Nakamichi 480 and Boston

An ebay purchased arrived today that took me back a bit. It was a Nakamichi 480. Nope it's not an exercise machine (are you serious?). And it's not a roter tiller or a high performance motorcycle. Nope, it a cassette deck.

...and it was possibly manufactured back when I was in grade school.

But this isn't just any old cassette deck. If I believe what I read Nakamichi's are like the Ferrari's of the cassette deck world. (They don't play tapes really fast, but they're just a higher end model of deck.) It's kindof cool to go out on ebay and find ancient technology from a by-gone era - and even cooler to play some cassettes that I haven't heard in years - as I had no other working cassette deck on premises.

This thing does sound really good. I thought I'd never say this about a cassette, and I'm going have to do some more critical listening, but I'm shocked at how good a cassette sounds on a good tape deck.

The first two cassette's I listened to from my collection were from Boston. Their initial album "Boston" and the follow-up "Don't Look Back". Boston was one of my favorite bands when I was growing up and call me nostalgic, but it was really fun listening to these albums again. I'm sounding old, but as they were playing I told my wife "they don't make 'em like this anymore!" "Brad Delp sure could sing"... "You know way back before electricity got popular Tom Scholz founded Rocktron and figured out how to make those cool sounding guitars." on and on. Yep I was sounding like a regular geezer.

One thing I appreciated listening back to the Boston album is how I could play the album straight through and a) every song was quality, and b) the album had a flow and continuity. You could tell it was meant as a full cohesive presentation - not a succession of stand-alone singles. The albums really stand up to history imho.

Anyhow. I have about 200 more old cassettes to work through and I'm actually glad I haven't thrown them out. As I go through I'm trying to archive the old music to my PC before cassettes finally go extinct.

And with that I'll leave you with this oldie but goodie. Feels good don't it? I think I want a hairy vest like the drummer is wearing. Or maybe I should just settle for his 'fro. And we all need shiny jump suits.