Decked out. Or not.

[vakkotaur]

I have a number of audio cassette tapes of varying quality. A few were commercial recordings and of those most have been replaced by CDs which have since been ripped to mp3. Most are things taped off of FM broadcasts, generally from the Dr. Demento Show, but also from other sources. I'm not sure how much, or perhaps how little, of all this I could find now in a more modern format.

A while back I decided to digitize the contents of the tapes and make them more accessible. To that end i purchased a used cassette deck. It worked, but not today. Today I switched it on and it lit up, but PLAY, FAST FORWARD, REWIND, and RECORD do nothing. Before this there was DC offset problem on one channel, so now it's at least two problems. Pulling the cover off, the power transformer was fairly hot. hotter than I think it ought to have been. This deck is a Technics M234X which was made in 1983 and I don't know its history. And how much effort do I want to put into this thing, without any manual or schematics? I might look at at a bit, but at this point I'm figuring it's broken enough that I can't hurt it. If I break it, well, it was already broken. Big deal.

However, what I want is a working tape deck. It doesn't have to be fancy. It has to play tapes, and it has to have outputs that the computer sound card can deal with and that's pretty much it. A counter would be nice. I don't need anything fancy, like a remote control or autoreverse. In looking around, it seems that audio cassette decks have not quite followed the price trend of VCRs.

Any recommendations for a good basic (and inexpensive) audio cassette deck? Or where to look for such? Preferrably a place I can just drive to, rather than a web site that wants me to register before letting me do anything. I've already avoided pricegrabber.com and I'd rather not do this on ebay if I can help it.