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If you're looking for proof that the internet has pretty much everything you'll ever look for… here it is.

I was thinking today about the Marantz PMD 420. I happened to use this particular device at a job back in the 1980s and I remember it with great affection. At the time, Marantz was not a well known brand, but they made some of the toughest audio products out there. The sound was pretty good as well, as good as you were going to get from cassette tape.

The 420 was one of several devices from Marantz that were built on the same chassis. The 420 was near the top of the line, with stereo recording and every adjustment you could possibly want. For a portable device, it didn't skimp. It had backlighting that you could turn off if you wanted to hide the thing somewhere. It had real analog VU meters and knobs to set the audio level. There was a lot to love about this little device, not the least of which was that you could drop it from a height of about 4 feet and it would work perfectly.

I found this glamour shot of the slightly higher-level 430, which added additional tape bias controls and a switch to cut the monitor circuit completely:

So yes it was the 1980s

Pretty much everything about this thing screams 1980s, right? The angular design, the businesslike capital leters on everything, the real buttons… and I have to say I really like it. The things you needed to know like the record and pause buttons were marked with high-contrast colors and pretty much everything could be navigated by feel. I'll tell you there were plenty of times I had to use one of these in a darkened room and I was glad of that.

But this recorder still lives on

A quick search for this product turned up several working models for sale in the $200 range. That's pretty amazing for a product that's close to 40 years old. When you add in the idea that cassettes are obsolete, that's even more amazing.

You can find an owner's manual, and even a service and repair manual for it courtesy of ManualsLib. That's right boys and girls. Once upon a time when you paid a lot of money for something you could have it repaired. Times were different then. I get it. But someone else has a lot of affection for this thing too.

Check out this recording:


YouTuber "Ben's Retro Tech" got one of these models to repair. Even though it was old, he got it working perfectly. If you watch the video you can also see a lot of the fine adjustments you could make on this unit as well.

Some of the cool stuff

The more you look at this device the more interesting it gets. It's a high-quality recorder, that's obvious. But it also has two sets of line outs as well as an internal speaker. There's a 1/4″ headphone output so you can listen in on the recording without disturbing anyone.

It's also a really killer cassette player. You can adjust the pitch, so that if old tapes got stretched you could compensate. It had a "REVIEW" and "CUE" feature that very few devices had. If you were playing the tape, you could hold down PLAY and then move through the tape at high speed with the audio heads engaged. This made it easier to find what you were looking for. In the days when auto-reverse was pretty rare, it had "memory rewind" which was even better. You could set the counter to zero and then automatically go back to that point. It even had an auto-replay function so you could leave it somewhere and it would repeat the same tape over and over again. You got a lot with this device.

The one thing that wasn't very good

The only thing I didn't like about this device was the shoulder strap. The PMD 420 was pretty heavy and the strap was similar to the straps you get on DSLRs today. That meant it dug into your shoulder something fierce. I know people who made replacement straps for them and wouldn't part with them. It also didn't have great battery life. I want to say it got maybe two hours of recordings off of several AA batteries. But of course there was a sturdy AC adapter you could use.

What stuff do you remember from your youth?

I think there's a fine line between fondly remembering the things you had and thinking that they're still the best thing ever. Fairly recently, a friend of mine told me he still missed his HR10-250 TiVo. This was a decent DVR for its day but compared to what you get today it was really limited. I always go back to how I knew someone who never let go of their old Atari because newer systems didn't let them play Burger Time. There were a lot of games better than Burger Time but this is the one they liked. Eventually that old Atari blew a capacitor, as they tended to, and I don't think they've played a video game since.

The post FUN FRIDAY: Marantz PMD 420 appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.

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