Studebaker Sound Station Portable Stereo Boombox with Bluetooth/CD/AM-FM Radio/Cassette Recorder (Red)

This Boombox for excellent it reminds me of the 80s with how the boomboxes were back then but back then they were not equipped with CD players so I'm impressed how it works and it lights up within the speakers

I must have gone through every boombox Amazon sells. They’re all garbage except for this one. It’s incredibly loud and clear. The radio has great FM stereo, but AM sounds dull and lifeless. Wish it had a Japanese tuner so that AM would be wide band and sound decent like other models. The CD player, like all modern CD players cannot do continuous/gapless playback. It inserts a short gap between the tracks which can be annoying with many CDs that have continuous audio over multiple tracks. The cassette player sounds awesome for playback of original tapes or tapes made on an 80/90s deck. Beautiful playback. However, do NOT attempt to record anything on this unit. Like ANY modern cassette recorder, it’s only got a permanent magnet erase head (instead of electronic like older ghetto blasters or stereo component tape decks). What this means is that any recording will sound awful and will be riddled with bad tape noise…bad enough to NOT be tolerable. You’ve been warned. In order to really enjoy the tape function, play store-bought original tapes or tapes that were recoded on a proper deck. At $269, this is no bargain. Sure it sounds great but would be better priced at $179 - $199 CAD as I’ve seen this advertised in the US for $149 USD and as low as $99 USD on HSN. Excellent audio for a 2020s device, you’ll be happy but it’s expensive and ugly. Your ears will love it, though.

Owned this for just over a year and loved it - great look, awesome features. Was a huge joy rediscovering my cassettes and CDs. After a year the cassette transport began to fail for no apparent reason. Tapes played back with a slight chattering warble. Even worse, the pitch of the tape would slowly rise and fall (like an off center LP record playing very slowly). The pitch variation was as much as a musical half-step. (I tested the same tapes on an ordinary, cheaper player and they sounded perfect.) This was unconscionable so I took the thing out of service. I hadn't bought the insurance, so expensive lesson learned. One other issue I had (less of a deal breaker but not ideal) was with the CD player. For albums with music or sound that went from one track straight into another (such as a live album with applause between songs), the player would insert a split-second fragment of silence between the tracks. This became particularly annoying with music (such as prog rock) where everything was meant to flow as a suite. Suffice to say on the Studebaker, it didn't quite flow. I'll miss you, old pal, but it's time to move on.

As teenager growing up in the 70's and 80's, I mastered the art of dj'ing my tapes while cruising the boulevard in my car, there was a combination of hitting the FF and the REV buttons to get to the songs you wanted to hear, in the order you wanted to hear them... I was looking forward to sharing the fun of tape-deck navigation with my 17 year old daughter. She has a love for all things 80's, and has taken to collecting VHS movies, Albums (vinyl) and cassettes. That is where I figured this unit would come in handy. Absolutely nobody in their right minds would ever want to re-live the years of swapping 8-tracks over to cassettes for the sake of sound alone. Hell, storage alone was worth that swap ( suitcase vs briefcase). I do still have a working 8-track player (under-dash mount style circa mid 70's) that plays tapes with little or no motor noise, the sound quality is what it is, but it still does it's job. I can't even begin to recall with any certainty, the number of cassettes I've thrown out over the years, more likely than not with a single tail of tape fluttering from a long detached, eaten loop. My point here is that I didn't buy this device solely for the purpose of bringing cassettes back from the dead. I did, however hope that the cassette portion of the system would be of decent enough quality to enjoy some old memories with my daughter, while letting her feel the joy and pain of the hands-on nature of the genre. The buttons and the door are of course plastic, there is no tactile delight in using either. Both are sloppy and temperamental. Push the play button and the transport motor sounds like it's the size of the entire unit. You cannot listen to anything at a comfortable level as the whir of the motor drowns out any other instrument in the group. This is a normal operating sound, not a straining, or "defective part" type noise, just annoyingly loud. As for the quality of the sound, speaker-wise, I would say that if I had given my daughter this when she was 10 or 11, no big deal, but with Bluetooth speakers costing less than a third of this thing, sounding so much better; I am having a hard time finding something to get excited about. Flashing lights? The bouncing needles of the old school VU meters? I have had less expensive, low level Sony boxes that were far more impressive and way less costly. I know this seems like a big ol' whine-fest, but I was hoping for much more for the price. The CD player did what it should, the radio is the radio, reception is what it is so Yay for that. Radio Raheem would be disappointed in my choice of musical weapons.

Very nice 👌 I love the colors. BLUETOOTH!