EEVblog 1590 - Cheap $33 Boombox Teardown
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- Опубліковано 2 січ 2024
- Is a modern $33 boombox from Kmart any good?
THE 80's boombox teardown: • EEVblog 1562 - THE 198...
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#ElectronicsCreators #boombox #Teardown - Наука та технологія
Wow! I was expecting a little tiny board with a couple blobs, tons of empty space, and a piece of steel for weight. Can they really make an assembly like this for so cheap? Guess slave labor helps.
I suspect even in today's China assembly is done in huts in provincial villages.
that's what i was expecting as well
Having been a nonunion electronics tech for 30 years I can assure you that slave labor is what makes the world go around.
suspect same children that makes 1EUR per day. thats what makes our lives easy/simple . fun to look how they hide in bushes when camera show up.
in GB Rolls-Royce factory worker get ~1gbp/car to put door and do alignment and plug wire harness. in the end you get ~100k/y
and people are.. it is not worth my time and effort to repair/make...
@@viperwizard491 1 dollar children aren't good for this sort of stuff.. 15- 20 bucks a day adult is more likely.
they still make class ab amps from discrete components too with that kind of wages.. they're actually sort of nice since if you blow them up you can just go to a shop and buy the parts to fix it. and why bother if they could buy smd amp boards cheap? I dunno, but that's still what they have a lot on thai market. the PA rental market uses a lot of that stuff(often these amps and stuff have your usual bluetooth-usb-sdcard module from china bolted on at the factory too, and when I say discrete components I mean discrete components in that the amp boards in some of them can look like your class ab amp board diagram from university electronics course 1:1 even in physical layout).
33 bucks might sound like super cheap but really it's not in that you would need 1 dollar labor for something like this, it's not that many minutes of hand work that goes into it, with fixtures it's even quicker.
1:27 "1.5W output for moderate volume" This might be the first ever instance of honest power level descriptions in the entire history of audio electronics marketing. That box belongs in a museum!
They forgot to mention its 4000W PMPO rating 😂
@@nicholasvinen what a missed opportunity for them :D
The actual speakers are 8 watts. so they could have easily marketed this as a 16 watt machine and it would have still been more honest than most lol.
Dave, once you removed the protective film from the tape drawer I was on the edge of my seat to watch you remove the film from the tuning scale... Watched the whole video and there is the shot at the end with the film still on the tuning dial! Ahhhg! You owe us another video to rectify this crime.
YT algorithm sees plastic film removal as fetish content... You're only allowed one peel per video.
@@peterlarkin762 I couldn’t have handled two money shots in one video!
Single-sided phenolic boards, discrete wires between boards directly soldered with no headers. They really did go the extra mile to give it that "retro" look inside AND out.
The numeric scale is there so you can remember your fave stations'"abstract absolute position" rather than having to memorize values in a large arbitrary frequency range.
Would like to see some more cheap-o teardowns.
loved this oldschool teardown . Reminded me of some of your old videos back in the day
👍🏻
yessssss I've learned SO much from these old school teardowns 🎉
You’d probably like my teardowns. The aircraft electronics are especially interesting
Yeah, except one thing, I don't remember him being THIS positive about everything. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks ;)
@@joonglegamer9898 XD :D this one made me laugh so much 😂. You are right
Damn, if this was stereo, I'd be sold.
I'm diggin the Qbert board pattern on the back wall of the tape well. 😂
I have no idea where that design trope came from, but I've been seeing that everywhere. Seat covers on municipal busses. Wallpaper at the Royal Institution lecture hall. Headbands for head lights. It's weird. It's wanky. Maybe at one time someone thought "this looks futuristic" and a bunch of people copied him, but it hasn't aged well.
@@TD75 I'm familiar with Escher's Penrose Triangle and other "impossible" shapes; this isn't one of those. It's just a basic cuboid pattern that reminds me of a similarly basic triangle mosaic pattern. They're so ubiquitous and ingrained in our culture I'm tempted to consider them third-order simulacra.
I had a laugh at 3:14 when i saw that fallen off dustcap in the advertorial of the supermarket.
Of all those boomboxes, this one on the picture already had failed instantly.
@@Okurka. I saw that and thought it was pushed in have a look at the left speaker.
