Hello gentlemen! I'm planning on recording a few songs from cassette tape to my pc for the purpose of preserving them on cd. However, I don't have a good cassette deck anymore for the use of the RCA line out jack. Instead I have a cheap boombox with a headphone jack. I know that volume can effect the output using the headphone jack, and the boombox is a POS. However, is there a substantial loss of sound quality using the boombox as opposed to a good cassette deck? These original recordings aren't that great to begin with, but I'm just curious. This project is for a friend of mine. She called some guy in the phonebook that would do it for her with professional equipment for only $15. But hey...I'm challenged to try it myself anyway!

I think I found out my own answer. It seems like the headphone amp not only affects the volume, but can colorize the sound as well. It's bound to be bad coming from a small boombox anyway. Well, it turns out my friend is going to go ahead and take them to that guy (without him doing any editing), but I'm still going to try it myself (because I'm stubborn!) just to see how a cheap boombox can compare to a studio quality tape deck.

Sounds like $15 is pretty reasonable if they can do a quality job. Let us know how they compare.

Make sure the cable that you use is sterio and not mono. Alot of speaker cables are mono only and thus only record the left or right.

I am sure you already know this, but who knows!

-Hutz