What's wrong with the GPO Brooklyn Boombox?

I've had more requests to review this than anything else in recent years, so why not check one out? What we have here is the gpo

brooklyn

portable boom box, yes it is a portable boom box, this one I thought was a whole point of boom boxes no, but this is not one of those static boom boxes that can't be moved, one portable, must have a handle now, its appearance is retro inspired by the 80s, now often with retro looking things. That indicates that perhaps it's more about looks than quality and I have a feeling that will be the case here.

I'll explain why in a moment, in terms of the characteristics of this well that we have. the cassette deck on the front so it's kind of part retro but the rest is more modern than that, I mean it's got a slot loading CD player on top and then it goes to dab plus dab and FM radio reception bluetooth receiver. Also, you could use it for aux input for speakers, USB input for presumably playing mp3s, so it has pretty much everything you want, so if it worked well that would be a good thing, so we'll find it. but

what

worries me a little is that when I look at the specifications here it says two 40 watt speakers, now the device itself has four speakers on the front, which tells me that we have fake tweeters on top.

From left to right as far as the power of this goes, I just want to mention that it runs on a lithium cell, so instead of running a d cell charge on this, which should take quite a while, it runs on a lithium battery that requires one and one. half an hour to charge and now you can play for four hours the brand here gpo. I have to mention something about this. uh gpo in the UK used to be the general post office which existed from 1660 to 1969. I think they split up and split into different companies - the post office and a British telecommunications company because at one point it was all mail and then It moved on to telecommunications phones and things like that and in 1969 they got rid of the brand and moved on.

Among other things, after a while this gpo brand must have been available for purchase and was bought by a company called pro telex in Manchester and they started using the gpo brand to sell retro style phones, which makes a lot of sense, but then they diversified. So they started putting the gpo brand on those suitcase record players and old style radios and stuff like that, so it doesn't make as much sense anymore. One thing about this is a bit strange, although it says designed in the UK. Which is designed in the UK. Don't think it's the radio, I think it's probably the cardboard box, so it's the box, not the

boombox

.

The reason I say that is that you can buy this device in China on Alibaba and if you order 500 to 1000 units it costs you 150 dollars. and then from there you have the ability to put your own branding on it, so where it says gpo at the top next to the radio tuner, you can have your own logo there and they will print a box for you as well. Also, by the way, I should mention that this was an open box offer that I got about a year ago. It's been there ever since. I haven't opened it but it cost me about £100 so that's why I chose it because I thought if this thing weighs 250 pounds it's going to be rubbish it's going to be it's going to be horrible but you know you never know look on the bright side it might be okay It's not going to be okay let's find out I just saw a A couple of things on the box I want to mention before I open it look at the balance, it says minimum and maximum, surely they should be from left to right, but speaking like a witch, it's not mentioned Nowhere is this stereo, now you would assume it would be especially from having a balance knob, but nowadays you can't be too sure so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I wanted to talk about this screen at the top. This is the information for the dab plus radio. Now in some publicity shots, it's a kind of dot matrix. The screen on this one is segmented so I'm interested to see

what

's actually inside the box and another anomaly: these speaker grills in one picture I've seen have quite large holes in them, while this one is sort of a normal fine mesh. I want to see what's inside the box. Which one did I buy? Well, we'll find out. Let's open it. Ok, here is the output of the 15 volt 4 amp power supply.

Its multi-voltage input has a cylindrical plug on the end and an interchangeable cable. On this side, that's my 11.1 volt 2700 milliamp hour battery, so presumably I have to put that in before I start and that's the instruction booklet in multiple languages, well I'm going to say I can't really complain about the look that I have. I think they've done a pretty decent job there, it's got some weight to it too, so let's take a look at this tape head and see if it's stereo. Yes, I'm happy to say it's a stereo tape head on top of the tape head too.

You'll notice that the reveal spring crosses diagonally, which means it's a tenashin type mechanism and has a permanent erase magnet, so it's not quality, but at least it's stereo. Okay, let's put the battery in the back. There is a large gpo logo on the back. Here I wonder if they change the arrow depending on who requests it or if they just leave it blank. Something I've noticed down here, although in the power consumption it says 36 watts, now it mentioned that it had two 40 watt speakers, so what? It happens when you turn it up to maximum anyway, let's open the battery compartment.

I don't know if you can get these with different size battery packs, but this sticky foam takes up quite a bit of space and the idea is presumably between that and the one on the back of the battery cover that will seat the battery and prevent it from doing noise, so let's just plug this in and this is where the power adapter comes in. There's an LED on top, presumably showing the charging status like Well, let's see what's on the side. There's a good selection of inputs here, so we have a stereo RCA auxiliary input and output.

