My Man-Cave of Cool Stuff I Got Mostly for Free

It pays to be nice to to your neighbors. Because a few weeks ago, the neighbors across the street from me (who I had spoken to on a couple different occasions) were moving, and looking to unload some of their stuff. They knew that my wife and I like to sell used stuff that people throw away, as we had done when their next door neighbor moved away early this year, so we were their candidates. And they had some treasure! Stuff that would have been way out of my meager price range.

I felt like I since talk about music so much on this blog I might as well show off my new setup. Here’s my man cave:

I’m primarily going to discuss my new dual cassette deck, stereo receiver and turntable, but I can talk about my new CD shelves too, another free curbside pickup. This is my first ever stereo system and turntable, I’ve always been too poor to have them, but finally they’ve fallen into my lap like a gift from the Gods. Here’s a closeup of the stereo system.

The Tower of Babel! My room isn’t big, so I have to stack everything up. In order to use the turntable I have to move the cassette deck and speakers. This isn’t ideal of course. But, I use cassettes way more than records. This is my very first record player, a Victrola combo unit which also has a CD and cassette player, as well as AM/FM radio (which I have no reason to ever use, but it makes it look more vintage). I can’t say how it stacks up to other record players, but I love how it looks like something from the 1930s. The speakers aren’t the best, but it’s good for listening to old jazz. I had a few classical records laying around from my other neighbor who moved which I was unable to sell, and I went ahead and bought a Nirvana record at Target just to have something else to play on it. 

“Things have never been so swell, I have never failed to fail. Paaaiiiinnnn”

The CD player, sadly, is very wonky, and only plays certain CDs. I haven’t figured out why it prefers some CDs over others. It will even play some of my burned CDs but not others. And the cassette player, while functional, is the weirdest one I’ve ever seen.

It kind of works like a car cassette deck I suppose. You slide the tape in like a VHS tape to a VCR, but from the side, and push a button to eject the tape. It makes a weird clicking noise when you get to the end of the tape until you eject it and flip it over. I have no idea yet how to clean it if I need to, but suffice to say I won’t really be using it often as long as I have that dual cassette deck. I have a few 1930s jazz tapes I can play on it. The turntable itself is nice though, I think. Admittedly, I don’t know a whole lot about turntables, I can’t really tell how high the quality is. I can say that it works though. I think combo units like these get a bad rap among vinyl purists. But hey, I’m poor, it was free and it works, I’ll take what I can get. I’ve always wanted a record player, but it was such a low priority it was like a distant dream. Now, I will slowly build a record collection. Records are usually pricy though, so it’s never going to be as huge as my cassette and CD collection. You can get records for cheap at thrift stores, but it’s mostly “thrift store music” ; or classical, country, Christmas and Christian music. Maybe jazz if you’re lucky. Granted I’ve found some 90s rock before, but on CD, not vinyl.

Anyway, onto the cassette deck.

This is my precious. People talk crap about cassettes for having bad sound quality, but that’s because most people never get to hear them on one of these. It sounds amazing. The sound is rich, you don’t hear the background hiss. And it does some neat tricks. I don’t have to flip the tape when it comes to the end of Side A, it can play both sides of the tape. And the fast forward feature can skip tracks like you would with a CD; it somehow detects quiet parts of the tape and stops there. I don’t want to put too much strain on the belts so it’s not something I’m going to do often. It also has a timer, which is nifty. And you can record from one tape to another. 

I scavenged the speakers off another stereo that was broken. They sound great. It took me a while to figure out how to set it all up because I’ve never in my life had anything fancier than a boom box. I needed to get audio AV cords to plug in through the stereo receiver to get it to work. It was a learning experience. Here’s the stereo receiver.

And what a fun little toy this is. I like to play around with the bass sometimes but it makes the whole house vibrate so I can’t get too crazy with it, unless I’m alone. This thing can make my mixtapes sound downright majestic. Things like this cost $300 on eBay. And yet here I am, with a free one. It took 36 years for it to happen, but I have a stereo system. 

There is still a place, however, for my boombox. For you see this stereo system is from the 1990s, so it doesn’t have an aux port. I use aux ports to record music onto blank cassettes straight from the internet these days. I also don’t have a CD player for the stereo system. That’s the one thing it’s still missing. One of these days I’ll have to get my hands on one of those high end CD players from the 90s that I can plug into my stereo receiver. Anyway, while it’s really hard to find a good newly-made cassette player these days, this modern boombox gets the job done pretty well. It’s a Panasonic. 

And last but not least, let’s have a closer look at my CD/cassette shelf. It’s always subject to change as my collection grows. 

On the top here we have my electronic music; my Kraftwerk albums, Das Ich, Ministry, SYZYGYX, Ayria, and some others. On the bottom are my metal albums; Covenant/The Kovenant, Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Stratovarius, Type O Negative, Alice in Chains and Nirvana. 

Got some of my favorite cassettes on bottom, including recent Bandcamp and concert acquisitions from goth bands, my bootleg of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, a few good mixtapes including my very first two from 1999 (the yellow Memorex ones).

And what the hell, here are those DVDs and VHS tapes you might have seen in some of the pictures here. I cover up the logos because I got sick of staring at them. I like to enjoy a movie as an individual work of art, not part of some corporate catalog. The two tapes on the top left are bootlegs I made by printing out the covers. One is disguised as a “Good Guys” tape from the Child’s Play series, and houses a VHS mixtape of horror movies and shows. The one next to it is a copy of the short film Kung Fury.