OK.  So I didn’t, really, but if I wanted to, I could now, you see.

The unprecedented completion of my “record all the vinyl on to the computer” project prompted my wife to make delicate coughing noises and point out that she had several albums on cassette that had never been released on CD, or that were long out of print, and that gosh, it’d be nice if they could be made into digital sometime soon.  I have a few albums that I can’t easily replace, myself, so I didn’t take much talking in to the idea of doing something about it.

We have a couple of things around the apartment that can play back cassettes.  Unfortunately, none of them have line level outputs, so I’d have had to deal with matching input levels to whatever came out of their headphone jacks.  Very much sub-optimal.

Obviously, I needed to get a component-style cassette deck.

At this point I made some minor tactical errors, which I will recount for your amusement and as a caution.

When we were at Fry’s buying other stuff, I looked at their selection.  None were under $150.  This seemed a bit excessive.  I thought about trying my luck at Goodwill, and even went to the big Goodwill store near… to the big Halloween store that is where the big Goodwill near our house USED to be.  It was weird to think of a Goodwill as going out of business, but it either folded or moved.

I got the bright idea of checking Craigslist, and found a listing for a rather nice looking Pioneer cassette deck with a local seller.  He swore, and here I am not kidding, that it had been owned by his grandmother who no longer had any use for it, and it seemed like a deal at 55 bucks.

Of course I’m an idiot and didn’t insist on testing the deck before I packed it into the car and drove home with it.  His reaction upon my “hey, this cassette deck you sold me, it doesn’t play cassettes” was “well, it worked the last time I used it!”

Then I did what I should have done in the first place, I went and looked on Amazon.   For 85 bucks, shipped, I got a Teac W-600R dual-deck cassette component, which is quite happily playing back a tape as I type this.

So I still, uh, saved 10 bucks as opposed to buying a deck at Fry’s, but… not my best showing, overall.