We have a three and a half millimeter line, two three and a half millimeter microphone inputs on the top. then USB at the bottom and then at the top, here's the CD player loading slot with the eject button next to it, the dual telescoping antenna and the handle here which is a little wobbly, could do with a little cushioning so it doesn't move. It doesn't fall like that but anyway let's turn it on good, here goes nothing, oh, we have some power. It seems to be working so far on the left, this is the source selector, so by the time we're on the radio, these lights.

Here indicates the mode you are currently in. There is a delay that I have noticed if, for example, I turn it all the way down to auxiliary input. Just wait, there it goes so you eventually have an auxiliary Bluetooth USB CD tape in the radio. the radio there is a mode button here a switch should say at the moment it is on dab digital radio you can turn it down press it to fm mode now the fm1 is tuned to this rear section of this one on the right here i will just turn up the volume a little bit, It doesn't seem particularly responsive, in fact it's not that bright, but I can get a few stations here, gold again, gold last try free on sage dog, of course it's not a proper analogue radio. using a digital tuner mixed with an analogue dial if I move it to dab then you use the front section here and that changes this station on the left bg ambassador.

I must say that the dab radio at the moment does not have good reception. but it's working, it's picked up quite a few stations here, use the front of this to select your station and then press the button when you want to go to number 15 and join, but yeah, there's a lot of breaking in here, which I wouldn't expect there to be a radio dab in this room. We can try to make a comparison. I have a dab radio here in the corner, so we'll put it on a station that won't give us any content. matches and we'll see if we can compare the two, so radio 4 should have talked about either way, but why do Belgians have a greater love for mussels than the British? books written about their food culture, there must be a joke about Brussels muscles in that show but anyway I have a Sony dab radio tuned to the same radio 4 station, let's see how it deals with Holland in reality.

So 65 of the mussels harvested in Dutch waters are destined for the Belgian market. We absolutely adore him. I think now we're probably considering that it's supposed to cost £250. There are some pretty rough edges. Look at this tuning dial. It's a little bit diagonal, but it's also very roughly cut, kind of a sharp, rough piece of plastic, and on top of that, there's a little piece of plastic here behind the tuning window that moves up and down. This is strange, I don't know if I can see it, let me zoom in a little, yes what you are seeing here is the tape counter or at least that is how it is described, however you will see from the bottom of the screen that there is no no cassette in the machine so I'm not playing anything at the moment, what happens is as soon as you go into tape mode this starts at zero and then starts counting, you can always reset it if you want but it continues again , so really this is a Stopwatch that only counts in seconds, from what I can make out, it's not the most useful thing, the screen is quite dim so I hope you can still see that it's counting down, so let's put a cassette in type one, is the only type this machine can handle and there is no noise reduction either of course, so what happens when we press forward fast?

Does this move faster? Let's find out that no, it's still counting down in what feels like seconds, let's try rewinding and see if it starts counting down. It doesn't keep counting. So it's really a stopwatch that counts in seconds whether it works for you or not, I don't know, but it's certainly not a tape counter, at least the car stops running. Well, let's try to play the cassette that comes from YouTube audio. library is all patrick patrickios now to me it sounded like the tape was running slow on this machine whether true or not we will find out later with wow and flutter meter testing one thing I do know is that the tape doesn't sound very good, it sounded muffled and confused.

Now I recorded this tape on a good quality device, in fact it was on the Sony WMD-6C professional walkman, so it sounded good at first, but now it's not playing very well. I could put that down to perhaps misaligned heads and if there was an azimuth screw hole on the front here it might be worth trying to adjust it, but I won't mention anything about treble, bass, volume and balance. The controls while we're down here are sticky, wobbly and an unpleasant feeling. I noticed they had a high and a low but they just rotated freely, there was no top and bottom position but as you can see at the top of the screen here it is reflected on the screen over there so you know when you are in the center position on each one just by looking at the screen, but there is no stop on the controls themselves, you have to keep an eye on that, similarly with the scale.

I want to place it in the middle like this, so here we go, that was the cassette deck. We will do more checks later. We'll try some of the other features. The output level screen on the front here is for entertainment only. purposes and I have no problem with that, as you know from previous videos, I like flashing lights; However, if you don't have them, you don't need to turn them on, but I will turn them on now. Press play on the tape and you'll see that it's already getting pretty loud, although you won't be better off hearing the music, but it's at a very low volume so it's not an accurate reflection of the actual output level once you've uploaded to any level.

