Check out this absolutely bitchin’ radio Mel & I found at some giant thrift-store downtown. It’s the General Electric 3-5233b. I paid around $20 for it, and it was in much worse shape than it looks in that pic. It had a thick layer of dust, grime, and whatever else was floating around someone’s garage over the last 40 years. I tore the whole thing down and blasted whatever surface I could with dish soap and hot water. Electrical connections, components, and the tape-head were cleaned very slowly with isopropyl alcohol and a few dozen q-tips.

I read up on this thing, and it looks like it came out in the mid-to-late 80’s. It was GE’s response to the bigger, beefier ghetto blasters. Designed to be cheaper, more portable and used in smaller spaces like dorm rooms. And this thing is pretty reasonably sized, too. If it were 1985 and I needed to stuff a tape deck in my backpack, this wouldn’t be a bad option. I couldn’t find much else on it, unfortunately. I spent some times looking for old manuals and advertisements but came up empty.

This thing slaps, in an old, tinny, mono sorta way. It’s been my main device for tapes since I got it. If you haven’t listened to cassettes in awhile, you might have forgotten that they’re a pretty far off from hi-fi. I have a modern tape-player (FiiO CP13), and it’s not bad, but I can’t say I love it. I can hook it up to my most expensive amp, pipe it into my best r/hifi headphones, and it’s still a tape. The only difference is that I get to hear all the pops and defects that come with that medium in HD. Through the GE mono? Sounds just like the radio in my dads Suburban.

I’m not trying to sound like “omg it’s just vintage and nostalgic and liminal <3”. It’s like, you know how old games designed for CRT TVs look bad on modern LCD displays? It’s kind of like that. It’s not that it makes the tape sound any better, it’s just that modern equipment makes them sound worse.

Regardless, getting this thing cleaned up and functional was a pretty cool project. I like finding these old devices that are still kicking after 30-40 years. Plus it’s gonna be pretty rad when I pull up to the function with my boombox and Playboy Carti tapes.