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I had to leave work early yesterday for allergies and was a mess all last night and this morning. I went out earlier to the drugstore and decided to stop by a neighboring Goodwill because I need to replace my decomposing 12 yr old jacket (I wound up with a $9.99 London Fog trenchcoat complete with zipout lining).
Lo and behold, I found a vintage full sized Panasonic boom box for five bucks. The thing was covered with filth and had no power plug or batteries for me to try, but it was just begging to go home with me, so I obliged.
I grabbed a generic two prong power cord out of my box-o-cables and plugged it in. One of the local radio stations came on loud and clear. I tuned it to the Nashville classical station at 91.1 FM and with a half dozen paper towels, bottle of GooGone, and some elbow grease got it as clean as I was going to get it.
I have really enjoyed listening to it while I leisurely worked on a homemade mute in the kitchen (between sneezing and blowing my nose.) I actually don't have a radio in the house and have to use Internet radio on my work iPhone hooked up to a dock if I ever want to listen to the radio outside of my car. This is much simpler and sounds better. I may eventually bring it in to work since Internet streaming is strongly discouraged to preserve bandwidth.
I had a similar Crown boombox in the 80's next to my bed. I used to listen to 96.3 WQXR and classical cassettes on it, and take it out to tape record band concerts. I got rid of it in the early 90's since it was "obsolete" but have often regretted it.
Share Your Boombox Stories!

Brings back a few memories. Does it have a "wide stereo" switch?

Regards

Gerard

I have a very old one of these in my garage to listen to broadcast music. The tape player isn't very useful but it receives AM and FM as well as it ever did.

*it has an "audio in" connection so I suppose I could listen to digi-tunes on it also.

I use one of these for marching band. I can play a CD with midi files of the music and me counting drill over it. That leaves the mic input for me to offer instruction while the CD is playing. It is a pretty effective PA system. It has been rained on, dropped, and subjected to marching band rigors for the past 20 years.

I even bought three more for my students to use for accompaniment tracks at Solo Festival.

I had a Panasonic RX-5150. 8 D batteries, 22w of power. Seperate woofers and tweeters, Aux in (I put a turntable through a little radio shack pre-amp on it for my bedroom).
Really miss that thing.

Not quite a boom box, but my dad bought a large portable Sony radio when he was stationed in Spain 45 years ago. Still works, still sounds great. If only there were any good radio stations...

In NYC:
WFMU (as good as radio gets)
WBGO
WFUV
WQXR

bort wrote:Not quite a boom box, but my dad bought a large portable Sony radio when he was stationed in Spain 45 years ago. Still works, still sounds great. If only there were any good radio stations...

Thanks... But the old man is in Baltimore!

Bortimore?

bort wrote:Thanks... But the old man is in Baltimore!

My first boom box was a cheap simple cassette player and AM/FM radio that I got for Easter when i was about 8. When I got to middle school I got my first CD player and it was a Seiko boombox. It was awesome! It had dual cassettes for copying my buddies' music. My parents still have it in their basement.

Tangential thought:

For some reason, I seem to remember buying a new inexpensive stereo every couple of years when I was young. Like this one...


Now, I spend most of my music listening in the car or with an iPod or iPhone.

I used to have a small radio/single cassette not so boom box that was my music in my first pick-up after the radio antenna got snapped off. It and the tapes would fit in a half-case beer box. I currently have a CD playing boom box in my workout room.

KWAX is the Willamette Valley's classical station, also at 91.1 FM.

Here is a shot of the 5150. It definitley earned the nickname of "Ghetto Blaster". The "wide" switch on a Panasonic is actually called "Ambience"-but functions the same. Ahh, many times "Tom Sawyer", really loud. Oh yes.