Normal volume type to list, it starts to stand out in red. Let's try a CD. If you've ever used a CD player, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this screen shows minutes and seconds, so that would be just under two minutes. the track, but no, we're actually at the two and a half minute point because this screen records seconds and there's no way to change it, it just counts second by second, so if you want to know where you are on a track, I'll have to do a little mental calculation. It's a very strange choice and something I've never seen before.

Now I was hoping to have something more positive to say and the CD player definitely allows me to do that because it sounds better. Than the cassette, the cassette was quite muffled sounding, as I mentioned, but it also didn't seem to have much stereo separation, whereas the CD player definitely sounds like a proper stereo signal, but has a slightly strident edge. You know, a little tinny, a little harsh, it might wear out if you listen to it for a long period of time, but it didn't skip, it was nice and clear, there wasn't any weird distortion, there was no background hum or hum. from that business, so yes, as a CD player it works fine, it doesn't have any CD text, but that's to be expected for adevice like this all controls work as they should so yes as a CD player it does the job. for which it is designed and while we have the CD in the machine we could also try to copy one of those tracks.

You're really having trouble rewinding this cassette. I'm going to change it and try a different one. 'I'm going to need a type 1 tape. I don't have many of those at home, but this one will have to do. It's a bush sf90. They are quite nice ribbons. I don't think there is anything particularly special about its quality, but it will suit this particular device. There is also a recording on that tape of a radio play. I will only reproduce a section that would have been purchased. Helen thought about Helen Maguire, whose youngest son, Oliver, was very interesting, but the reason I'm using that tape is because I can record over it and we'll see how well that permanent erase magnet removes that recording.

Now you'll see I have some aluminum foil underneath and that's in an attempt to cut the tape. Electrical interference you are picking up from my Wi-Fi router. I tried it before in a video. You may have seen it and it worked fine on this device. It's actually not helping much. It's still picking up a pretty annoying click, so it seems. like the shielding on this isn't really doing the job, then what I'm going to have to do is move this to a different location to do the registration test so I can get a fair and accurate result.

Well, to try this. I have a USB stick here with an mp3, a wave file and a flack, yes, so as expected it can only play the mp3 file. There is no text accompanying mp3 files. They are strictly track numbers. The info button does nothing. You can see it said fo1 at the beginning, so that's folder01, so you'll be able to put your music into folders if you really want to. It's actually just a rudimentary mp3 playback, however, we should be able to record to this USB stick, so let's move on. on the radio and see if we can do that what about the argument that we might be short-sighted in ignoring the potential of gene editing now and investing in these kinds of technologies because we might look back in the future?

Well let's see if that works we might be shortsighted to ignore the potential of gene editing now and yeah okay I'll try bluetooth now yeah there it is and that just leaves one feature at the bottom here that we haven't tested and which is an auxiliary input. I have plugged a cable into the side and yes it works. I would have been surprised if it hadn't worked, but at least we know it works. However, I have to say if you want to submit your audio. For some speakers via Bluetooth or viral cable, there are much better options than this, much cheaper and with better quality.

Let's do those surprise and flutter tests. Now we have both scales set to one percent at the top, so there we are. Looking at the top row of each one, we'll start on the right side here, so this is really the measure of surprise and flutter, the oscillation of the audio, whether or not the speed is stable and moving a little bit, it's down here in 0.2. I'll put 0.3 at the top of the scale so we can get a little bit closer, so now we're looking at around 0.25 percent and flutter to put that into context, a lot of the older devices wouldn't point at all or even nothing, zero point, so you know it's not great, but that's how things are nowadays, that's typical of this type of mechanism, if we move to the left in speed, I was

wrong

before when I said it was slow, Well I think. what was happening is that it had trouble playing that particular tape for some reason, it seemed to have trouble moving it, so on this tape, which is better quality, we're seeing okay if the one percent is on the top right about 0.6 percent faster.

I think there you have it, that's the sheet music, let's try something else, let me explain what's going on here, we have the spectrum analyzer on top and right now it's connected to this Sony pcm recorder. I'm just using this. as a playback device right now it is playing a wave file which is a sweep that goes from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz, from a low note to a high note and then starts again from the beginning and while playing each of those frequencies. You can see it represented on the spectrum analyzer and if I unplug it you can hear what the spectrum analyzer is listening to, so that's what shows up on the screen.

My intention with this was to connect this device to the auxiliary input on the boom box and then record it to the cassette and then I was going to play the cassette to see how much audio was captured and how much was lost, we ran into a small problem, although only for plugging it in and then listening to it with headphones without even involving the recorder is completely ruining the audio just look at this on the right so this is the aux input for the boom box which you can see registering on the screen there so what I'm going to do, I'm going to plug the headphones in there, I'm going to plug the output of this into the boom box, so what's happening now that we have a loop going?

