Great sound, near CD quality with good cassette tapes such as chrome or metal tapes.

Layout of controls confusing. No microphone jack input. No tape counter.

During the last 30 years, I have run several Cassettes decks to the ground, including a Philips (the very first model they manufactured!), a JVC, and a Toshiba, plus numerous cassette boom boxes. Their transfer machanisms were simply worn out and had to be junked. My present (probably the last) Pioneer CT-W205R cassette deck which I brought a year ago still works fine with little problem. However, it did break one of my very old tapes (a 60 minute BASF), but I am not sure if it was the fault of Pioneer because cassettes tapes are not supposed to last 30 years! Other cassette players (especially car players) are very notorious in tape breaking. I use it mainly to play pre-recorded cassettes from the record labels, and to transfer my CD collections to play in my car. For pre-recorded cassettes, the sound is great and is CD quality. But if I use to transfer my CD's to tape, it depends on the type of tapes I use. I find that good quality tape such as chrome or metal tapes gives the best recorded sound. TDK tapes seem to produce the best sound with this model. Operation of the controls is a bit confusing, as the knots (play, record, FF, rewind, etc.) do not follow the conventional layout. For example, on this cassette recorder, the "stop" and "pause" are the same knot, but on their Audio CD Rcorder PDR-609 which I also have, the "play" and "pause" are on the same knot. The auto play song selection feature is a hit and miss operation. It only works half of the time, even with original pre-recorded music cassettes from the labels!) Even my old car tape player works better. Also, there is no microphone jack (most recorders, cassette or CD, nowadays do not have this anymore) and so I am not able to record any voices such as a lecture or a speech in a meeting. As it stands, the technology is now becoming obsolete. Since I have installed a CD player in my car, this fine equipment has to retire. For now, I am replacing this equipment with the PDR-609 Audio CD recorder mentioned above.

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PDR-609 Audio CD recorder

price, sound

no tape counter

My teac cassette deck is getting kind of old and I needed to replace it. So I looked for an inexpensive dubbing cassette deck. I chose this pioneer sx205.
I took it home and hooked it up and it sounds and records just great!
The only big drawback is: no tape counter. But, if you can live without it, you will be pleased with this cassette recorder.
It is not the fanciest, but it gets the job done (and most importantly, it makes your cassettes sound GREAT)!

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teac ad3