Missing some useful features, but a good deck.
Written: Jul 16 '01
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Pros: Easy to use if you don't lose the manual.
Cons: No Microphone Jack. Fade-in feature sucks.
The Bottom Line: Quality equipment for a good price if not much is expected as far as features.
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| imgeorg's Full Review: Sony TC WE435 Stereo Dual Cassette Deck Single Dua... |
I held off buying a tape deck for a long time...thirty years, in fact. I won't bore the reader with a life story as to how I came to need one, but I will say that I wish I had discovered 30 years ago that taping your LPs was an excellent way to preserve them, as long as the audio tape was quality and the recording device was quality. Once a master is made, copy the tape and play it until it wears out. Dub a new one from the master. Saves a lot of wear and tear on the vinyl! Good equipment can, in my opinion, produce an even better quality recording than those cheap-a__ commercial cassettes that almost always end up being eaten by your car player.
As with all the equipment I buy, it has to meet certain quality standards. This means that I'm not likely to buy something like Audiovox or GPX or anything that has a reputation for cheapness as well as inexpensiveness. Music means too much to me for that. On the other hand, just because I want quality doesn't mean I'm prepared to spend an arm and a leg for it, either.
I went to Best Buy for my tape deck. At one time, they had the reputation for quality brands at cheap prices, but I've found that not to be the case anymore. Still, I was able to find one on sale, and during the Christmas 2000 season, too. Two Sony models were priced cheaper than anybody else. One Sony model, the cheapest, was sold out. So I bring the 435 home.
On Christmas Day, I play with my new toy. After the first few hours, I find out the auto-level doesn't always pick the right level. Somehow the tape sounded OK while taping, yet put it in the car stereo and it's barely audible. Whoops. From now on I set the level manually to make SURE it's loud enough. There's not a good way to adjust the BASS level, either. I wanted to see if I could make a cool DJ style mix with my dance records. The FADE-in control wouldn't FADE-IN or FADE-OUT when I wanted, even when I followed the manual's instructions to the letter. Push once for FADE-IN, twice for FADE-OUT. Forget it, twice was FADE-IN and screwed up if I removed my finger from the button. Plus, it wasn't the effect I was looking for. I didn't take me long to see that this was going to be too complicated for my purposes, so that was disappointing.
Actual straight recording with no fancy effects is fairly easy once the language is mastered. After making sure I'm not recording on the leader tape, I set my old Pioneer SX-3600 to aux and push in one of the tape monitors. Hit REC and it doesn't record; it records on PAUSE! Must be some of that Sony logic I've encountered before. So I was at least able to record tracks from my LPs to make compilation tapes. I would love to have been able to include my voice between tracks to record an introduction to the different songs, since my friends have never heard of a lot of these songs. But to my horror, there is no microphone jack anywhere. I thought ALL decks had a mic jack! It never occurred to me to look to see if it had one, because I just took for granted that it would have one.
That's a definite negative. I was hoping I would be able to make some custom tapes recording my voice while I read my favorite books. These plans are out now. I don't know why there'd be a headphone jack on it when there's one usually on the receiver (unless that's changed now) and no input jack of any kind. It's stuff like this that makes me want to investigate mini-disc more.
Dubbing a pre-recorded tape is easy and fun, and can be done in two speeds. Put the tape to be dubbed in deck A, put the blank in deck B, select either High or Normal, then once again hit PAUSE. The recording mode can be set to one sided, two-sided, or relay, which is an obscure setting which I can't figure the need for. The downside I've found to using either the two-sided or relay mode is when dubbing a 90-minute tape onto sturdier 60-minute tape, the deck doesn't take the leader into account, and so some music is missed because of the machine's trying to tape over the aforementioned leader.
In conclusion, while I've liked having the deck, I don't know whether I'll keep it or look for a model where I can record my voice onto it. There's no reason why a tape deck shouldn't be able to do that, especially as much as these things cost. In fact, I seriously considered taking advantage of Best Buy's generous 30-day return policy and returning it to the store after I had dubbed and recorded to my heart's content; but I didn't go through with it. Too much Quaker in me, I guess!
I recommend it if only for a couple reasons. First, it's a good entry-level deck, great to have if a person needs to have something. Second, it's quality, so while it's definitely not a kid's toy, it's not likely to fall apart, and I worked mine like a horse the first three months I had it, because I enjoy hearing my old favorites in my car stereo for the first time in ages! But I personally was disappointed by it's limitations. It seems like the decks from the 70s could do more for the money.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 161 total
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Epinions.com ID:
imgeorg
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Location: Oklahoma City area
Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Writer and artist wannabe.
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