The HiFi enthusiast in me would likely want something better, but to be honest, for the price, and if you want a simple all-in-one machine, that's really not too bad.
consumer electronics are such a disappointment these days. I fix stuff for a charity shop (for free obviously), we often get old ghetto blasters and I'm always amazed at how well they were engineered with repair in mind. one of them had a frame that allowed you to lift the electronics out with the mech attached and the cool thing about it was that the tape eject button released it from the main chassis. (it was a Hitachi TRK-8190E for anyone interested)
Exactly, that’s why I only do teardowns if high end stuff and aircraft electronics
Looks like that one even has real tweeters too....
@@rickgreer7203 it did aye, it sounded fantastic
You could buy a 1980s boom box with RCA input connection and connect it to a Bluetooth/SD card unit
internally to make the 1980s boom box modern again.
8/10 for giving it that vintage look from the speaker grills to the cassete buttons on the top. bonus point for having modern options like usb and bluetooth. Sadly have to drop a point for using treble and bass knobs instead of the set of eq sliders.
Looks like the SD circuit board also does BT because I see an antenna "squiggle" trace at the board's lower right.
These integrated mp3 player boards are available on AliExpress for almost nothing.
I too buy discounted electronics from the clearance pile in Coles XD. I have purchased a few cheap blaupunkt (if that's how you spell it) 12v inverters that has come in handy. I also grabbed a 12v kettle for the car when I feel like making road coffee!
That's what I'm going to do when my neighbors start to getting annoying! Take the oscilloscope for a spin with me 😂
A headphone jack AND Bob's my uncle, for $33? We live in marvelous times.
I work in PCB and product design and the fact they can assemble, package and ship these for $33 AND make a profit is just unbelievable. Especially since it techincally works, even if not as well as a brand-name item. They're using a couple of the all-in-one chips, obviously, but just the cost of the PCBs, casing and manual assembly these require adds up. I think Dave messsed up a bit as when he initially held the mic in front of the speaker on this unit it sounded pretty good, so he then moved it between the speakers so it was more muted :)
Slave labour makes things really cheap.
All companies in China and in many other countries are heavily subsidised by their governments. The actual cost of the materials to create these items are similar in most countries and labour / cost-of-living charges are ever-increasing.
Yeah, that audio effect in the middle was odd. Mono mic and mono speakers. Out of phase speakers perhaps?
@@EEVblog that’s what I wondered yeah, if one of the speakers had been wired the wrong way around.
12 months warranty too
I think you missed a sticker to peel across the freq display area.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much circuit board and direct wiring there is in this thing. And the micro switch in the power connection would be to prevent the batteries from receiving unintended voltage. For $50 it’s a bloody steal
Big props for having MC Frontalot on a USB stick ready to go in case you need it!
Perfect gift for the lover of today’s music!
That's actually waaay better put together than I'd have expeced, I can't imagine any other target segment for this than young kids, and in that context, the mic makes perfect sense, it was great fun to record yourself to tape play it back, when you were a kid.
Great stuff, Dave. Thank you for the entertaining video:)
BTW. (after 5:20 ) they wrote "LED" above the LED. That's how we know the truth. But it is very short-sighted that they didn't marked the knobs with a "KNOB" sticker and the buttons with "BUTTON". I think they are keeping some secrets from us ... hehehehe
Brisbane K-Mart has them for $49AUD, I love it, play some radio out the back shed, little memory of old times. Nothing special but it turns on with 1 switch. I also got a new age cheap clock radio for down the back, but to play the radio you need to press one button to turn on, another to select BT, then some other button to change to radio, every time, its going in the bin, keeping the fake old school tiny boom box for ever
This makes me more keen to save rather than scrap older cassette decks given the modern units are, well, garbage.
You mean older quality decks, since it's not like there wasn't a lot of garbage like this back then. There was tons of it. On the other hand, not a lot of yesterday's crap is likely to have survived, I suppose, so... And yes, there are no good cassette players today, maybe a couple barely passable. Being a niche market it's not really likely to change.
It’s worth it alone for that rack and pinion tuning dial! Genius engineering. 🙂
I remember buying a Matsui (Currys home brand) double tape stereo in the late 80's for 30 quid (so I could copy computer games)
Yes I had a few Matsui products from Currys (UK) in the 90s, made very cheaply but surprisingly reliable. I had a VHS video recorder that ran for years, it even had a built in Teletext decoder which was a useful addition for my non-Teletext TV.
