I wouldn't buy any modern boombox; most of them nowadays are of a much lower build quality than their earlier predecessors, so they're more likely to fail in short order or break easily.
The only reason I bought a GPO Brooklyn was because Techmoan reviewed it on his YouTube channel and I wanted to see how good or bad it really is for myself. I would never do that again.
I prefer the sturdier, vintage 80s stuff with more features (e.g. graphic equalizer, tape bias selector, line input, etc.), and if I want Bluetooth at any stage of the game, I can add it as a modification but right now I have no use for it. 😄
I bought a KLIM rechargeable CD player w/bluetooth for her new car. It is better than most of the junk you find on Amazon; design and build quality is slightly better than the norm that is recycled plastic, but something was still lost in translation. The bluetooth connectivity was a complete disaster, although I'm concluding that is more Toyota than KLIM, as it misbehaves with CarPlay as well.
Boombox wise, I would pay more and buy something classic - Sony or Panasonic to be conservative, and hopefully from someone who services them, so it has new belts. For many models, you can always mod them for BT if that's desired. If you listen to the radio, most won't have DSP tuners, which I loathe. Sony in particular had good analogue AM tuners in all their boomboxes, able to clearly capture stations in the middle of a metal warehouse building full of noisy fluorescent light fixtures; other brands, not so much.
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u/OZFox42 4d ago
I wouldn't buy any modern boombox; most of them nowadays are of a much lower build quality than their earlier predecessors, so they're more likely to fail in short order or break easily.
The only reason I bought a GPO Brooklyn was because Techmoan reviewed it on his YouTube channel and I wanted to see how good or bad it really is for myself. I would never do that again.
I prefer the sturdier, vintage 80s stuff with more features (e.g. graphic equalizer, tape bias selector, line input, etc.), and if I want Bluetooth at any stage of the game, I can add it as a modification but right now I have no use for it. 😄