GTP Alternative Cool Wall: c.1975-c.1990 Portable Cassette Radio Players

c.1975-c.1990 Portable Cassette Radio Players

  • Total voters
    51
  • Poll closed .
Roger the Horse

Roger the Horse

5,551
Antarctica
Controls set for heart of sun
GTP_RogerTheHors
Nominated by @W3HS

Portable radio and cassette tape player aka Boombox, Ghettoblaster...

boombox_pc_3-thumb1.jpg


Usage: providing an audio backdrop for outdoor activities such as sports games, fishing weekends, hangin' wit da homies, beach trip or sitting in the garden on a warm day with BBQ and a few cold ones.

Pros: Take your Off The Wall or Bon Jovi albums anywhere and get on down with friends.

Cons: How about the 8 power bricks you needed to run the thing? Or that it was the size of a briefcase?​
 
The predecessor to MP3 players, iPods, and all of those funky gadgets that came after. A symbol of the 80's.

Cool.
 
I guess I'm a minority...

Heavy, obnoxious, unrefined. Phonographs are cool, iPods are cool, but the boom box is seriously uncool.
 
The Bman
You can't compare something from the 70's and 80's to something from the 2000's. That's like comparing a stone ax to a howitzer.
Click to expand...

Then what can I compare it to? The boom box was the music player of the 80's, a decade that produced almost nothing I like (except Reagan).
 
The iPod came out in 2001 whereas the boombox first came out in the mid-70's. Two different eras and there's nothing you can fairly compare to something that's the first of it's kind.
 
Something so obnoxious can only be cool if it took a decade like the 80s by storm.

I guess this fits the bill.

JMoney689
Not really, the record player was the first.
Click to expand...

Those weren't renowned for being the first available devices to combine radio, cassette and/or CD playing capabilities into a portable (if bulky) stereo system (i.e. @The Bman's point).
 
I have a couple of these laying around. Sub zero. Part of my childhood despite being young.
 
Never Cool, still not cool, unless you were someone that had one before they were cool, in which case, they are still not cool.

Guess what I voted.

Hmm, possible still preferable to buying an iDevice
 
They're cool to me because of the way they brought portable music to regular people for all kinds of purposes and they look pretty badass when given a lick of paint and some stickers.
 
Electricity-guzzling, oversized, bling-a-licious wake-the-neighborhood-up annoyances.

Iconic, yeah, but get off of my lawn. Buy a Walkman, like mature people do, damn kids. :D
 
Where I grew up Boomboxes were seriously uncool (but we used to think the opposite), usually reserved for obnoxious kids who made terrible mix tapes that nobody wanted to listen to. They were very short lived in my youth as Walkmans became the rage and nobody really looked back. Also most of them were cheap crap and you were lucky if some bit of it didn't fall off the first week you owned it. Think about it, how many did you see that didn't have at least one knob or button missing? The second tape deck on my Sony made it about a month. They were truly junk, like a lot of stuff from the 80s. That said, having one as a child was sort of a freedom, one of the first you got to experience.
 
I had a few of these over the years. I used to load my Spectrum 48K with a Sanyo twin tape monster - it doesn't come any more retro than that! For all the nostalgia I'd vote Sub Zero, but in the cold light of day they sounded crap, the Dolby only made them sound crapper and there was always someone who had a better one that had detachable speakers. You could however use them as a sledge in the winter. But even so, it's a Cool from me.
 
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