ALTERNATIVES TO TAPEDECK PORTABLE
I would later get tired of dealing with the portable CD player via cassette adapter and replaced it a crappy in dash CD head unit that skipped all over the place but ended up replacing the car several months later in 2006 with the Ford Ranger.
ALTERNATIVES TO TAPEDECK DRIVERS
The '88 Honda Accord, the LX-I grade four door had the top factory deck and it was fantastic as factory decks go, excellent base from the full range 6x9's in the rear but had to replace the front speakers as the passenger side driver crapped out, installed some Boston Accoustic 2 way drivers in the doors to replace them, yes, the original factory speakers were 2 ways as well. It did alright for what it was back in the mid 80's and eventually grew out of the cheap decks into a decent Kenwood 2 shaft model to fit in the space of the original AM/FM radio in my 83 Civic in 1992, had auto reverse, music search, soft eject, high powered amp (50W with 2 speakers, 25W each w/ 4) and put in a pair of 6.5" Kenwood 2 ways in the doors, later adding surface mounted mini 3 way speakers in the back cargo cover area that I built for the back cargo area and it was a fantastic deck for the day. When I bought my oldest sister and her first hubby's 74 Chevy Nova, it came with a basic Sears AM/FM cassette deck and 2 way 6x9 speakers in the parcel shelf, that was my first indash cassette deck and I've had them ever since, even went through 2 Realistic powered graphic EQ's, blew out both of their power sections before replacing the whole thing with a cheap off brand deck from our local flea market. That said, back in HS, I had for a brief while an AM/8-track deck in my 68 Chrysler Newport 4 door sedan, not even a hardtop at that and would later replace it with the factory radio which I put back in, it was AM and had thumbwheels, a very cool item back in the day and fitted underneath it an underdash cassette player from Radio Shack that had auto music search AND auto reverse, yup, a rarity in the lower models and I think it went for some $70 or so back in the early 80's, true it had an itty, bitty amp, but it did alright, even with the cheap Rad Shack 4" surface mounted speakers jury rigged into the rear 6x9 speaker holes. Actually, more than a twinge of guilt there have been times that I’ve felt like the protagonist of an Edgar Allen Poe story, being stalked by a ghost who hums “Johnny Hit And Run Pauline” while dragging chains over an endless expanse of busted tape decks.Īh, the venerable cassette, I was lucky in the sense that good friends went w/ the 8-track back in the 70's with the Zenith System 3 all in one stereo system that they bought in I think 1974 and by the standards of those systems, it was HUGE in size, anyway, I managed to skip the 8-track and went straight for the cassette format, thanks to my Dad who that Christmas I think gave me a small portable cassette deck for Christmas, yep, a K-Mart special w/ built in condenser mic even and I've had several cassette decks ever since, still have one as part of my computer audio setup. It immediately became my favorite tape and went on many road trips over the next 20 years (it was finally eaten by a tape-hungry boombox in my ’76 Nova)… but I always felt a twinge of guilt, thinking about the poor Capri-driving woman losing both her stereo and (what I’ve always assumed was) her favorite cassette. I’d heard of X- they were starting to get medium-big in Northern California with Under The Big Black Sun around that time- but I had never listened to Los Angeles all the way through. Not just any cassette, in fact- this was one of the greatest albums ever recorded: X’s 1980 masterpiece, Los Angeles. Powering it up, we discovered that it had a cassette inside. So, we rigged up the cassette deck in place of the AM radio in the Corona, using some junkyard speakers sitting in holes crudely hacked into the rear package shelf with a jigsaw. “What’s done is done,” he replied, “Now you’ve got tunes, dude!”
ALTERNATIVES TO TAPEDECK INSTALL
“Let’s install it tonight!” I was horrified, but what could I do? Rat off my best friend to The Man? I told him he was an asshole. Next day at school, filled with pride, he handed me a paper bag containing the stereo.
Dressed all in black, including ski mask- he was on a mission, you see- he coat-hangered his way into the car and spent hours silently dismantling the dash and removing the Realistic cassette deck. This decisive action consisted of Sick Dog ripping off the cassette deck from a Capri II owned by a young woman who lived next door he believed that she had once called the cops on him for doing bleach burnouts in his (six-cylinder) ’68 Mustang and thus deserved to get her Capri de-stereo-ized. I figured something would come up, but my friend “Sick Dog” (second from left in the yearbook photo of my crypto-Baja-ized ’58 Beetle, above) couldn’t stand riding in my car and being forced to listen to “Kill The Poor” through a warbly-ass 8-track adapter and decided to take decisive action.
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