. It's his regular procedure to roast the hell out of cheap devices (or not if the're alright)

[u/cassiusthetic]

I love TechMoan! I need to watch his videos again:D

[u/dandanthetaximan]

God Bless Techmoan

[u/AldoLagana]

No fucking shit. But because ignorance rules these days, the companies make a mint selling broken and unworking garbage. How many vids of shit new garbage tape players does he have to make b4 no one buys one? My guess is infinite because ignorance is infinite.