Adventures in Audio Shopping
One of the benefits of writing about home-entertainment
electronics is that I have had a chance to play with a lot of it over the years, so when
it comes time to acquire something for my own system, I can usually do so on the basis of
all my hands-on tinkering. But that's typically restricted to the more exotic sort of
gear; samples of more prosaic equipment rarely come my way.
Several years ago I started to make music compilations that
my wife could use when teaching fitness classes. While digital technology made the
creation of these assemblages very easy, the plan was always to dub the final mix to
cassette.
And while some class venues do have tape playback
equipment, others don't, so we decided to invest in a boombox that could be carried from
place to place. My only direct experience with boomboxes had been an inexpensive one that
lives at the cottage and is suitable for pulling in the oldies show on local small-town
radio, but not much more. I figured we could do much better.
The first task was to decide exactly what we'd need. I had
already been amazed at the immense variety of these devices on the shelves, and I knew
that eliminating boxes that had features we would never use would narrow the field
considerably and would also allow us to spend more on the functions we wanted.
One decision that eliminated the majority of machines was
to buy a cassette-only model. Almost all of the portable systems out there include CD
players, but in our case, the result would be on cassette, so there was no need to be able
to play discs directly. In the end, however, the machine we chose had a pair of line
inputs -- a relatively unusual feature on a boombox -- so when we do want to listen to
CDs, we can plug in the portable player we already own.
The field was narrowed even further by rejecting models
that had dual cassette mechanisms for tape dubbing. In the first place, tapes copied on
such machines are usually inferior to those made machine-to-machine, especially if the
high-speed dubbing mode is used. Also, our originals were to be mastered on MiniDisc
rather than cassette, so tape-to-tape copying was unnecessary.
Two other requirements might well have been in conflict
with each other. One was that the unit would have to be relatively large; otherwise, the
speakers would have little hope of producing anything like decent bass. Size and bass
performance don't always correlate well in hi-fi speakers, but experience showed that tiny
boombox speakers always sounded thin, no matter how much bass boost the manufacturer
applied.
At the same time, the machine had to be relatively light.
My wife is fit but no Amazon, and she would have to lug the boombox and her other
equipment (such as exercise weights) to the various class locations. So big but light it
had to be, as well as relatively inexpensive.
Above all, it had to sound good. It would be naive to
suppose that we would ever find true high fidelity in such a portable device, but I knew
that there were huge sonic variances, and that the good ones were remarkably neutral. We
were determined (at least I was) to find one of those.
When it came to deciding where to shop, I'd noticed in my
travels that, while audio shops usually carry a small selection of boomboxes, it's the
massive electronics emporia that have a really wide selection, and usually very reasonable
prices. We discovered early on that while some of these stores might carry the same
brands, they generally had different models on display. In fact, the unit we ended up with
turned out to be the only model we found in two different stores.
Before we headed for the malls, I recorded a short sample
tape containing three pieces of music I knew well. In fact, all three are selections I
have used repeatedly to evaluate full-size speakers, so I figured they would be a good
point of reference. To keep things short, I recorded only about 30 seconds of each so that
I could listen to a lot of players in a short time. And because I anticipated (correctly)
that few of the machines that met my other criteria would have either Dolby noise
reduction or chrome/metal equalization, I used neither. Otherwise, I recorded on a premium
tape properly matched to the recorder, and used only CDs as sources.
To their credit, the sales forces of all the stores were
prepared to indulge me, and most were helpful even though I took a very long time fiddling
around to make what they must have seen as a very low-ticket decision. And I was gratified
to find that almost all the machines I looked at were plugged in and ready to go.
And, somewhat to my surprise, we ended up with exactly what
we were looking for: a light, reasonably handsome, tape-only boombox for a bargain price.
Bonuses included the line inputs, a reasonably effective five-band equalizer, and
detachable speakers, which will be useful in larger rooms. The unit -- a Sony model, for
the record -- even produces more-than-respectable sound.
Go figure!
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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