This is playing the audio into the boom box and then the headphone output from the

boombox

goes to the spectrum analyzer and just look at the screen up there, it's all over the program, remember before we had the individual bars, this I think is known as harmonic distortion when the frequencies are not represented correctly, but I would just say that it was really ruining the audio, so my intention of getting a nice clean audio recording on the cassette and then playing it back is out of the window now because the thing can't even Listen correctly, it doesn't matter. reproduction, so what am I going to do?

I have a cassette with a signed scan module that I recorded on a different device. I'm going to play it and we'll see how it shows up on this screen, okay? so that shows up a little more normal now you can see the individual bars just wait and see when it drops it won't go much further than this I don't think it's gone so that was at 6.3k on the top and we'll see where it starts in the bottom roundabout, so 40 is the first one that shows an adequate amount, but yeah, it shows you that even if you're just plugging something into this and listening to it through the speakers in that loop somewhere they're creating a lot of distortion in the audio.

Well, I think it's time to take a look inside. Well, I have to admit that I'm quite surprised that it seems that there has been an attempt to make something of reasonable quality they didn't achieve their goal, but you can see that someone tried, so let's take a look at the various components here so that we don't too much going on in the back, we have the battery compartment here with the cables. starting from there and that's the outlet on your right, back here, that's the CD drive. I'll do a couple close-ups of the chips and stuff in case anyone is interested in finding out exactly what model this is, but there's no question. it's something that you also put inside a computer, now moving on to this main section, the back of the front of the unit and I admit that I was

wrong

, the tweeters are real and they are connected, they are connected to the main speakers.

So the wires run to these and then two wires come out of the terminals to the tweeters. Interestingly, both the large and small speakers have the same number printed on them. SW918 I was expecting to see some specs on the back, but that's not the case. Both do not need to be manufactured by Sunwin. Now I mentioned that this device was quite heavy and now I realize that where it all resides is on the back of the speakers, just look at the size of the magnet on those I mean. Surely these are capable of going much louder than this device allows them to, but yes, that's where all the weight is, it's in the speakers, so there's the back of the ribbon mechanism, this plate of circuit at the top is obscuring our view. a little bit, but I'm sure you can see that it's a very similar unit to what we're seeing on a lot of these modern cassette decks, the flywheels down here are plastic set over metal and at the top there's the motor it doesn't have no markings, unfortunately I don't know if you can read it, but this section is the dab radio module, so it's just a component that is plugged in here, you can certainly change it depending on what is required in different countries.

I'm not sure why it's not getting a good reception now that I have this open. I think you could try removing some screws from the back of this section, which is the radio tuner window. I hope I can get that part. There's a lot of plastic hanging around and then I'm going to put it all back together because you can see that someone has put in a pretty reasonable effort to try to build a pretty decent quality stereo using what off-the-shelf components they can. getting today it seems like maybe the components aren't completely up to the task, well it's time to sum this up and I would say the average customer of this is probably more interested in the aesthetics than its performance but I I'm going to talk about performance for a moment and say that overall, most features range from mediocre to poor.

I wouldn't say anything was particularly good, perhaps the best performing part was the CD player. which was adequate, although it is a bit unusual to only have the second message on the screen. I quite like the fact that it was a slot charger, although I thought it was unusual, but the rest is fine, the radio, whether you're listening to digital radio. dab dab plus or switching to fm the reception quality was poor. I have other devices that receive a much stronger signal at this location without any interruption and this one has the two antennas on top so there must be something strange about the internal setup.

I've looked at other reviews online and other people have the same problem, so now it's not just this particular machine, as far as the cassette deck goes, the performance of that one is definitely in the poor zone, muffled indie type. Having very poor stereo separation could probably benefit from having their heads aligned if it could be done, but I'm not sure that would really improve things too much, it could be something beyond the actual mechanism that is causing the problems as far as wow and the flutter. and the speed is not a real issue, it's kind of a typical boom box performance, the overall sound quality, although quite loud, with a bit of metallic echo, is not particularly pleasant to listen to and you have to remember that all this It is marketed because it weighs around 250 pounds.