Great video! Right up my alley, Thanks!
1:05 Rigol or Siglent need to make a model of battery powered oscilloscope with an audio amp, bluetooth, and speakers. That would be real street-cred.
They squeezed a lot into it for the price. I'm amazed at what a single chip can do these days.
That's the power of smaller silicon lithography getting cheaper BABY!!!!
Love the knock off "Xabuchi" motor name and logo @15:48 !
Dave, I'm disappointed that you didn't peel the plastic off the tuner window too. 😢
Really strange feeling to watching this thing's teardown 😅
Happy New Year 🎉
I must admit 4 D size batts isn't going close to old school units. My neighbour had a old school boom box and it required 16 D batts. It would beat you out of the house not a problem. His had 5 radio Frequencies AM /FM/SW1/SW2/LW and had tune knob and fine tune. It would also auto skip a song and play in both directons i belive it was a mid 80's unit and it was super heavy and it might have been JVC or SHARP and made in Japan. I miss him he is no longer here but i remember him washing his RED Gemini and listing to tunes.
loved to watch this as im from that old generation and i remember how many models of this i did repair!
I'm from the younger generation, and repairing stuff from the 80s and 90s now for my job. It seems like a sweet spot for repairability, complex enough that it's valuable and there is demand for repair, simple enough that you can repair it (none of these 1000 pin BGA rubbish). Standardized parts like the LM358 in wide use, schematics maybe available, etc.
I love repairing it now, but I can't imagine living it, that'd be awesome.
AntandTec did a video presentation on one of these where he modified it to take an Amazon Dot.
He said that he was thinking of installing a proper tweeter for improved performance at higher frequencies.
I suspect they included shortwave for markets where that still somehow matters plus since the tuner chip does it anyway, the cost is minimal.
Enjoyed the video! Maybe this would be a good option for a kid's first radio.
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😂 better vid than i expected good work As always Dave cheers
Oh yeah baby, I've been waiting for this one...
I have like 4 of those old school boom box's they are a necessity for every shop/garage, the manual ones are better then the digital display ones since you don't have to re-tune them when power goes out
I think there's another protective sticker over the "scale" too. ' Left me hanging man! :D
2:37 love the M C Escher graphics inside the Cassette well..!
I was half expecting a capacitive dropper that ben found in his.
(2:08) I think the designers tried to make it look like a tuning band for shortwave distance, VHF channels, and/or UHF channels.
(2:46) I seem to remember a Techmoan video where the host mentioned that the designers likely used photos of Sharp boomboxes as part of their design reference photos and didn't bother to search online for what APSS was or their radios were rushed into production.
(3:08) The one Techmoan had was branded 'REKO' which, if i recall correctly, was the brand name used by Aldi South when they sold them.
This one is branded "Anko" which is the home brand of KMart in Australia.
Eight to 16 MHz shortwave? What happened to 1.8 MHz to 8 MHz where the most action is? I was actually considering picking up one of them as a cheap, do everything box, but I actually wanted the HF reception.
Recently rebuilt and repaired a mint, but broken Tivoli Model One that I got for $10 (probably the most expensive Model One anywhere in the world now)- and was reminded how nice it is having a radio that you just turn on with a knob and has a tuning knob. The Chinese production quality was mostly trash with crooked SMDs everywhere and probably why so many of them failed. Sounds pleasant though.
Bob’s yer uncle! Hilarious video! Thanks for
making it!
Thank you for the video.
Happy New Year 🎉 ausie
I know some old Philips record/tape/radio combo's had the cog-wheel radio tuner like this. After repair you had to lock it to a well know radio station and move the slider to that station and pair it up so the freqeuncy shown on the front would match the settings on the tuner....
Imagine you have so little power that you have to advertise it in the box.
The nightmare of the 'speaking' mp3 / bluetooth chips. A total embarrassment when one of those goes off at full volume (it always speaks at full volume). It will be one of those JL chips, AC46 type (a now obsolete version); I even managed to download the source code for those chips, along with the dodgy original speech files, but never got around to trying to re-program one due to the Chinese software tools often coming with included malware.
rippin teardown! more please!
