Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/23/mickey-rourkes-loft-in-nine.html
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What’s up with the equalizer settings? Is the left channel treble-high and the right bass-heavy, or is there just an awkward divider in the middle of the spectrum and the midrange way overemphasized?
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The £180.00 Miniature Wassily Chair is way too Perky Pat for me
If I recall, Mickey Rourke got his tape flipped a couple of times in that movie.
That’s what the kids called it back in '86.
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I’m fairly sure it’s set that way because someone on set thought it looked nicer in the shot than the two arcs you would expect from a 2 channel equalizer.
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I can’t deny that’s one cool-looking tape-flipping mechanism. Was that common back in the day? I’m thinking it must cost several times what could be accomplished with ordinary auto-reverse, and is probably highly prone to breakdown – wouldn’t last half an hour once it gets the attention of small children.
ETA: Makes me think of the Sleek furniture set from Animal Crossing.
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I love the running commentary on the John Carpenter film “The Fog” Half it it is his wife saying “Oh! We still have that lamp” sort of thing. I got the impression their house is furnished from the film.
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“I still dream of owning that Nakamichi.“
There’s one on EBay if you’re willing to spend $950 plus shipping. These days, my challenge would be finding cassettes to play. I was rummaging through the glove box in our older car recently and came across “The Queen is Dead” cassette by The Smiths. For nostalgia’s sake I decided to pop it in for a listen as I ran errands. What spewed from my car’s speakers was a collection of badly warped noises that sounded nothing like the original. I guess cassettes don’t hold up well over time with neglect and temperature changes.
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Back in the 1980s, I used to say that “cassette tapes are the format of the future.” That was actually wrong, but philosophically correct. Hear me out:
The demand for audiophile quality music has been exaggerated since the days of the wax cylinder.
People want music to pour forth like perfume and are generally uninterested in endless fiddling with individual tracks and such.
Where people do wish to fiddle with tracks, they’d prefer to just re-record their mix – preferably to an identical format.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, a friend just gave me a cassette he rescued from his garage. It’s an interview he conducted with Robert Anton Wilson and I simply must transfer it to the format of the future: MP3.
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You may be able to fix the cassette, with a sponge and a rusty spanner.
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Alas, that is far beyond my hi-fi budget at the moment. Thanks though!
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Owned a 3-head Nakamichi back in the day, few models down from that tape-flipper. There was a great, high-end car/home audio shop where I had my '87 Mustang’s car stereo done (which…was pretty insane itself) that had that deck, but I just couldn’t justify the cost. Great design idea for an auto reverse without moving the heads, though. 
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That thing had the looks, but I seem to remember Nakimichi making something called “The Dragon” which was supposed to be the best cassette deck ever made.
http://www.tonepublications.com/old-school/nakamichi-dragon/
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What a coincidence! I have a pile of cassettes that I’m trying to figure out how to be rid of. Not sure if that particular Smiths album is in the collection, though. Do you like 80’s goth? Because I think it’s mostly 80’s goth. Probably some Skinny Puppy and Ministry in there, too. Oh, and a few bootleg Pink Floyds that I recorded off the vinyl.
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My young son is a bigtime post-punk and 1980s fan who just bought a Walkman at the flea market. He’d give them a very good home!
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I still have a box of enough Gabber cassettes to piss the neighbours off for a solid 24 hours, but we’ve got youtube now to do the same thing.
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Of all the things you can dream of in that movie, that would not be on my top list…
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Nakamichi did it that way so that the tape would always present the same profile to the heads. When you auto-reverse, the tape is stretched differently. Or so their advertising said.
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I have that deck. It fell off a shelf and needs repair to resume working, probably a couple of hundred bucks at a good shop. You can have it for the shipping cost. Let me know.
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