That's what it's supposed to be. I've seen it online selling for £200 but that's still a considerable amount of money for something that works like this so you're really just buying it for the looks and as far as looks go you've got it. the flashy lights here, the digital display on the deck, that's kind of strange, just having a counter that goes up, has no bearing on the performance of the cassette and of course looking in, there's no belt that goes up to a counter mechanism, so that's how it's supposed to work, but it's pretty useless, so yeah, everything is displayed and very little comes out, but I don't want to end this video with a negative like that, so we'll just post that aspect if you want something that looks eye-catching. and it cost you 200 quid, well there it is, but let me give you some alternatives now, if you just want to stream music from your phone via bluetooth or listen to the radio and play some CDs, there are other alternatives to what I'm going to do. show you that I am interested in devices that have a cassette deck, now there is always that guy in the comments who says who wants to play cassettes and my answer is always people who want to play cassettes, do it if a person who wants to play cassettes here are a couple of alternatives to the gpo

brooklyn

first if you want all the features that the gpo brooklyn has this is the philips azb798 and it costs £120 and I have reviewed it before and it has the exact same range of features ok there is no no flashy lights here nor a tape counter other than a tape counter, so it has a CD player, a cassette deck on the front, it gets dab radio as well as FM and you can stream your music to it too. via bluetooth or connect an auxiliary sound source, on top of that it also has a remote control which the gpo brooklyn doesn't have, so this is a much cheaper way to get pretty similar performance to the gpo brooklyn, I have What to say although the radio reception in this case is much better, but as far as the performance of the recorder is concerned, there is still some muffled wear and flutter, you know they haven't concentrated on that part at all, but there it is. have. that's an option that would save you around £100 on the gpo brooklyn and give you exactly the same set of features but without the flashy appearance, so let me show you another one now, this is thelast and this would be my choice, well, almost.

It's the panasonic rxd55 and like the Philips model above, I reviewed it earlier on the channel and it will be linked in the video description and will no doubt appear somewhere at the top of the screen, but the rxd55 is one of a couple of machines that are very similar, the only difference between them really is that the rxd55 is the louder of the two and the rxd50 doesn't have as much power output, but the truth is that if you turn it all the way, it won't No It sounds so good anyway and the battery life of the rxd50 is considerably better than this model so I would go with the rxd50 and I had a look online today to see what the price was and they are currently £92 now these particular models I have been making them for years at Panasonic, so what we are dealing with here is an older device, so no dab radio here, no bluetooth, all we have is a cassette deck, an FM radio and a CD player in the front, oh and it will also play mp3 from a USB stick, but since they have been making it for years without changing it, the performance, the quality of these components here are much better than the ones they are putting in the devices modern, so, in general, the sound.

The quality of this one is, I would say, better than any other boombox I've tried in the last few years and that's because it's not new, it's an old one that they are still making, so if you want something to play your cassettes. so this would be my recommendation but you're missing out on all that bluetooth and dab stuff but you know you can get it somewhere else as for a decent cassette this is it but I say decent I mean it's not like the top end . It's basic stuff, but the same applies in the past, if you have a stereo, they generally weren't the best performers when it came to cassette decks. flaw in this one that I bought not long ago, I mean, it has a couple of nice features, but it doesn't have any kind of Dolby noise reduction and in fact the problem with buying something old like this is that you're more likely to get something that doesn't work so well.

Once he did, this one doesn't sound good, there's a lot of hiss and I'm sure it's missing the treble. Maybe the tweeter on the right side isn't working, so I'll have to take a good look at it. you probably need to replace all of your covers, no doubt now over my shoulder is a triple deck and you may see the video where I took it apart and had to repair the three mechanisms that had the belts on each of them, but also the clutches. Two of them were also removed and I had to get some spare platforms to replace them, so there are a lot of problems at Heron when buying an old boombox.

Everyone says, "Oh, get an old one, get an old one, they're the best, yeah, they were." when they were new, but now they are years old and it is more than likely that some kind of problems will arise with them. I don't think I have a single boombox that is old that doesn't have some kind of problem with it, but you buy something new like the rxd55 or rxd50, it will work out of the box, if it doesn't you can return it, so that would be my recommendation if you only want to play cassettes. Listen to it. to fm am radio and i play cds with really rich sound and good quality so panasonic rxt50 or rxd55 that's my recommendation when it comes to gpo brooklyn if you want something that looks flashy maybe it's good. but if you plan to use it as some kind of prop for retro productions, you have to put it in the background or something that you pretend is from 1980.

It stands out immediately, everyone knows what it is and where it comes from, so even for one of those it's You better get an old one and it doesn't matter if it doesn't work if you're going to stick it on a shelf somewhere anyway. I think I've talked enough that it just shows you that there are some options available, it's not all doom and gloom, you can play wacky cassettes if you really want to and they'll sound pretty decent on something like this, but that's all for now, as always, thanks for seeing you.