Hi Dave! I love to see your teardown videos! What about show us some of thermionic tubes and first transistor radios? Greetings from Argentina! 🇦🇷 🤝🏻🇦🇺🦘🗽
I got the Sylvania SRC232BT-RED boombox simulator to this one. I wouldn't mind it if it was stereo, there was a shuffle play for the sd card or usb, and there was auxiliary in. I would allow for the permit erase head and other cheap thing added but I would have used 1 watt 8 ohm speakers instead of these 8 watts 4 ohm speakers.
Bonus points for that random strip of wood grain 🤣
You can kind of see how this was probably a better product when it was first released, and then got cost reduced into oblivion over the years.
APSS works only, if you have play pressed and THEN press fwd or reverse.
The $33 dollar boom-box sounds like tape is running just a hair bit faster than the silver one. Noticed that on the Queen song.
14:25 ZD2 Looks like you got your MELF.
Oh wow, the Wow and Flutter of that tapedeck is abysmal from what I could hear. Even though there's only one style of clone cassette mechanism now, it doesn't mean it has to sound like absolute garbage, there are some good new ones that use that style - as I recall TASCAM make a fairly decent HiFi one. It's nothing on a decent old model with Dolby C or S, but for those that want new with warranty it's fine. No dolby (since dolby don't license the tech anymore)... I bet the microphone only records to tape, and I bet it sounds terrible since it looks like a generic tiny electet microphone. And not stereo? Dang. Well you can get these in stereo and they sound better, I think VWestlife reviewed one that wasn't half bad for a modern boombox.
I'm not a lawyer but I bet the Dolby patents are long-expired, so you wouldn't need to license it from them any more. You couldn't call it Dolby though, I expect.
Market is the 1980's hipsters, who still have worn out tapes they want to listen to, and where the tinnitus and deafness means they just fill in the rest with the mind.
It is pretty impressive for $33. I just got an air purifier for my bedroom and I burned 99 bucks, all it has is a blower motor filter and a UV light!
On the box it said something about converting your tapes to MP3, so I guess someone could buy it just for that and still get reasonable value. No auto-reverse though, so you can't record the charts show for a couple of hours on a Sunday evening. Who said technology only gets better? Thinking outside the box, I wonder if you can record the radio and if the mic is active - you could record your own shows like we all did in the 80s for $33 - cracking!
1:04 Dave, because of You, I cant stop laughing for last 5 minutes.
“It speaks to me!” - in recent years you’re lucky it seems if that’s all something does, where many things seem to want to listen to you also/instead. ;)
Yey, that's a "rosewood" top right there, feels just like a premium guitar.
Save all the screws and throw the rest away 😂
And dont forget the cassette belts as well ?
we will need those to replace the bokken and perished belts on the old 80s Boombox..?🤣🤣😂😂
I have the same/similar unit, bought it second hand in 2020, just curiosity. Piece of crap, deck not working (broken off wire), belt stretched, awful sound quality, USB groundloop, digital tuner (doesn't work really well with an analog compressed scale), passive tone controls, linear volume control and MONO. Mine is branded "Ricatech" and identifies itself as "USB/SD 3 Band Radio Cassette GHETTOBLASTER" haha. Chipsets used; BK1198 (tuner), KA2206B (amp) and BCFDY02.1N (unknown). Speakers are 5W 4 Ohms in series (bridged amp config). Plastics are pretty good. It can run on an USB power bank (connected via battery terminals) a pretty long period of time. But don't waste your money on this. If it was stereo you can do some tweaks to make it a little better as is.
I think it's pretty neat they added Shortwave too. Even if it's not the whole range but just a smaller section of the shortwave band but it's a very useful portion still and you should be able to receive a lot of stations on it. Especially during the day. Yeah i think the biggest downer is that even if it has 2 speakers it's just a Mono Radiorecorder. So you won't get Stereo sound from Radio, SD & USB and also Bluetooth and cassette. However you should still be able doing stereo recordings of the FM Radio to Cassette.
Re: The APSS (Automatic Programme Search System). From what I can remember from my ghetto blaster days, you need to have the play button and either FF or RW pressed down at the same time. The play head should detect silence or gaps and stop at the first instance. If you get quiet bits in songs it can fool the search. Having said that, it's probably bogus on this cheap setup.
