I'm shocked the record industry survived this technological marvel.

I was the engineer who repaired this product.
It's a new feeling to see it after so much time has passed.

I half expected Techmoan to pop out of the woodgrain at some point. Always love an oddware episode!

Man, Anders Enger Jenson sure knows how to play the game. He gets so much free publicity from pretty much every retro/tech YouTuber around.

I'd love to see a beige large server tower filled with all these oddware 5 1/4" drive bays.. speaker... crt...cig lighter..vu meter ... would be great!

Man, a cup holder AND a tape deck? This thing has all the features!

Also odd that it appearantly records in 44.1KHz 8 bit stereo. Did a quick calculation because when you played that clicky WAV recording in Winamp, it showed 705kbps where it should have been 1411.

I think the recording version would have been AWESOME in the early 2000s. In 2000, almost all cars still had tape players. Recording them was a kind of lengthy process (setting up the deck, adjusting the level, preparing a playlist, monitoring it).
With this you should have been able ( not sure how they implemented the S/W) to just drag a few files on the App, it should be possible to automatically arrange them for best use of both sides (in theory it should even be able to apply EQ by recording test tones to the tape, rewinding, and then auto adjust the sound output EQ), click go and just walk away / do something else on the PC. Would be super convenient for quick tape recordings to be later used in a car. Almost like an analog flash drive.

I'd like to see someone build a 2000-2005ish tower, big as it can be, with maxed out 5.25 slots of all the silly items, all functional. That would be impressive.

As much as an audiophile my pop was, he still had his old Sony dual tape deck wired into his computer with some proprietary software he had for his cassettes, but had an ION record player that was also wired in, and this.... This would have been a godsend to him... RIP pop, hope I'll get your reel to reel working someday soon and can play your reels soon

I actually have a 2c and the software works perfectly on Windows 11 with a good ol’ USB to serial converter and a usb sound card. I actually quite like it. It’s cool listening to all my dads old classic rock tapes through my pc while I work.

Converting my cassettes to CD sounds like something I’d actually do.

It never crossed my mind that something like this would exist. My car still has a cassette player, I bought my favourite modern album (Dave - were all alone in this together) and it came on cassette, record and CD

It's bad that I kinda want a modern version of this. Pretty damn sweet.

I had this and it was AMAZING. Being able to convert my jam tapes to MP3 was a game changer back in the day!

I just finished tearing down a VW Gamma Stereo from the late 90s/Early 2000s for a full refurb. That mechanism looks near 1:1 with the one from the VW (which I believe was based on a Sony Design) even down to the belt layout, and the ribbon cable usage and placement.

Kinda wanna find one of these for my Win 2000 system now. Really enjoyed finding out this was even a thing.

Ahh...digital and analog going hand in hand in harmony. What a beautiful sound to behold.

I'm probably not the first to think this, but I bet this thing could be pretty handy for use in archiving old computer tapes. Since it's serial, the protocol should be fairly simple to reverse engineer, so one could ditch the Plusdeck native software (probably a good thing, as it appears that the software is causing glitches in the recording) and write an open source app to control the deck and manage the recording (setting the sound card to highest quality of course.) Might even be possible to programatically monitor the audio stream as it's being recorded so as to detect blank/silent spots (so that tapes with multiple programs on them can be automagically split into separate files) and maybe even somehow decode the audio stream in order to automagically detect the filenames. (this latter would be tricky but doable I think.) Might have to pick up one of these at some point. Of course, if they are being used for retro archiving, the prices of these things have probably gone through the roof by now. :-P

That would've been useful back in those days. A lot of cars back then were cassette only. but 150$ was quite a lot back then too

Glad you said what BTO stood for.
Almost thought Bachman Turner Overdrive got into the PC peripheral business for a second.