First of all, sorry about the term "music chunking". I tried to come up with a good translation for the finnish word of "käyrätoisto" (you know, the opposite of "suoratoisto", streaming in english). This is the best I can do.
Few friends of mine spontaneously decided to stop using all streaming services for the entirety of February. This included all streaming services, but the main focus kind of organically gravitated towards not using streaming for music. After all, it is relatively easy not to stream any video content for a month, but losing access to services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal is a major change in modern daily music consumption. Anyway, this initiative greatly inspired me, and even though I didn't really dive into the deep end directly (i.e. purchase a casette walkman for portable use. See picture.), I was invested into the scheme at the latest when one of my friends announced that he had "refined a cosmic 80's mixtape casette from his vinyl collection". I had to get myself a copy of that mixtape, but first I needed equipment to play said mixtape.
A friend of mine rocking his Walkman
So, how does one go around purchasing equipment for playing casettes nowadays? There are some contemporary options available, but many of then are subject to bad build quality, very expensive pricing and/or bad availability. I quickly determined that the best way is to opt for a slightly riskier option of bying one second-hand from some bloke who's been resourceful enough to post theirs for sale online. This option is a bit riskier since all devices which have to physically move something in order to operate are eventually subject to having their drive-mechanisms fail.
JVC KD-D2, bunch of casettes, Fisher TAD-M77
Nevertheless, I managed to hunt down a relatively reasonably priced stereo system which come equipped with all I needed. The Fisher TAD-M77 is a relatively consumer-grade piece of stereo equipment from the 1980's, and this particular unit even included a turntable for playing vinyl records, in addition to having a built-in CD-player, FM-radio and two casette-decks. 150 euros changed hands and I was the happy owner of a brand new (relatively speaking) stereo system. Misfortune struck almost immediately, as the final functioning casette deck broke before I had the chance to use it at all. I'm relatively certain that I can fix both of those decks once I find the time, but before that I had to get myself a discrete casette deck for mixtape-playing purposes. Two days, 60 euros and a trip to Korso later, I had one in my hands, and this JVC KD-D2 worked flawlessly. The nice gentleman who sold it to me was also kind enough to supply me with a bunch of random casettes, many of which contained absolute bangers!
I purposefully made sure not to even attempt to get a setup that is somehow "pure" or "sounds optimal", as my aim is to simply gain access to music chunking with as little effort as possible. Once my collection of physical music grows, there might be reason enough to invest in a somewhat audiophile-compliant setup, but as of now my first priority is to just start accumulating music on physical media, and have the capability to play it. As long as I don't actively damage my physical media, I'm comfortable having it sound like dogshit for the time being.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with the fact that I finally took the plunge back into the world of physical media. Time will tell how much I'll invest my time and money into this new hobby, but knowing me and accounting for the fact that I already have been looking for both outer and inner sleeves for my vinyl records, it is a fair assumption that you'll see more of this in this blog in the years to come.
Ok so, this is going well so far!