Yeah, I think so too, as Techmoan did a video on the same boombox model shown in the video (his video was titled along the lines of "Aldi boombox"), and showed that it was fake and that someone likely referenced photos of Sharp boomboxes when designing the cheap ODM boombox both he and EEVBlog showed.
Nice hearing MC Frontalot :)
The pot for the digital tuning is interesting- all of these digital radios seem to use the same style pot and mechanical linkage. I think a pot off the board would be easier mechanically- anyone know why they all use this arrangement? Is the pot special in some way? BTW, the crazy thing on other recent radios: many don't use log/audio-taper pots for volume, instead they use linear. It means all the volume action is in the first 5 degrees of turning the knob.
Damn. I had a TV that had a zero-100 volume, and anything above 10 was almost unrecognizably louder. That explains why.
That wood grain. Clint of LGR would be happy!
Dave I know the market for these devices: teardown videos! I actually love seeing the evidence of all the clever engineering they put into these to get the BOM down! You absolutely know this thing was overseen by marketing wankery types who demanded they put a microphone in it just so they can tick off another box. That's the entire story of this thing (and millions more like it): they could actually build something that was cheap and sounded great if they kept the features down to a minimum
This exact same model has been on sale for at least 4 years under various brand names. The price has also barely changed.
I LOVE 80S BOOM BOXES AND GETTO BLASTERS 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
You are driving me crazy by no pealing the radio dial cover, like you already did the cassette! :(
I used to own a Panasonic RX-DT75.
Man, that was a boombox!
I'd like to see you gut this to the cassette deck, tuning mechanism and then replace the speakers and everything else, creating a 2024 boom box worthy of your shop.
Its actually a good looking radio in a creepy late 80s kind if way. Might be worth gutting and replacing the guts with something a little less beefier, maybe sime good speakers... You could really have something nice... for triple the original purchase price!
"What a piece of junk!"
She's got it where it counts kid.
Gotta' give 'em credit for the honest output wattage. I remember these pieces of shit with 400W+ P.M.P.O.
Pretty cool!
14:57 the tape mechanism has no changes for past 30+ years.
All those "0" resistor (jumpers) were a clue that it is a single-sided board. I'm amazed no lithium ion battery (upgrade it Dave!). Would make a good prop for BTTF4. That woodgrain reminds me of Realistic audio equipment.
I expected to hear "The bluetooth device is ready to pair" XD
You'll find it in the US as the Audiobox RXC-25BT. Available in Black and Red. Note that they don't list the AC voltage on any listing I could find.
They could whack a lithium battery in it for an extra 10 bucks, plus you save on the mains power conversion, that's like a buck off. And you don't get the UL screaming at you when it shorts the mains and burns your house down.
They wont put a lithium battery in because it would cost to much to ship.
And as lithium battery's are a fire-risk🔥🔥🔥🔋🔋 😁😁😁😁😁😁@@phillyphakename1255
Wow. Audiobox straight up stole the Audiovox name and font, just switched the V to a B, and they even had the audacity to put a red line in the B just like Audiovox does with the V.
Surprisingly they didn't wire those speakers out of phase, did they? It would have been a spatial sound! 😂
They actually might have. When I move the mic to the middle you can here the output drop.
@@EEVblog But you can always add "Spatial/Normal" switch afterwards. 🤓
( I have a late 50's Telefunken Concertino radio and in those days they connected (in addition to the main speaker) two tweeters out of phase to create more spacious sound.)
I’ve destroyed more than one double cassette player trying to replace those black rubber tension bands on old 80’s -90’s players which in most cases were a confusing melted/oily disintegrated mess and extremely hard to get to. On top of that trying to figure out how and where those multiple-different length bands, especially for reel to reel /auto reverse/etc were interconnected has been a nightmare.
If I managed to see well, the speakers are connected in series. Mono sound for everything and not just for the cassette player.
Short Wave can be useful to receive international broadcasts when there's no internet available.
Enter the MonoBlaster! "So real."
Casette music search works only if you press play and FWD (REW) simultaneously.
I got terrified, when you placed cassette into this thingy. All in all, looks like we are regressing.
Remind me a little of a Sony CFS 210, like I used to have growing up.