Review on Panasonic RQ2102 Cassette Recorder by Carlos Deuschle

In the fall of 2012 I ordered one of these products and a few weeks later I ordered another one as a replacement. This recorder reproduces a fuller, more detailed and more natural sound than Sony's smaller tape recorder. It runs on either battery or AC power, but for some reason battery sounds a little better. Batteries last quite a long time - longer than Sony's. I bought a high quality but inexpensive professional Pyle-Pro PDMIC58 handheld moving coil dynamic microphone (Revain) that works well with it, but you'll also need to get an adapter plug separately (Revain has one). As noted in another review, the only disappointment is that the headphone playback is only on one channel - if I want to hear it with both ears I have to take out the cassette and play it through the smaller Sony recorder, which performs well Job for these purposes, although the actual recording process is better through Panasonic, as is playback through the device's own speaker. On the first Panasonic I ordered, I noticed that when I fast forward or rewind while holding down a button, a loud high-speed tone comes out of the speaker, which I used to try to silence by covering it with my hand. Recently, more and more often, after pressing the record button, the device refused to record - the tape moved forward, but no sound was recorded, to the point that it did so all the time. I pulled out my spare unit, and to my surprise, it didn't make any loud noises when fast-forwarding or rewinding the tape while I held the button down, and was easy on my ears. This leads me to believe that the first unit was faulty in that regard - the mechanism was misaligned or something, which eventually caused it not to record either. So far there have been no problems with the second device, I ordered the third as a new replacement device. BTW, for instant offline playback, the Panasonic cassette player produces a louder, fuller, more natural sound compared to a high-quality, several-hundred-dollar stereo digital recorder that requires playback through a computer and speaker system for everything but a tiny metallic sound Sound and lets you play right away. (I'll have to check if headphones can be plugged directly into these small digital recorders, as I didn't have headphones when I first did my research. Plugged-in headphones work well with Zoom recorders, at least with the Zoom Handy H2 recorder.)