dubbing cassette tapes

Over the years, through the normal channels of inertia I have collected a lot of consumer electronic residue. Record players, tape decks, VCRs, TVs, mp3 players, cd players, computers of various types et cetera. It's interesting when examining the older of these machines which ones still have a function that they can perform well enough that I still use them decades later.

My Panasonic tape recorder, given to me as a Christmas present some 34 years or so ago, still works and has been called back to duty periodically over the time I've owned it. My SONY Walkman with the built in stereo microphone sits in pieces in my parent's basement. It it's motor hadn't given out and my brother hadn't taken it apart it would still be in use today as being incredibly useful. In some ways the time for these machines has past. I can cheaply buy a digital recorder that will do what they do. But since there are so many cassette tapes still in my possession there is still room for them.

No less than three small boomboxes live here with me. One, a mid 90s version with a cd player, lives in the bathroom where it serves as a radio since it's selector switch has long been too unstable to chance trying to play cs or tapes in it and having it die all together. Another one, the newest one, sits on the living room floor. It was a gift to my grandmother which became superfluous as she could never work it (bad eyesight coupled with bad circulation in the hands) and then moved to a nursing home and didn't need it anymore. The third, and oldest of the three sits unused and unloved by my living room window. It's a dual cassette model from the late 80s. Looking at it now I would think it would be utterly ludicrous to anyone of a more current generation. Why would you ever want to dub a tape onto another tape? What purpose would it serve? Tape to computer for digitization into an mp3, that would be useful. Onto another tape? Why bother? I was looking at it this afternoon thinking those very thoughts. Why do I even have this thing in my house anymore? When was the last time I copied a tape? Sometime in the 90s?

And that is where I think my point lies. Bells and whistles. A simple product of utilitarian design may continue to function perfectly well for years. But the more elaborate ones, the ones that are more specialized, they'll just become useless trash.